Brown Sugar Topped Squares--- Again: I bought the pan just for these

Today, we are revisiting the first recipe we made from my great-grandmother's book!

Brown Sugar Topped Squares ½ cup butter (or ¼ cup each of butter and shortening) 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk (save the white for the topping) ½ to 1 tsp cinnamon, if desired 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cups sifted flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt         Topping: 1 egg white 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 cup chopped hazelnuts, pecans, or almonds (if desired) Heat oven to 325°. Line a 9"x13" pan with parchment paper. (You don't need to bother with cooking spray, just put the paper into the bare pan.) Cream the butter and sugar. Then beat in the egg, the yolk, the cinnamon (if using), and the vanilla. Beat well. Then sift in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix everything together. Place into the pan and spread as much as you can. This is easier if you coat the top of the dough with cooking spray and then pat it out. (You may need to re-spray it a few times if it starts sticking to your hands.) You may not coax it all the way to the edges of the pan-- that's fine, don't worry about it. In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Gradually add the sugar, then beat well. Pour this onto the dough and spread it to cover. Sprinkle on the nuts if using, then gently pat them to press them into the topping. Bake about 30 minutes. Cut into squares or bars while warm. Source: handwritten note Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

One of my friends flips electronics for a side income, so we often go to thrift shops looking for stuff tagged with notes like UNTESTED or SOLD AS-IS. While he is examining the electronics, I often wander to the kitchen section because I can't be persuaded to care about vintage stereos. I usually leave empty handed, but I recently plonked this on the checkout counter next to a haul of 1990s computer keyboards and an alarm clock with woodgrain sides. (Did you know there are alarm clock collectors? I didn't.)

 

I got this pan because I wanted to bring out a certain special recipe again:

As some readers will recall, we didn't have the right-sized pan or enough brown sugar the last time we made this. (I was housesitting for my parents at the time. Mom doesn't keep as many ingredients on hand since she decided she was three-quarters done with baking.)

Just like before, the recipe yielded very little dough. It looks like a decent amount until you compare it to the vast acreage of pan that it's supposed to cover.

I tried to persuade our dough to get all the way to the edges of the pan, but it didn't quite make it. Fortunately, that ultimately didn't matter.

This is a really fast recipe--- aside from the tedious job of coaxing a small portion of dough across a big pan. We were ready to put on the topping before we knew it. The first time we made this, the topping was so runny that we only needed to tilt the pan a bit. But today, we needed to get out a spatula.

Since we had some pecans lying around from a previous recipe, I sprinkled them on as the recipe says. I mean, how can you go wrong with brown sugar and pecans?

I should have pressed the nuts into the cake before baking. I thought they would sink in, and they didn't. They didn't fall off as soon as you picked up a slice, but they didn't really stay on either.

If you love the taste of brown sugar, this recipe is absolutely meant for you. The now-toasted pecans on top were perfect with it. You might want to add a little bit of cinnamon to the cookie layer, but if you like brown sugar a lot you won't need to.

Mock Pumpkin Pie: or, Cornmeal for dessert

What do you do when carrots are too expensive?

Mock Pumpkin Pie 1 unbaked pie shell 1½ cups cornmeal mush* ½ cup brown sugar or molasses ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp salt 1 tsp ginger 2 eggs, separated 2 cups scalded milk Whipped cream, sweetened to taste Heat oven to 350°. Mix the cornmeal, sugar (or molasses), spices, salt. Whisk in the milk. Beat the yolks in a small bowl til light and lemon-colored, then stir them in. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Then fold them in. (They will probably float in a separate layer on top.) Pour into the pie pan and bake until firm. (Mine took about 40 minutes, but keep in mind I halved the recipe and made a small pie.) Serve with whipped cream on top. *If you don't know how to make cornmeal mush, here is a recipe. Cut the ingredient amounts in half. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

We're starting 2026 with severe economizing, but with also a bit of adventure. Can you really turn cornmeal into a pumpkin pie? I'm willing to believe Mrs. Mary Martensen after she showed us that you can make cherries out of cranberries and raisins. 

