A Peach Pie in Disguise for #Halloween by Lucy Burdette

LUCY BURDETTE: I remembered making a wonderful pie ten or so years ago for wonderful writer Nancy Pickard, whom we’d invited to teach a class in Connecticut. The recipe came from Whole Grain Baking by King Arthur flour. It was a peach pie with a crumb crust, and oh so good. Since the peaches have been so amazing this year, we froze 6 cups of them to use in a future pie. At the last minute, I added some blueberries that were otherwise going to go unused. This is not actually a Halloween recipe, but I thought you could admire John’s pumpkins and gourds from the garden while reading about my peach pie in disguise.

Ingredients for the filling

6 cups of peeled and sliced peaches, either fresh or frozen

Other fresh fruit as desired

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon almond extract

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon water.

1/4 cup cornstarch

Ingredients for the topping.

2/3 cup of old-fashioned rolled oats, pulsed in the food processor.

1/2 cup oats, left whole.

1/2 cup brown sugar, either light or dark 

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

The King Arthur recipe also had a fancy crust which you can look up in their book. I had a crust in the freezer left over from my experiment in tomato pie. So I decided to make it easy on myself and use that.

Defrost the crust, but keep it cold.

For frozen fruit, place it in a large pan and heat to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to break up the bigger pieces. Stir the nutmeg, cinnamon, and almond extract into the peach mixture. In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch, the lemon juice, the water, and stir this until smooth. I found there wasn’t enough liquid to smooth out the cornstarch, so I added some from the pan of fruit. When this is smooth, stir it into the peach mixture.

To make the topping, pulse the first batch of oats until it’s partially broken up. Add the cubes of butter and pulse this until distributed. Mix in remaining oats plus the vanilla and the pinch of salt.

Remove the crust from the refrigerator and place it on a pan covered with parchment. (You will thank me for this later!) Add the peach mixture to the crust. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the top of the pie.

Bake at 375 until the topping is golden and the filling is bubbling, about 50 minutes. You can see that mine was a big mess! Serve this with either ice cream or whipped cream or nothing.

But oh so good!

For some serious Halloween posts, you can check out the cheese ball dressed as a pumpkin or Alison Roman's carrot cake or even a fancy stuffed pumpkin. Happy Halloween!

USA Today bestselling author Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mystery series including A POISONOUS PALATE and A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS. Join her mailing list right here.

Book 15 in the Key West series, THE MANGO MURDERS, is in bookstores now!

The trade paperback edition of A POISONOUS PALATE is out now! 

And the trade paperback edition of A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS is out now!

Around the Kitchen Table: What Are Your Favorite Childhood Summer Memories? + #Giveaway

CLEO COYLE: The start of summer always revives wonderful sensory memories for me and my husband: the smell of fresh-cut grass, the crunch of corn on the cob, the splash of pool water, and swoosh and awe of fireworks. One of my favorite memories from childhood happened every year in early June.

Photos from our younger years!
Click here to learn more about us
and the books we write together
as Cleo Coyle.

After spending nine months cooped up in classrooms, we kids were rewarded with a special “school picnic” day at Kennywood, a charming, century-old amusement park south of Pittsburgh. As a budding foodie, I looked forward to noshing on the park's carnival food as much as riding its landmark wooden coasters. Corn dogs, candy apples, double-dipped ice cream cones, fresh-cut fries, and cotton candy (yes, all in one day of indulgence)! I loved it so much as a child, I even took a summer job there between high school and college. I was a “rides” girl and worked on crews that ran everything from the Ferris Wheel and Bob Sleds to the Pirate Ship, and even this locally famous old coaster: The Jack Rabbit...

Take a ride with us now in the front seat of this wonderful, landmark wooden roller coaster. To start the video, hit the white arrow in the center of the window below and don't forget to throw your arms up on the way down!

👇   👇   👇

This video is a real blast from my past and my husband's, who also grew in the Western Pennsylvania area. If you don’t see a window (above), click here to ride the coaster with us on YouTube.

