tillo-berry pie

They really are fruits.

If you've ever seen a cape gooseberry, you'll know where I'm going with this. They're also sometimes called 'husk cherries'. I was served one once as a garnish on a fancy dessert, and had no clue what it was, so I didn't eat it. I really should have.

Because then I'd be able to tell you how they taste compared to a tomatillo.

Yup, a tomatillo. Very closely related to the cape gooseberry, in look and in taste.

Like tomatoes, tomatillos seem to have been relegated to the realm of savoury foods. They don't have to be though. They really are kinda sweet. They've got a bit of a citrus flavour to them too. And they pair nicely with cinnamon when you put them in a pie. It comes out as kinda 'mock apple' which is good I think, because it kinda eases people into the idea that you can actually eat this thing in a sweet dish.

The trend lately with foods seems to be the addition of sweet things to savoury ones, so Recipe Guy and I (being contrary, as usual) decided that we'd take something typically savoury and make it sweet.

Tillo-Berry Pie

• about 1 pound of small tomatillos
• 3/4 c sugar
• 3 tbsp tapioca
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• double pice crust 

If you want to make your own crust, you'll need

• 2/3 c cold butter
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6-8 tbsp cold water

I like making my own crust, and it's really quite easy. Unlike making cakes and muffins, you want all of your pie crust ingredients nice and chilly.

Cut the cold butter into chunks about a tbsp in size, and dump in the flour and salt.

Use a pastry cutter to cut it all together until the biggest chunks of butter are about the size of peas.

Sprinkle on about 5 tbsp of ice water, and use a fork to cut the water into the flour. You don't want to "mix" this.

Mixing causes gluten to form and stretch, which is great for cakes and bread, but really the opposide of what you want for a flaky tender pastry.

Dump the very crumbly mixture out onto your rolling surface and add another tbsp or two of water.

The way I deal with pastry now is patting and folding. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker's me! Resist the urge to do anything remotely related to kneading.

At first, the folding will be a bit weird, and not much like folding. You'll just be picking up part of the dough and putting it on top of another part, and then pressing them together. If it doesn't hold well after a couple times of doing this, sprinkle on a bit of water, and then fold a few more times.

Eventually, you'll end up with a lump that mostly sticks together after you pat it.

Cut this lump in half, set the slightly smaller half aside, and flour the other one, your surface, and your rolling pin. Check as you roll to make sure that it's not sticking.

If it is, use a knife to gently separate it from your surface, and flour both the surface and the pastry.

Roll it until it's a good couple inches in diameter bigger than your pie plate.

Use your rolling pin to help you carry it to the pie plate.

The filling is pretty simple.

Peel the pretty little paper lanterns off your tomatillos, and rinse them off.

Recipe Guy seems to have one plant that makes slightly purple tomatillos. Apparently there are varieties that are entirley purple.

Slice the tillos. Put them in a bowl.

Dump the other stuff on top.

Stir. Dump the filling into the crust.

Easy as...

The other half of your pie crust needs to be rolled out now. You can make a circle and put it on top whole (cut slits in it for steam to escape), or you can do a lattice top. A lot easier than you think and makes people say "ooo".

Roll out your other half into a rectangle, and slice it into 7 strips.

Lay 3 strips on the pie, and then fold the middle one back, and lay one of the remaining 4 across the two strips.

Switch! One comes forward, two go back.

Repeat until you run out of strips.

Press the edges of the strips to the edge of the bottom crust, and use the scraps left after cutting your strips to fill in the blank spots.

I recommend brushing the crust with a beaten egg now, rather than after it's been in the oven for 20 minutes. The egg makes is lovely and shiney, and helps its brown a bit too.

Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then turn down the heat to 350, and bake for another 30 minutes.

The early high heat helps the crust brown and crisp before the fruit starts oozing juices all over it and making it soggy. The later lower heat makes those juices bubble into tasty sweet filling.

It worked! It really worked!

I think I'd like to put a few more tomatillos in next time, and maybe less cinnamon to make it less like a mock apple and more like a tillo pie, but it really did work!

What "savoury" ingredient do you think would work well in a sweet?

Chicken Salad - Round 2

I love things that are rolled up or stuffed. Or both!

I'd been planning on making a chicken salad (cold dinner, too hot to cook) with Asian flavours all week... and then I started getting cravings for Sriracha. (which I, and others apparently, like to call "cock sauce" thanks to the lovely rooster on the bottle)

I knew what I had to do.

I know most people unfailingly put mayo in chicken salad no matter what other flavours are going in, but not me. And not just because my mayo had been in the fridge so long it had expired.

