Catching Up with Tuesdays with Dorie

You know, every Tuesday that I was away in Europe, I felt a small twinge of longing. Before I left on my trip, I faithfully made all of the Tuesdays with Dorie assignments, and fully planned to post them as I traveled along. After a frustrating night of spotty Internet in Rome with an Italian keyboard, I realized that my time would be much better spent in enjoying the moment. And still, on Tuesdays I wished I could participate with my posts but even more so, I longed to peek at all the other TWD posts. So here's what I missed while I was away. Rice pudding. It's quite pretty, true. It doesn't make me do a back flip or shout Hallelujah, but it's better than I remember. When I lived in South America, I had cinnamon rice pudding at least twice weekly, and I learned to tolerate it. Dark chocolate rice pudding and white chocolate raspberry rice pudding are more palatable, sure, but my picky mouth still wonders why there are roly-poly bits of rice in my beautiful chocolate. It's like orange juice with pulp; I wanted to strain it with my teeth.
Next up was the Kugelhopf, a pleasant mix of yeast risen bread and cake. I made mine with shredded apples and a buttery cinnamon sugar coating. And while it was pleasing to the palate, I bemoaned the fact that it wasn't a bit sweeter. Honestly, I put more sugar in my dinner rolls than the bitty 3 tablespoons used in the dough. The outside of the cake is brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with sugar, which is delicious, but only made me want to skin the cake and skip the middle. Which is what I did. It saves calories to eat only the yummiest part. Then with your saved calories, you can eat even more of the yummiest part.

My favorite, by far, of this month's assignments was today's Twofer pie, a happy marriage of two Thanksgiving favorites-pecan and pumpkin. Baking pie on the Monday night before the holiday seemed like an excessively premature thing to do, so I skipped the crust, halved the recipe , and baked the filling in three little custard cups. IT'S GOOD! Really and truly good. So good that now in addition to the apple ginger, mixed berry, pecan chocolate, pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin streusel pies that I'll be making tomorrow, now I'll be making a big TWOFER pie too. You can get the recipe here at Vibi's gorgeous French blog. Scroll down and you'll find the recipe in English, never fear. Ay mamacita! Thank goodness there will be nearly 30 of us to devour them.

And here's a naughty little secret: we always devour at least one pie on Wednesday night. Tomorrow night's going to be wild at our house. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Happy Birthday to two of my little sisters today. Heidi and Catherine, born three years apart but on the same day.

Come Back Tomorrow:

Our Fun Night Before Thanksgiving Dinner Tradition