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

When read I the recipe title, I thought we would start by mashing carrots (as was a common pumpkin substitute at the time). But this pie is apparently meant for people who can't even afford a few carrots, because today we are using... this!

This is a pot of "cooked cornmeal," which presumably meant cornmeal mush. I'm pretty sure most people making mock pumpkin pie in 1933 would have known how to make cornmeal mush, but I had to look it up. (I didn't plan on learning bygone skills before we got past the ingredient list.) 

At first I thought that starting this pie by making porridge was a lot of effort (and another dirty pot in an era before dishwashers). Then I realized that someone at the time might have simply made enough cornmeal mush in the morning to save a little for a future pie.

At any point in the recipe, I could have just reheated the bowl contents for breakfast. (And if we were on a Depression-era budget, I could have also served it for lunch and dinner.) 

 Some of the cornmeal mush stayed in little hard yellow lumps that refused to break up. I had to get out a whisk and really flog it. I guess you should always expect to put in a lot of work when you're making ingredients act twice their cost.

 

I thought this was one of those "just stir it together" kind of recipes, but the directions tell to beat the egg yolks until light (well, the single egg yolk since I halved the recipe). This seemed more pointless than any other step. But just in case it mattered, I had at it with a whisk until it looked slightly aerated and then lost interest. Can you see the difference?

I gave this a taste after adding the milk. And... well, it was hot milk with sugar and spices in it. The cornmeal didn't change the flavor as much as I thought it would.

When we got around to working in the egg whites, they floated on top instead of mixing in. I had a hard time breaking them up. Maybe this is supposed to be like one of those sponge puddings that separate into a custard layer with a cake-ish layer on top?

You can really see the layering if we look at the bowl from the side.

While I was waiting on the oven, it occurred to me that if someone wanted to sell this recipe in this millennium, they could easily rename it "polenta pie."

I decided this pie would be easier to cut if I got it out of the pan first. I note this because my great-grandmother's pie clippings yielded a pie that I could flip out of the pan and then right-side-up again without any structural failures.

Before we hide this under cream, let's see what this recipe gave us. If you dimmed the lights and squinted, it was almost pumpkin-pie colored on top. We have a sort of extra-shiny surface layer like you get on brownies, which I think was nice. The egg white foam on top almost looked scrambled even though it wasn't. And the layer underneath looks like an unremarkable beige custard.

I only put whipped cream on top because the recipe told me to. And let's be realistic, this pie probably needed all the help it could get. Then I realized the cream might be the costliest part of this pie.

I didn't like this very much. But, I have a hard time getting too snipe-y about a recipe that is clearly meant to make a dessert out of nothing. So let's try to have a nuanced opinion here.

First, does it taste like pumpkin pie?

It tasted like pumpkin-spice. Which is not the same. And there were still little granules of cornmeal suspended in it. They were cooked soft, so there wasn't any grit in the pie. But contrary to my expectations they didn't take on enough water to dissolve.

Is it any good?

Well, it's better than I expected. Honestly, with a better mix of spices it could be pretty decent. I don't think I'll make it again, but I didn't throw away my half-finished slice either.

Was it worth the dish pileup in the sink?

I guess if you're on a really stretched budget and no one wants another water pie (or its close relative vinegar pie) for dessert.

Final thought:

This recipe successfully turned some dry pantry staples into a pie. It's not the best pie I've ever had, but it is very good at what it's meant to be.

New Year's Flambee: or, Here comes 2026!

Did 2025 make anyone else want to burn things?