Now it's your turn! 

Do you have favorite summer memories from childhood? 

🍓🌼🍓

MADDIE: I was a big reader as a child. I lived in an inland suburb of Los Angeles, the Pasadena area, so it was not only hot, it was smoggy. One of my favorite afternoon treats was whirring up chocolate ice cream and milk in the old two-speed blender. I would pour it into one of the metal mugs we had and take my shake and my book outside to sit under a tree to read.

My parents had planted apricot, yellow and white peach, lemon, and fig trees when they bought the house when I was four. We never had an in-ground pool, but most summers saw a big kiddie pool with the inflated sides. I loved to pick a big ripe peach and dunk it in the pool to "wash" it (as adult I wonder how many kids had peed in that pool...). I would sit on a swing eating it, then jump in the pool to wash off the juice.

Now I find myself slightly allergic to raw peaches, which distresses me. But not to cooked! When the peaches are ripe at my local farm stand here in Massachusetts, I make Peach Pie.

🍦🍨🍑

 LUCY BURDETTE: We spent a lot of our summer time at the beach with my mother's sisters, especially Aunt Barbara and her family. Sometimes we rented a cottage at the Jersey Shore, and sometimes a house in Hatteras, North Carolina. Our pets always came with us--dogs, cats, and guinea pigs. We spent hours and hours in the ocean, and when not in the water we played endless card games and kick the can. The adults played right along with the kids--such fun memories! We didn't have the extra money to eat out a lot (plus, four kids!), so those meals were special. My favorite was probably the fish fry at the Hatteras Fire Station. There'd be fried fish (caught that morning), delicious potato salad and cole slaw, and the biggest treat of all--hushpuppies!

PEG/MARGARET:  At least once during the summer, my parents would bundle us into the car after dinner and head to Asbury Park and the boardwalk.  We would begin to get excited when we crossed over the Driscoll Bridge and once we could smell salt in the air, we’d know we were almost there!  The  whirling teacups was the first ride we’d see when we entered the boardwalk and we’d wait impatiently as our father bought tickets so we could ride them.  Then we’d stroll up and down the boardwalk, which was all lit up and in stark contrast to the dark, mysterious ocean barely visible in the distance.  Oh, the noise!  Bells ringing at the booths with games of chance, people screaming as the roller coaster made its descent.  The smells!  Popcorn popping, hot dogs grilling and the ever-present tang in the air from the ocean.  We were allowed one treat and we usually chose cotton candy.  I can still feel the grittiness of the sugar against my teeth!  And then it would be back to the car where we’d inevitably fall asleep on the way home!

🍔🌿🍉

LESLIE KARST: I spent my formative years in Columbus, Ohio, and although my folks—both native Californians—detested the bitter winters and hot, humid, summers of the midwest, we kids adored the snow and fireflies that arrived with the change of seasons.

To flee the summertime humidity, our parents would drive us all up to Acadia National Park in Maine for a few weeks each August, and my most vivid memory of these camping trips is, not surprisingly, food-related. Each day, we’d head off to pick buckets of blueberries, which my mom would mix into pancake batter for a glorious breakfast the following day. I still can taste those plump, juicy, tangy-sweet berries. The flavor of summer. Heaven. (Here’s a shot of me with my younger sister, off for a blueberry-hunting foray.)

🍔🌿🍉

MOLLY MACRAE: So many wonderful memories of summer! In sifting through them, though, I realized the common ingredient to most is being outside. My brothers and friends and I seemed to spend most of our days and evenings outside. Nights, too, under the stars - no tents - rolled up in our dad's old wool army blankets. We led charmed lives exploring, hiking, riding bikes, swimming, climbing trees. And picnicking! We ate at least one meal a day outside, sometimes more (scorched bacon, eggs, and toast over a fire, anyone? The best!). The weather didn't always cooperate, so there were also Monopoly games that lasted for days, each of us clutching fistfuls of sweaty Monopoly cash and arguing over what rules to follow. Here's a picture my husband took of us carrying on the tradition of outdoor eating with our boys and my dear old dad one long ago June in perfect (ha!) picnic weather. Makes me smile every time I think of it. 

