Coconut Pie - tastes like summer to me!

The smell of coconut immediately brings to my mind thoughts of summer, sun, and beaches, so I was super excited when I recently came across a great recipe from an old Bon Appetit (November 1992) for a delicious coconut pie.  It isn't a traditional coconut cream pie, but almost more like the pie version of a macaroon.  (Is your mouth watering yet?)  The article mentioned that the pie is very rich and should be served in small wedges, and I totally agree.  However, it never hurts to have a few small wedges right? 

Francis Oliver's Coconut Pie recipe (as adjusted by me)

Ingredients:
1 All Ready Pie Crust (half of 15-ounce package), room temperature
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 1/2 cups sugar (you can use a little less if you think the pie is too sweet)
3 eggs, beaten
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or use 1/2 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract)
1 1/2 cups sweetened shredded coconut

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 450°F. Roll out folds in crust, and press crust into 9-inch glass pie plate. Trim and crimp edges. Bake crust until light golden, about 9 minutes. (I use ceramic pie beads when I bake a pie crust without a filling, but you can also use dried beans - cover the raw pie crust with aluminum foil and cover the foil with pie beads or beans and bake as directed.  Remove foil and beads/beans from the pie crust once cooled.  Do not eat beans after using them for this purpose.)  Transfer to rack and cool. Reduce oven temperature to 350°F.

Melt butter in heavy medium saucepan over low heat or in the microwave. Add sugar and stir until mixture is heated through. Transfer to bowl. Add eggs, lemon juice and vanilla and whisk to combine. Stir in 1 1/2 cups coconut.

Pour filling into crust. Bake until filling is deep golden brown and set, about 40 minutes. Cool on rack. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover and chill. Bring to room temperature before continuing.) Garnish with shredded coconut, if desired.

Check out the original recipe on http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Frances-Olivers-Coconut-Pie-5002 and try this pie out!  Your whole house will smell like summer!

My(?) recipe for Apple Crumb Pie

Today, I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite recipes, which is actually a recipe that my friend, Jennifer, shared with me a long time ago.  It is my Apple Crumb Pie recipe, and I think it is actually why my husband married me.  Not to brag, but it is the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted, and now I share it with you. 

Apple Crumb Pie

Ingredients:

For pie:

6-8 apples

1 9 in. unbaked refrigerated pie crust

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp lemon juice, if using red delicious apples

1/4 c brown sugar

1/4 c white sugar

For crumb topping mixture:

1/2 c white sugar

3/4 c flour

1/3 c butter, softened

Preparation:

Wash, peel, and cube apples.  Mix cinnamon and sugars and combine with apples.  Add to pie crust.  Mix together crumb topping ingredients with a fork until crumbly.  Place over top of apples.  Bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes or until top is golden brown.  Serve with vanilla ice cream. 

Strangely, I recently found a very similar recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks – Don’t Panic, Dinner’s in the Freezer.  http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Panic-Dinners-Freezer-Great-Tasting/dp/0800730550  This, combined with the fact that I’ve been passing the recipe off as my own for about 14 years now, made me think: When does a recipe become yours?  I’m sure I’ve changed a few things in the recipe (for example, I never use lemon juice because I always use gala or fugi apples, and occasionally I use less flour and add oats to the toping mixture), but it’s still basically the same as the one that Jen gave me so long ago.  I am still the one making the pie, so I am using the recipe, but does that make it my recipe?  The US copyright office doesn’t really help.  Their website www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html is pretty technical and tells you the paperwork that’s required to file for a copyright on a recipe, but it doesn’t really say much except that you can’t just republish an entire cookbook that already exists and call it your own.  (There goes that plan.  I guess Paula Deen is safe for now…) 

My other thought is, does it even matter if a recipe is yours or not?  There’s an episode of Friends where Phoebe decides to give Monica her grandmother’s chocolate-chip cookie recipe as an engagement present but realizes it has been burned up in a fire. They try to figure out the secret recipe only to realize that they are Nestle Tollhouse cookies and hilarity ensues.  I’m curious how many of our grandmothers are passing off Nestle Tollhouse cookies as their secret recipes, and how many of us care?  If the cookies are delicious and come from someone you love, does it really matter if they pulled the recipe out of their own clever mind or off the back of a bag of chocolate chips?  I will post more about secret recipes next week, but in the meantime, can somebody tell me if I need to repent and stop lying about my pie recipe?