New Year's Flambee Large-sized tart baking apples (one per serving) Whole-berry cranberry sauce Sugar for sprinkling About 1 tablespoon of whiskey per apple Whiskey butter (recipe follows) Heat oven to 350°. Wash, pare, and core baking apples (one per serving). Fill the holes with whole-berry cranberry sauce. Place the apples in a baking dish, then pour a little cold water at the bottom of it. (Use a baking dish that looks nice enough to bring to the table, if you have one.) Sprinkle the apples generously with sugar. Then bake until tender, about 40 minutes. While they're baking, make the whiskey butter. Serve the apples while still warm. When serving them, pour about a tablespoon of whiskey over each one. Then ignite the apples. Serve with Whiskey Butter.      Whiskey Butter: 2 cups sifted powdered sugar (10 oz by weight) ½ cup butter, softened  ½ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt (omit if using salted butter) 2 tbsp whiskey Cream the sugar, butter, nutmeg, and salt. Beat until smooth. Then gradually beat in the whiskey. Note: We changed the main ingredients to use what we already had on hand. If you want to follow the original recipe: use mincemeat instead of cranberries, and apple brandy instead of whiskey (both in the butter and for pouring over the apples to ignite). Omit the nutmeg from the brandy butter. Warning! NEVER pour liquor right from the bottle onto flaming food! The fire will travel up the pouring stream and go into the bottle. Then, the bottle will blow up in your hand. If you must pour additional liquor after you've lit the food, pour it from a ladle or a large serving spoon, and be sure you don't have anything flammable nearby (including any hanging holiday decorations suspended from the ceiling above). Adapted from: Mrs. Florence Kummerer, 511 Chestnut Street, Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

The newspaper ran this on January 10, which is a little late for your New Year's party (unless you stashed the clipping away for a whole year). But I guess it's easy to still be optimistic about the upcoming year when you're only ten days into it. The recipe seems like something you'd make to lighten the mood as the very last holiday leftovers are finally exhausted and you have to go back to normal food.

Recipe Exchange; Philadelphia Inquirer; page 11; January 10, 1936

Igniting food goes in and out of style depending on the decade, but I didn't think I'd see it pop up in the middle of the Depression. (Or at least, not among home recipes). 

This recipe's title made me think this would either demand a lot of time or a lot of grocery money. But this is a pretty simple dessert-- aside from the part where you set it on fire. But we'll get to that after we bake some apples.

The recipe calls for putting mincemeat in the apples before cooking them. I thought I would grab a jar of it on a post-holiday discount, but apparently they purge the stuff once Christmas is behind us. And I don't mean pushing it to some clearance corner. There was no mincemeat among the piles of cookie mix and canned pumpkin. Nor was there any mincemeat among the canned pie fillings on the baking aisle. I asked multiple employees where the last remaining jar of mincemeat might be, checked every possible section of the store, and ultimately left empty-handed.

I thought about some raisins into a pot with brown sugar and boiling them into a quick sorta-mincemeat, but then I decided I was making way too much work. We would put cranberry salad (of which we have a lot) in the apples instead. I'm sure Mrs. Florence Kummerer would understand if I changed her ingredients to match what was already in the house.

While we were economizing, I chose not to purchase any brandy for the recipe. I know mini-bottles tend to be forgettably cheap, but I still have a partial bottle of whiskey from my brother's wedding. (That wedding was five years ago) Also, I just don't like going to liquor stores. And really, do whiskey and brandy taste any different after you've burned them away?

Now that we're done (not) shopping, it was time to get out a paring knife. I've seen a lot of recipes that involve cutting out the centers of apples and then stuffing them with something, but this is the first time I've attempted it. My first attempt to cut the core out of an intact apple doesn't look to bad, does it?

I could pretend that I casually did a near-perfect job, but let's flip the apple over and see the missing chunks where the knife went the wrong way.

I sprinkled on sugar "generously" as the recipe said. Most of it fell right off. My erroneous knifework actually paid off and gave some of the sugar a perch to land on. If I bake whole apples again, I may cut notches out of the sides for this express purpose.

 

You could see why the recipe doesn't use cranberries after a few short minutes in the oven. The apples looked like they were bleeding. I may file this recipe away for next Halloween (minus the part where you set it on fire.)

The long baking time allowed me to make the "Brandy Sauce," which today is whiskey sauce due to the above-mentioned economizing. Incorrect spirits aside, our sauce was more like a frosting. I think I just accidentally made "Brandy Butter" as if I'm some British person making a Christmas pudding. Well, Mrs. Kummerer does tell us to fill the centres of the apples and not the centers of them.