🚗

MAYA CORRIGAN: When I was 12, my parents drove across the country from the East to the West Coast, returning by a different route. The three of us in the backseat squabbled a lot on the way, but that trip was the beginning of a hankering for travel that my brother, sister, and I shared. Until then, our only outings had been the occasional weekend in the Poconos.

The place I remember best because we stayed the longest was Rocky Mountain National Park. I fell in love, not just with the mountains, but also with the local trout, my first experience with delicious fresh fish. Until then, fish meant my mother's perennial Friday meal of tasteless baked-to-death flounder. We drove on from Colorado, through Utah (Dinosaur Museum), to Las Vegas (where I illegally got the better of a one-armed bandit), across Death Valley (without air-conditioning in the car), to Hollywood, then on to Anaheim for Disneyland. The return trip highlights were the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert.

That trip also inspired my first novel, which I pecked out on a manual typewriter, finishing it when I was 13. The book featured a group of older teens on a cross-country hosteling trip with adventures at each location. I added a few places to their itinerary that hadn't been part of our family trip--a stop at a dude ranch and in San Francisco's Chinatown, where the girls solved the mystery of a missing jade statue. I look back on that summer as the beginning of my writing life.

🍦

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Loving all these great memories! My father was a fly fisherman before fly fishing was cool -- I never knew the story of how he took it up, but he always kept a fly rod and gear in his car during the summers and fished during the evening when his route as a traveling salesman took him near one of Montana's famed fly streams. And on weekends, we often packed a picnic in a big old split ash hamper -- my collector self sure wishes we still had it -- and drove to the East Rosebud or Stillwater rivers in south central Montana to "wet a line." I fished and swam, and read by the campfire -- mysteries, of course, starting with the Happy Hollisters, the Bobbsey Twins, and later Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and eventually, Agatha Christie. No photos of me reading by the river, so I'll share this one, on the sidewalk in front of our house, selling KoolAid from the Funny Face Drink Stand I won in a coloring contest! 

🍉

 TINA KASHIAN: For eight summers, I went to an overnight summer camp in Boston for two weeks. Camp Haiastan is a cultural camp--a camp for Armenian-American children, and I loved it. We did all the fun activities that summer campers experience, boating in a large lake, swimming, all types of sports, and arts and crafts. There was also an hour each day dedicated to language and culture. I met friends from all over the U.S. and even Canada (kids came from there, too), and I still keep in touch with many of them. When we drop our two girls off at the same camp each summer in Massachusetts, I see parents of campers I had camped with as well. As for the food, it was typical camp food and not very good. But that never mattered to me as a kid, and I looked forward to those two fun weeks every year. 

 

🌞

 

 MARY JANE MAFFINI:

I loved seeing these photos and reading everyone’s happy summer memories.  I grew up on Cape Breton Island and my summer memories have to do with water views. 

Every year we would drive around the Cabot Trail, a stunningly beautiful trip over Cape Smokey with its twisty roads and steep, terrifying drops straight into the Atlantic. As kids, our job was to scream our heads off during the scariest parts.  My mother (nervous at the best of times) would cover her eyes and my dad would do his best to keep the car on the rough roads. 

When we made it alive, we would spend a week in a rustic cabin in Cape Breton Highlands National Park with day trips to dash across the rocky beach and splash briefly in the icy Atlantic before settling for the afternoon at the calm, warm lake further inland with its sandy beach. Culinary highlights included my mother’s very delish chicken sandwiches, chocolate milkshakes and ice cream sundaes at the local restaurant, and, in the evenings, nicely scorched marshmallows over a fire. Here’s to happy summers, my friends, past and to come!

 

 GIVEAWAY!

To be entered in this week's drawing,

join us in the comments: 

What are your favorite summer 

memories from childhood?

Include your email address,
so we can contact the winner!

Comments Open through

Saturday, June 12.

