Did you know that you can buy some awesome pie making supplies with us? We have some pretty great pie dishes, and they will keep you from being arrested as you attempt to go get yourself some pie.

I’ve judged quite a few cookoffs in the past few years. Casseroles, Cupcakes, Pie (twice!), the Bodega Challenge, Chili. All have been fun, inspiring, difficult and often hell the next day on the gastro-intestinal system. I mean our bodies aren’t used to eating that kind of variety of one food all at once!

The long road ahead at the 2009 Enid's Apple pie cookoff

It may look easy to watch us judges up there tasting all the food, as the crowd drools in anticipation of being set free to eat the rest. It’s really hard. There were 53 pies entered last Saturday at the annual Enid’s Apple Pie contest. 53! That’s a LOT of pie. And truth be told, some of them were not very good. A few were downright inedible. 6 of us judges had to whittle down 53 pies (!) to find 3 winners. I certainly didn’t taste all of them, but probably tasted 20 of them. Even at only one bite of each, that’s a lot of pie for one sitting, and this was not a competitive eating event.

It’s always delicious, every cookoff has had its standouts, and to those people I say congratulations. I’ve helped some people, like Theo Peck, who won last year’s Casserole cookoff get into a whole world of cookoffs (he now plans his own and has an up and coming pate business) Others, like last year’s winner Sam Rio, came to the other side of the table this year to judge at Enid’s.

Some pointers for aspiring cookoff entrants:

1. Test your recipe first. If you’ve never made this pie before, make one a few days before and see if you like it. At the very least make a small one too that you can taste before you bring yours to the event. A previous cookoff winner came up to me at the Apple Pie contest and confessed that she didn’t think her pie was good enough to win so she left it at home (this shows restraint, and also saved me from having to eat another bite of pie).

2. Make sure your food is cooked all the way through. This may seem obvious with how temperature crazy the USDA is about cooked meat, but at the pie contest the judges agreed unanimously that the most common problem with the pies was that they weren’t fully cooked, and undercooked crust is gross.

3. Signage is nice. I think it’s nice to know what’s in the dish. I’m not allergic to anything (but someone in the crowd might be) but more than that it can be a real surprise to take a bite of what you think is an apple pie and it actually a sausage pie (with apples).

4. Don’t ask why unless you really want to know. By the end of a cookoff the judges are in a food (and possibly alcohol) induced state of mania, and much like taking sodium-pentathol, will answer your questions about why your pie didn’t win with their true opinions. Don’t berate the judges. Sometimes its a fine line that makes the #1 pie win over #2. Some people hate cilantro. Some tastes just aren’t good. If you can take the criticism then ask away, but give us a break and have a good time. That’s the point!

5. Have fun! If it’s stressing you out to make the food and get to the cookoff, then relax and don’t do it. It’s not worth it, nobody’s bleeding, and nobody is getting a giant check with zeros too numerous to count at the end.It’s not worth the stress.

We got a HUGE collection of vintage pitchers. almost 20 of them! On sale now for $20 each.

Pitchers!

some of our favorites...

Fruit!

So It’s been a crazy few weeks at the soon to open lab (First week of November)

so here are some pics:

Lab #2, getting PEX for Radiant heat

Our Spiffy new 100,000 BTU Boiler/Hot Water Heater

Gravel going down before the concrete arrives on Wednesday

Lab #1 gets Re-Bar before the concrete pour

It’s all part of life for the Erkkiblum family, and we start ‘em young. This week we drove back from Boston with a huge smoker (Jessica, we plan on smoking your tempeh) and a 1941 Chambers stove (sadly, for display only). This left so little room that Miss Moxie got loaded into the van through the side window.

Moxie flies in

**No babies were hurt in the transportation of these kitchen appliances**

Here’s a pic for those of you who want to see what’s going on.

Awesome Pile-o-lumber!

A few weeks ago I set a record for most cherries pitted in a minute: 35!
watch it here: http://r.urdb.org/Iq

I was recently blessed with a super secret CSA share containing some Children-of-Man tomatoes and the most wondrous food on earth: ground cherries. These little mini-tomatillo looking things taste like creamy cantelopes, and pop in your mouth with a subtle delicious flavor.

photo from our friends at brooklynfarmhouse.com

These bring up a consistent problem in my life. Whenever I am lucky enough to have something unique and special, I tend to protect it to a fault. I am afraid to indulge in too many of the ground cherries at one time, I would rather save them to have more at a later date.

The first time I canned tomatoes, it took a big bagful to make a quart of sauce. This sauce sat in the basement, unopened, until June of the following year. It was only when I was promised with the imminent harvest of new tomatoes was I free to open the jar. And once it was opened? I made a delicious meal with some homemade orecchiette, using maybe 8 ounces of the quart. But then, I got busy, and didn’t have a chance to make more hand-rolled pasta. And my sauce, my precious sauce, wasn’t worthy of just dumping on box noodles. Before too long, I had to revisit the harrowing question of whether it is safe to scrape off the mold and eat the rest (which it is not). Because of my inaction, I had to flush over half a quart of dense, rich homemade tomato sauce, which had been too good to eat.

I remember the horror I tried to conceal on my face when a friend dumped an ice cube into a glass of wine that I had opened, almost a year after bringing it home from the maker’s villa in Italy. She saw right through me. “It’s just wine, dude. You can get another bottle.” And yet, I don’t remember the name of the villa, or even the town. I do remember the ice cube, and the laugh that we shared when I was busted oversentimentalizing fermented grape juice.

I’m probably going to finish the ground cherries tonight, or maybe tomorrow. It’s not worth the trouble of canning the few I have left, and if I did the jar would become an heirloom, and not something to be enjoyed. I could always preserve them in amber. Delicious.

In short, a devastating tomato fungus has been spreading virally throughout the Northeast, arguably caused by plant distribution from the south by our old nemesis, WalMart.

Read more, and be prepared:
New York Times

This July 4th, we slept under the stars and stripes at the first ever Queens Farm Museum Campout.

photo by Joel Bukiewicz

Thanks to Brooklyn Based, Sweet Deliverance, and of course, the Queens County Farm Museum for an amazing time!

OK, pig porn after the after.

photo by Ernie Monteiro