I tasted a sample of our "sauce" and it was halfway to eggnog. I gave it a little nutmeg to complete the flavor, and it was absolutely delicious. One of my friends really likes eggnog (we have, like, three containers of it in the fridge because the grocery stores were getting rid of it). I might surprise them at some point with whiskey-nutmeg frosting on cookies or something.

And now, the time had finally arrived to bust out the pistol lighter. This step terrified me. I had horrible visions of the fire leaping up to the ceiling, or cracking the plate and then burning a hole in the countertop. I didn't even take this to the table because it's made of wood. The kitchen counters at least have tile on top which would buy me some time in the event that I had to wield a fire extinguisher and hope it was enough. But after about fifteen seconds of blue flames, it was all over. I turned on the lights and said "What was the point of that?"

Well, now that the fire has safely gone out, let's see what is left.

I guess you set these on fire for the spectacle because it didn't do anything else. I thought the sugar on top of the apples might get browned a bit, but you couldn't see the difference. And you really couldn't see the flames unless you turned the lights down really low, so it wasn't much a spectacle. (Hmm... dim rooms and fires on a holiday that's famous for getting drunk...)

I didn't know how you're supposed to serve brandy butter with this. The recipe calls it a sauce but it's more like extra-thick frosting. I guess you smear it on top? It did taste really nice as it melted and slid off the apples.

This is a cute little recipe aside from a brief moment when you turn dessert into a fire hazard. Flavor-wise, it is exactly what it looks like: apples with cranberries in them. (Or mincemeat if you follow the original recipe). But you need to read all the way to the bottom of the recipe to get to the good stuff. The "brandy sauce" (or whiskey sauce if that's what you have) is merely a four-line addendum to the main attraction, but I think it might be best part.

Provolone Puffs!

When the temperature gets cold, the oven gets hot!

Provolone Puffs 4⅜ fluid ounces milk 2 tbsp olive oil, plus more for brushing 2 eggs ¾ teaspoon salt, 2½ oz flour 2 eggs 1 oz diced provolone ½ oz shredded provolone Coat a six-cup muffin pan with cooking spray. Select a small saucepan that can handle using an electric mixer in it without getting ruinously scratched. (You can beat this entirely by hand if you don't have one, but if you use a mixer you'll be glad.) Put milk, olive oil, and salt in the saucepan. Heat slowly until the milk boils. Toss in flour all at once. Allow to boil for a few seconds until the milk begins to bubble over the flour. Turn off heat and beat until smooth. Then set the spoon aside and switch to an electric mixer. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on high speed until very smooth after each. Stir in the diced cheese. Spoon into the muffin cups. (Push the dough off the spoon with a knife to prevent sticky fingers.) Let them sit until they get completely cold (you can refrigerate them to speed this up). Otherwise, they won't bake right. When ready to bake, heat oven to gas mark 8, 450°F, or 230°C. Brush the tops with olive oil. Shake salt generously over each one, then sprinkle all of them with the shredded cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes (12-15 hectoseconds), or until the tops are a deep golden brown. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then carefully cut out of the pan if they don't fall right out. Serve warm. Leftovers can be placed on baking sheet and reheated at 350°F (180°C, or gas mark 4). Note 1: You want to wait until right before baking before brushing the tops with olive oil. Otherwise it will just soak into the batter and disappear. Note 2: You can make the batter ahead of time, get it into the pan, and put it in the refrigerator until ready to bake. If wrapped airtight, it should keep for at least a day before baking. There's no need to bring it back to room temperature. Just take it directly from the refrigerator to the oven. Adapted from Fanny Cradock via Keep Calm and Fanny On

I usually feel bad about running an extra-hot oven. But winter has paid us a temporary visit, bringing the temperature down to 29 degrees. (That's -2° for our celsius friends). Therefore I felt no guilt whatsoever about running the oven up to 450° (which, depending on where you live, is either gas mark 8 or or 210°C).

I may be understating things a bit. Actually, I said "Well, as long as the oven is already turned on..." and made a lot more than today's puffs.

Carbs taste better with frost outside.

