Monday, August 20, 2012

Summer Garden Love Pie

The Palermo family spent their summer vacation in Oklahoma, visiting some great people and meeting some new one's (Makenzi and Cassi Coder, you girls are awesome!), as always, the Hillenburg family was the best and I wish we could see all you more often.  The girls got caught up on old movies(Ya Ya!) and saw a new one, that I won't name, and that we all walked out of.  One of the movies we were desperately trying to watch was "The Waitress", we could find the DVD cover, but no movie.  We even tried to buy it at several stores, but no luck.  If you haven't seen "The Waitress", it's about a woman who works in a pie diner and has a special knack for making pies and then she gives the pies all kinds of crazy names, there is some other things happening in the movie too, but I don't want to give away too much.  Right now, our garden is producing all kinds of wonderful things, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, basil, oregano and mint.  As I was looking thru a magazine, I found this recipe that incorporated all the yumminess from the garden and thought it sounded fabulous.  I guess you could call it a quiche, but that sounds too fancy, we are going to stick with pie, because for one, it's baked in a pie dish and for two, you need to have a pie shell to bake it in and three, pie just sounds like comfort food.  This isn't technically one of my grandma's recipes, but I will use her pie dough crust and if she was still here, I think she would really like it.  I have decided  that going forward all my pies shall be named.  I will call my apple pie "I love my daddy pie" because that was my dad's favorite.  I will call my banana cream pie "I love my husband pie" because that is one of his favorites that he only gets at Thanksgiving.  My pies shall all have the word "love" included in the name, because I know my grandma loved to make pies.

So,

Pie = Love

'Nuff said.

Here is the recipe for "Summer Garden Love Pie"
1/2 pkg pie dough(this girl doesn't use "store bought" dough, but if you have to use store bought it's ok)
2/3 cup fontina cheese
1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives, chopped
1/3 cup shallots
3 heirloom tomatoes, cut into 1/2 inch slices
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp cornmeal
1 tbsp thyme
1 tsp kosher salt, divided
1/2 tsp pepper
1 1/4 cup 2% milk
1 1/2 tbsp grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
3 large eggs
2 tbsp fresh basil leaves
1 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered

Preheat oven to 350. Put dough into a 9 inch deep pie dish, sprinkle with fontina cheese, olives and shallots.  Lay half the tomato slices on top, then combine the flour, cornmeal and thyme (I added some fresh basil and oregano too) and sprinkle over the tomatoes. Top with remaining tomato slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Combine milk, Parm-Regg cheese and eggs, pour into pan, bake for 40 minutes or until set, let stand 10 minutes, top with basil. Combine cherry tomatoes with salt and serve with the "pie".

Here is the cast of characters:


Grate the cheese:


Chop the olives:

Put the cheese, olives and sliced shallots in the pie dish:

Layer in some tomatoes:

Sprinkle with the flour/thyme/cornmeal mixture and I added some fresh basil and oregano and another layer of tomatoes.  Then mix the milk, eggs and parm and pour over the top:

Bake for about 40 minutes or until the pie is set and sprinkle fresh basil on top:

This pie had all the yummy flavors of the garden:

I would like to thank my husband for being my food photographer, couldn't do it without you!