Lime Pie and Emmy Winners
Hey everyone!
Did you watch The Emmys last night? I had some friends over and I made a huge batch of The Best Chili of Your Life and then Nicole Rucker's Lime Pie from her gorgeous new cookbook, Dappled.
Before I tell you more about the pie, though, and speaking of the Emmys... today's Lunch Therapy guest is a TV-writing luminary: Mr. John Riggi.
John has written for some of the greatest comedies of all time -- 30 Rock, The Comeback, The Larry Sanders Show (he has three Emmys)-- and he was kind enough to come to my apartment to talk all about the link between comedy writing and cooking, his mother's Italian restaurant in Cincinnati, making food for the 30 Rock writers on the Chopped set, his house in Italy, how Italians eat so much pasta without getting fat.
But the most moving part of the interview -- and the part I've been thinking about a lot -- is when he talks about standing next to his mother at the kitchen counter as a kid, watching her make tortellini by hand, and the way that, now, he makes that same tortellini: "I feel that I have this connection to her that a lot of other people who have lost somebody don’t have because I see my hands moving and I kind of think to myself, ‘She put that in there. That’s her. It’s a different manifestation of her, but that’s her."
Click HERE to listen to the interview.
And, as always, if you can find it in your heart to leave a review on iTunes, that really does mean the world to me. And every week when I ask, a few of you do it. And that makes me so happy!
Ok, as for the lime pie: it's a real winner of a recipe. (You can find it online here, but I highly recommend buying her book.)
A lot of it will be familiar to anyone who's made a key lime pie: you blitz graham crackers, then mix them with melted butter and salt (but a good teaspoon of salt, so it has some zing). You press that into a pie plate (a little tricky, I used a measuring cup), bake, let cool, and then you make your filling with sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and a whole lotta lime zest (a tablespoon), plus lime juice. I think the lime zest is what really makes the difference. You bake that, let it cool, then top with a mixture of whipped cream and sour cream and refrigerate for a few hours.
What can I say? It's a pretty epic pie and actually not that hard to make. I highly recommend it.
OK, that's all for this week!
Until next time...
Your friend,
Adam (the "Please Review My Podcast on iTunes" guy)