Getting back to today's recipe, we're revisiting Fanny Cradock's gougère with one slight change. Instead of butter, we're using this:

Yes, that's a generous splash of olive oil in the pan. It's probably the last time I will to dare to be so extravagant (even though this is only a couple of spoonfuls). We happened to use up the last of the bottle, so I asked someone who was already out of the house to detour to the grocery store and replace it en route back. It turns out the price of olive oil has at least doubled since the last time I bought it. By the time I knew the price, it was too late.

Setting aside the cost, I didn't know if these would bake right. Does the choux paste need the butter to re-solidify before going into the oven? Is that why we're supposed to let it get cold? I set my worries aside and figured either these would be good, or the kitchen would be extra-cozy while they baked.

 

Naturally, our batter needed to cool off before we baked it. As anyone watching Fanny Cradock knows, choux paste must get completely cold before baking. Otherwise you get a lot of hot goo in the middle instead of steamy puff-bread.

These are exactly the airy, cheese-infused bliss you think they are. And as a bonus, I think they were actually a bit better the next day when I reheated them in the oven (which I was preheating for something else). It gave them a final crisping that made them absolutely divine. 

 

Graham Cracker Cake: or, Second verse, not as good as the first

Apparently my great-grandmother liked graham cracker cakes enough to save two of them.

Graham Cracker Cake ⅔ cup flour ¾ cup granulated sugar 2½ tsps baking powder ½ tsp salt 1⅔ cups graham cracker crumbs (or 7½ oz by weight) ½ cup shortening ¾ cup milk 2 eggs (medium-size if you can get them)* Heat oven to 375°. Cut parchment or waxed paper circles to fit the bottoms of two 8-inch round pans. Coat the pans with cooking spray, then press the paper into place. Press out as many bubbles from under the paper as you can. Then spritz the top of the paper with more cooking spray. Into a large bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the crumbs. Drop in the shortening by spoonfuls on top of everything. Then pour in the milk and vanilla. With electric mixer at low speed, beat just until dry ingredients are wet. Then beat two minutes at low to medium speed. Scraping the bowl and beaters as necessary. Add the eggs and beat 1 minute longer. Pour into pans. Spread the batter, making it just a little lower in the center than at the edges. Bake 25 minutes or until done. Cool in pans on cake racks ten minutes. Remove pans, peel off paper, cool on cake racks and frost as desired. (I used plain white icing with a lot of almond extract.) *The store near me does not sell medium eggs. Swapping in extra-large eggs didn't hurt a thing. Source: Unknown clipping, probably from a Chicago-area newspaper, likely 1930s-1940sNotebook of Hannah O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

I didn't know you could make a cake of graham crumbs until I tried the recipe she wrote on random scrap of paper. This one was good enough to get neatly pasted into "The Book," so we will see if it's actually better.

I wasn't going to sift everything, then I read the directions and saw that we're supposed to more or less dump everything in and then turn on the mixer. So I figured the sifter would help break up any flour clumps.

The bowls are already piling up!

After stirring in the graham cracker crumbs, I could see that we would have a lot of cake.

The directions now tell us to dump in everything (except the eggs). I've seen a fair handful of cake recipes that go like this from the 1940s and 1950s. I think it was supposed to replace the tedious, allegedly old-fashioned way. (You know, the instructions that go something like "Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time, then alternately add flour and milk...") But with a few exceptions, this cake method seems to have faded out of cooking as soon as the paper advertisements crumbled into unarchival dust.

Moving down the ingredient list, we are told to use "emulsifier-type" shortening. From what I understand, that is shortening that has some extra emulsifier added so that water won't separate out of it (or at least, not as easily). You can get it from commercial suppliers (in massive commercial-size boxes of course), but it's not very common in grocery stores. I decided to hope that our ordinary store-brand shortening was good enough. Fortunately, nothing in the cake is so expensive that an oven failure would break the budget.

We dropped everything in, turned on the mixer, and after two minutes (plus time to dampen) we had a sludgy light-brown mixture. At first I thought it looked too heavy, then I remembered we hadn't added the eggs yet.