I've been making various versions of a peanut butter and sesame based salad dressing for a while now, and that's how this salad stays together. It's basically a vinaigrette, but with peanut butter as an emulsifier. Watch, you'll see.

Chicken Salad Rolls

The Dressing:

• 1/4 c peanut butter
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp lime or lemon juice
• 2 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 clove garlic
• sriracha to taste
• peanut oil

The "vinegar" part of this dressing can be replaced partially or entirely by citrus juice. My ideal is a combination of lime and vinegar, but all I had when I made the salad was lemon, so that's what I used.

In a bowl, combine the peanut butter, juice and / or vinegar, fish sauce, ginger, and garlic.

A microplane grater (or citrus zester) is the ideal thing for ginger.

If you can't find fish sauce, or if you're kinda scared of it (lots of people are, it's okay to admit it, and admitting your fear is the first step to overcoming it) you are free to leave it out, but it really is what's missing in all the home made Asian food that never quite tastes the way it does in the restaurant...

Whisk together the stuff in the bowl, and keep whisking as you drizzle in the peanut oil.

Drizzle until you have a slightly thicker than usual salad dressing.

Use a bit of carrot or rice wrapper to taste it. Mine needed a bit more sour, so I squeezed in another tbsp or so of lemon juice.

If you want to put this onto a green salad, I'd suggest doubling the oil and vinegar amounts. What you have here should be pretty thick.

The Salad:

• 2 c cooked chicken
• 2 carrots
• a few radishes (daikon, if you can find it)
• 1/2 c cashews
• 1/2 c cilantro
• 1/2 c basil
• 2 green onions

Yes, there is a pretty high veggie and herb content in this salad. Damn tasty, and makes for a full meal. I couldn't find decent bean sprouts, but some of those would be nice in this if you have them.

Start with the nuts.

Toast the cashews in a dry pan over medium heat. Shake them around in the pan until parts of them start to turn golden. You should also be able to smell them.

Next, the sesame seeds... yes, I know they're listed in the next batch of ingredients, but they're in the pic in this section so toast them now while you have an already hot pan.

Dice all your veggies to about the same size, chop the chicken, and chiffonade your basil.

Thow it all into a bowl, mix it, pour the dressing over top, and mix again. Or just mix once. Up to you.

Now, at this point, you have a perfectly viable chicken salad. You could eat it as is for lunch or dinner. You could serve it with some fried rice (I haven't made fried rice yet, have I? I need to do that soon) or some noodles. You could roll it up in lettuce like I did with the last chicken salad.

Or you could roll it up in rice wrappers.

Have I mentioned that I love food that is rolled up and stuffed?

The Rolls:

• rice wrappers
• sesame seeds
• sriracha

Now, you've already toasted your sesame seeds, so we've got that covered.

Next is the rice wrappers. If you've ever had Vientamese "salad rolls" you know what I'm talking about. Rice wrappers are these lovely stretchy things that you can wrap around all kinds of fresh food to make a hand held salad.

They're a really fun ingredient to play with, and though they look delicate, they are fairly resilient and can stretch quite a bit.

The set up: you need rice wrappers, a dish of water (pie plate works), a plate to work on, and a plate for your finished product. Hmm... I didn't seem to take a pic of the set up, but this is almost everything...

What you see on the plate there is a dry rice wrapper. They start out crispy, but with a little moisture will soften quite nicely.

Dip the wrapper into the water in the pie plate. All you need to do is get it wet, but you need to get all of it wet.

Lay the moistened wrapper on the working plate, and wait about 15 seconds. It will suddenly be flexible and extremely pliable.

Put a small-ish amount of chicken salad in the middle of the wrapper. Too little and you won't get a nice proportional roll, too much and, though it will roll up, the filling will fall out when you try to eat it.

You're going to roll this up just like you would a burrito. Start by folding the edge closest to you over the filling.

Then, fold each of the sides in.

Then, lift the filling and roll it away from you until you have a perfectly stuffed, beautifully rolled, chicken salad.

Sprinkle the rolls with the toasted sesame seeds. If you don't want to dip your rolls directly into hot chili sauce (Taneasha now understands why she keeps seeing me chop jalapenos with bare hands; relatively high tolerance for capsaicin), you can make another batch of salad dressing, or a bit of hoisin instead.

One thing to note about rice wrappers: they will dry out in the fridge if you have leftovers. They won't revert back to their original dry state or anything, but they will lose their stretch and pliability, and are much more likely to fall apart. 

To prevent them from drying out too much, roll each roll in a dampened paper towel before you put it in a container. Even if they do start to lose their structural integrity, you can just tear the wrapper into pieces, dump it all into a bowl and eat it with a fork.

What kind of rolled up or stuffed food do you like?