Skip to main content

Agni's Flames & Creamy peanut Butter pie - A tribute to Jennifer Perrillos husband, Mikey.

By
When I had listed this weeks post  as 'something new' this was the last thing on my mind. To be honest, I no longer remember what I was going to post.

We bloggers secretly vie with each other for posting the most chirpy sounding pieces of writing, overflowing with happiness simply because a happy post spreads cheer, Soft focus photographs of food and the drool inducing descriptions thereof. It is seldom that we want to touch a topic such as loss. The first time I saw a food related article that talked about death was Chef Raghavan Iyers tribute to his late father in the food magazine Gastronomica. Food related to funerary events are seldom discussed in blogs, and not many have the courage to post these, and I'm no exception. It is a HARD topic to discuss gastronomically.

Food52 has a regular monday feature called Jenny's in the kitchen, by Jenny Steinhauer, a LA based correspondent for the New York Times. The details of the dish she highlighted are fuzzy, (her choices are usually fabulous, like the Feta, basil & Mint Pesto that I had posted a couple of days ago) what stood out was the heartbreaking news that a fellow blogger Jennifer Perrillo had lost her husband to a sudden heart attack.
Jennifer Perrillo is a Brooklyn based recipe developer & Food blogger. One of her memorable recipes posted, for fresh homemade ricotta, is what I instantly associate her with. It looked good enough to dip a finger & scoop out of the screen! Her way of paying tribute to Mikey, her late husband, was to make his favorite peanut butter pie. Her recipe (which is vegetarian) can be found on her blog link. This recipe is adapted from hers, although I did take enough shortcuts.


Cardamom & Saffron flavored Peanut Butter Pie.

 


You need:
1 readymade8 inch  frozen Pie shell
1 bar Godiva Dark chocolate with mint
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup plain full fat cream cheese
1/2 cup condensed milk
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon crushed cardamom seeds
10-12 strands saffron
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
Chocolate curls for decorating (mine were rather straight)

In 300 F oven bake the frozen pie shell till its golden brown.
Melt the chocolate bar (break it into little pieces first) along with the butter (microwave in a glass bowl for ~ 1 minute). Using a silicone brush, brush the chocolate onto the bottom & the sides of the baked pie shell. Place in refrigerator, while you prepare the filling.


In a large mixing bowl, beat the peanut butter, cream cheese & confectioners sugar till smooth. add the condensed milk & cardamom powder & mix to combine well.
Combine the saffron & the heavy cream in a separate bowl & whip using a beater till stiff peaks form.
Add about 1/3rd of the whipped cream into the peanut butter mixture & fold in. (it makes incorporating the rest of the cream easier). add the remaining cream. Ladle the mixture  onto the cold pie shell and refrigerate at least 3 hours, preferably overnight.


As I take Panfusine across to India for the next month, I'll be thinking of you & your girls Jennie, and saying a little prayer for your family at each temple I visit. Thank you Jenny Hartin, Shauna Ahern & Food52 for bringing out the human, the empathy & caring in each one of us bloggers.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

By
I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been...
3 comments
Read more

Unusual Ingredients - Unripe Blueberry Achar

By
T'was just another Summer afternoon, The kids were home for the summer holidays, getting bored, there's only so much summer reading you can force them to do, and the Indian mommy in me could no longer caution them against going out in the afternoon  (I've solemnly refused to use that horrid excuse of 'You'll get a dark tan if you stay out in the mid day sun'), and so we decided to head out to Terhune orchards for the blueberry picking. The kids never say no to outings to the orchard, they LOVE the trip there, the cute yellow dogs and the cats,  the chocolate crinkle and Snickerdoodle cookies, and they positively trip over grabbing buckets and heading joyfully towards the berry bushes... ... And there it ends, the younger one loses herself in her delightful imaginary worlds where she probably thinks she's hacking her way through virgin Amazon jungle, sighing at every branch that brushes against her legs, picks 2 or 3 berries as if they were a new as ...
6 comments
Read more

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

By
 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try an...
14 comments
Read more