After adding the eggs and letting the mixer go some more, it looked like cake batter. It occurred to me that since I have a kitchen scale, I could have weighed the bowl before and after putting a cake batter in it, and then used the scale to divide the batter into perfectly equal halves. Then I decided that only insane people and wedding bakers do that.

Speaking of getting batter into pans, I love that this recipe has us papering the bottoms first. It's so reassuring to know that no matter what happens, the cake absolutely cannot stick to the bottom of the pan. We may have to cut around the sides, but we have a guarantee that we will get the cake to fall out in one piece.

In addition to the pan size, this recipe tells us how tall the cakes should come out. I couldn't help getting out a ruler, which showed me that today's cakes fell short of the specified 1¼ inch. (I shouldn't be surprised. Recipes tend to vastly overestimate the yield of servings too.)

Having reached final assembly, I ignored the icing that came with the recipe because I already know what whipped corn syrup would taste like. Instead, I made white icing and added a thoroughly unnecessary amount of almond extract.

This brings us to the worst part of cake making: competently getting icing onto it. I've said this before, but I like to spread my icing thin. I think it's best as a sweet finish to the cake, not as something you have to scrape off and put in a mound on the side of the plate. Unfortunately, the only way to get a cake to really look nice is to smear so much icing on that your spatula can't get anywhere near the cake itself. And I have to agree with longtime commenter Freezy who said that what decorators call a crumb coat, the rest of us call "a disgusting amount of frosting."

With that in mind, I made only a small batch of icing. I got a little bit between the layers, and managed to coax the last spatula scrapings from the bowl onto the top.

At this point, I stepped back for good look at our cake-in-progress, watching its bare sides gently drop a few crumbs onto the plate as the air blew in from the heater vent. I could have made another batch of icing and tried to cover the sides without making an ugly wreck of it, but I decided "It's cute as it is. This is the look." Seriously, put this in a freshly sterilized all-white kitchen and I think it'd look like it came right out of Pinterest.

This tasted oddly like banana bread without bananas in it. I don't mean like the result of omitting the bananas from the recipe. Imagine if the bananas had departed from the banana bread and left their spirits behind. 

The cake has nearly the same texture as those supermarket sheet cakes that punctuate so many birthdays and office parties. It felt professional when I sliced it. But if we're going with graham-cracker cakes, I think the one my grandmother wrote down herself tastes a lot better. (I think it's the butter. The other cake doesn't use shortening.)

As a postscript, I wondered if the cake had reached its specified height in the center. (It rose into a dome instead of flat on top.) So after cutting a slice, I got out a ruler and found that the two layers are exactly the correct height. Maybe if I tried that trick of tying wet rags around the sides of the pans, the whole thing would be. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Spinach-Bacon Pie without all the fuss

Sometimes, recipes are a lot more work than they need to be.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, flour, and seasonings. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Don't drain the spinach before adding it-- mix all the juices in with everything else. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then bake about 20-25 minutes, until it puffs up on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

The spinach-bacon pie has made its way into regular rotation in this house. But all that business of juicing frozen spinach, measuring fluids, heating canned milk, and everything else got more irksome every time I made it again. So I decided to cross out the directions and just stir everything together.

At first I was worried. This pie won a Pillsbury Bakeoff prize with all its fussy instructions, so surely every step was there for a reason... right? Also, the ingredient list specifically calls for hot milk. I didn't know whether that had some crucial effect on how all the ingredients interacted in the mixing bowl. Then I decided that at worst, this would turn into spinach soup with a soggy pie crust under it.

This time, the raw filling looked more like leaves with a little bit of white mixture around them. When I squeezed and wrung the bejaysus out of the spinach as the recipe directed, we had little green shreds floating in white-ish fluid. At first I thought this might seem more like a panful of leaves than a decent pie. Then I decided that even if I never took the shortcut again, this pie couldn't possibly be bad enough to throw out.

Well, now I feel silly for posting this recipe with a long list of directions. In my defense, I was following what was originally in the book. But now we know that you can just stir this pie together.  

I really like this pie (which is why I make it so often). It's like a low-effort quiche. And for something that has such a hefty serving of vegetables, it doesn't taste like "you have to eat your vegetables." It's just plain good.