 

> MURDER AT THE TAFFY SHOP by Maddie Day

> SCAM CHOWDER by Maya Corrigan

> DEATH ON THE MENU by Lucy Burdette

> HEATHER AND HOMICIDE by Molly MacRae

> CARRIED TO THE GRAVE AND OTHER STORIES by Leslie Budewitz

Comments Open through

Saturday, June 12

Don't forget to include
an email address!

CONGRATS TO OUR WINNER...

KATHY L. 

🌼

Peach Pie from @MaddieDayAuthor plus #giveaway

Maddie Day here, celebrating summer with a peach pie.

I grew up with two peach trees in my family's southern California back yard - one yellow peach and one white peach - and peaches are one of my favorite fruits. Or have been.

Alas, I have developed an allergy to raw peaches and other non-citrus tree fruits in the last couple of years. I know - it's dreadful, but true. Eating fresh peaches, cherries, apricots, even apples makes my mouth itch. And you don't want to mess around with early signs of food allergies. The last thing I need is anaphylactic shock.

But it's not being able to eat peaches that really hurts. I love biting into a ripe, sweet peach in August. 

Still, I've discovered I can eat them cooked, so I've been sure to do some peach baking this summer. 

Taken Too Soon, my alter-ego Edith Maxwell's sixth Quaker Midwife Mystery, comes out on September 8. It features Rose Carroll Dodge (for those who follow the series - yes, she and David Dodge finally were able to marry!) venturing south to Cape Cod to help solve the murder of her aunt Tilly's ward.

A peach pie is easily something cooks would have baked in 1889 when the peaches were ripe. So I present to you my recipe for peach pie!

Peach Pie

 

Ingredients

9 ripe peaches, peeled* and sliced, approximately 5 cups

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 cup granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling

2 tablespoons cornstarch (not shown)

¼ cup unbleached white flour flour

2 unbaked pie crusts, either homemade or store bought (not shown)

¼ cup milk (not shown)

Directions

Preheat oven to 425.

*How to easily peel peaches: 

Bring a pot of water to a boil. With a slotted spoon, gently lower in a few peaches. 

Let sit one minute, then lift out onto a clean dishtowel. Repeat with the rest. When they are slightly cooled, the skins slide off.

Make the pie filling: Combine sliced peaches, lemon juice, sugar, flour, and cornstarch in a large bowl. Gently mix to combine and set aside.

Add the peaches to the bottom crust in a 9-inch pie plate.

Place the second crust on top of filling. Trim pastry, pinch bottom and top edges together and cut a few slits to allow steam to escape from the pie. Brush milk on the top, particularly around the edges, and sprinkle with a granulated sugar.

Bake the pie for 15 minutes on a rimmed baking sheet, then reduce heat to 375. Cook until peaches bubble and pastry is golden, approximately 45 minutes to an hour.

Delicious eaten warm with vanilla ice cream or enjoyed at room temperature any time. 

Readers: What's your favorite summer fruit? Your favorite pie?

I'll give one commenter an ebook of Taken Too Soon, the sixth Quaker Midwife mystery, after it releases on the 8th. 

Following on its coattails is Candy Slain Murder, the eighth Country Store mystery - also up for preorder and releasing on September 29. You guessed it, the story takes place at Christmas, with Robbie Jordan back in South Lick, Indiana. She digs into the mysterious skeleton of a woman who went missing a decade earlier, and then the woman's twin's murder nearly right in front of Robbie's eyes.

Isn't that a fun cover! You'll be hearing more here about the recipes in the back.

I hope you'll visit Edith Maxwell and me on our web site, sign up for our monthly newsletter, visit us on social media, and check our all our books and short stories.

Maddie Day (aka Edith Maxwell) is a talented amateur chef and holds a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University. An Agatha Award-winning and bestselling author, she is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and also writes award-winning short crime fiction. She lives with her beau north of Boston, where she’s currently working on her next mystery when she isn’t cooking up something delectable in the kitchen.