Piemas 2007:

December 1, 2007 at Kristin & Jess's house.

Pictures are available!

Piemas 2007 we spared guests the fire alarm by scheduling it before the guests arrived – during the making of the oxtail tart. Apparently, placing a pan full-to-the-brim with ingredients (fatty ingredients) into the oven can, under conditions of heating, lead to hot grease falling on the floor of the oven. Fortunately, Kristin’s fancy new house is not wired into the Waltham Fire Department, and it suffices to flip switches in the basement fuse box until the appalling noise stops. And then to fling door open, letting cool air sweep through the house, until the smokiness abates.

Because the house had been so recently purchased, folding chairs were the predominant form of furniture. No one commented, which was very tactful of them. This year the furnishings will be much more decorous.

No one remarked particularly sharply about the pie duplications, most particularly the two quiche lorraines. Now, any quiche lorraine is a fairly rich dish, and having two of them to compare led several attendees to walk away wondering if they had made the right choice to judge one against the other by taste as well as by appearance. Worse, no voting was actually conducted, and the creators are fully aware that the merits of a tounge-in-cheek matza crust verses a labor-intensive two-stick-of-butter gourmet crust cannot be compared any more than apples and oranges can (apples are better, of course). And speaking of tongue, I totally chickened out of putting kidney into the steak-and-kidney pie, mostly because comments on the trial version ran along the lines of “kidney tastes like something that makes urine”.

Meanwhile, the underage guest list increased, with the appearance of Graham, Bridget and Devin’s son, who sported a orange-and-blue patterned cap made by one of the multitalented hosts (me). Devin, who was raised in a healthy household where salad must be eaten before second are proffered, brought a tasty and nutritious dinner pie. Bridget, whose college career epitomized intelligent indulgence, brought a Shaker Lemon dessert pie. Graham’s childhood is sure to be full of arguments over what he is permitted to eat, though his parents have thus far agreed over the edibility of such ingredients as the battery-operated musical jazz center.

Noah and Rae, key participants in piemas past, were unable to attend until late in the evening, due to Rae’s popularity in wedding parties. Noah, unsupervised, underwhipped the cream in what otherwise promised to be a delicious and powerful cognac pie. Even a shelving in the sub-zero ourdoor environs failed to bring the pie into proper firmness, and it was served with spoons (because we didn’t stock straws). He presages another appearance of the pie in 2008, and we hope that he will lean more heavily on the beaters.

In the end, no snowstorms struck, no exodus of the building was required to satisfy local fire codes, and no spoons were (nearly) purloined. A quiet piemas, notorious largely for the quality and quantity of pies.

The 2007 Menu

Piemas 2006:

December 2, 2006 at 5:00pm, at Jess and Kristin's apartment.

Jess forgot what happened except that there was a spoon thief. Wearing red. And trying to use cuteness to get out of the charges. You can imagine the drama (borrowed from http://redrocketfive.com/pie/index.html):

Pictures of the fun (and no firemen this time!)

Al's famous! He managed to get himself interviewed about Piemas on a independent radio station out on the west coast. Check it Out

The 2006 Menu

Piemas 2005:

Sunday Nov 20 at 5:00pm, at Al & Kristin's place. Jess's account:

Piemas in brief:

About fifteen guests attended piemas this year. The dining table, complete with linens, made a nice buffet from which the pies and wines were dispatched. Guests were pressed into dishwashing duties as soon as they arrived and unattended plates were quickly washed and put back into service. After all the eating had been done, many packed up a doggie pie, combining pieces of their favorites (or of what was left) to take away with them.

This year's pie of great note: the chicken pie

The chicken pie certainly wins this award. It overfilled its boundaries. The woman from whom the recipe was gotten later acknowledged that "oh yes, the filling was known to bubble over."

This year's piemas special: the fire department.

In the height of the party, as we ate the appetizer pies and cooked and rewarmed the dinner pies, we went to check on the doneness of the chicken pie. Opening the oven door let a plume of smoke into the apartment. The chicken pie filling had burbled over the tops of the crust and onto the oven floor. Well, almost immediately, the smoke detector in the apartment started going off. This building was converted from a factory, and as all the fire alarms are wired together, it wasn't long before all the alarms in the building, including the flashy lights in the hallway, were going off. Al promptly called the fire department, yelling to them on his cell phone over the noise. They showed up after a while, trooped into the kitchen in uniform, and peered at the not-much-smoky-any-more oven. But they didn't have a way to turn off the alarm. A half-hour of scouting for annunciators got the building unit turned off, but the apartment was still rather high volume.

That's when we constructed the tower to heaven: a dresser, with an upturned tabletop balanced on it, with a folding chair balanced on the tabletop, with a Noah balanced on the chair, and a screwdriver handed up. Noah unscrewed the fire alarm from the ceiling, inspected it for switches and batteries, and then pulled wires. The alarm stopped. Technically, it may still be going. But now there are no speakers attached to it. And surprisingly, the IKEA dresser did not break.

The guilty chicken pie was eaten, as well as the marvelous seafood pie (marked with a pi to confound those who complained that it was baked in a square dish), and we gingerly heated the remaining dinner pies up.

Photos!

The 2005 Menu