This summer, when I was back in the states, it became very obvious that one thing I miss from home is pie. Now, I can make my own pie from scratch, but I am somewhat limited by the lack of an oven. There is an oven setting on our microwave (which is generally how one goes about baking in this country) but our oven setting doesn't seem to work - so no oven. As I'm sure you are all aware, last week was Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving isn't even on the radar over here. Even my native English speaking colleagues are generally disinterested in Thanksgiving. There are two other American's, though, and one is new to Japan this year and the lack of Thanksgiving was really getting to him. All the native English speakers at work decided to band together - even if it was their first Thanksgiving ever - and pull it off.
Of course, I volunteered to figure out the pies. I had a few options in mind.
1. Cafe Piranha recently started advertising pies, so that seemed best. The owner loves to bake and makes really tasty pastries. We figured anything he came up with would be great. He even already had a pumpkin pie on the menu! (Of course, pumpkin was our top choice for the dinner).
2. We found a company that buys things (like pumpkin pies) from Costco and mails them to people without Costco cards.
3. We do know of one bakery that does make awfully tasty apple and sweet potato pies. Its not like sweet potato pie in the U.S., but it does have a real crust and the filling is delicious.
Something had to work!
Unfortunately, last week was a monster and we didn't start investigating these options more closely until, well, Friday. That's not as bad as it sounds, because dinner had been moved back to Sunday to accommodate schedules and allow for some real slow cooking. Still, Friday didn't leave much time for error.
Plan #1 was an error.
We went to Cafe Piranha on Friday evening and ordered a slice of pumpkin (actually sweet potato) pie and a slice of apple pie. What came to the table was not actually slices of anything recognizable as pie. In fact, they looked like perfectly baked cream puffs. We tried to dig in with our forks, but the puffs were wrapped in paper, so it was a little challenging. We hadn't even managed to wrangle one bite out of the pies when the owner hurried over to top off our water and delicately suggest that THESE pies could be eaten just like hamburgers. なるほど! How silly of us! We grabbed onto our cream puffs with both hands and chowed down. While the "pies" were absolutely decadent, there was little about them I would normally associate with pie. I thoroughly enjoyed the treat (the monster puffs were only $2.50 each!) but I was starting to worry about how successful our pumpkin pie hunt was going to be. Plan #2: Costco
Russell jumped online as soon as we got back and went about ordering the pies online. We got all the way to the end when we had to select a delivery date - starting after Tuesday. Damn! Foiled again.
Plan #3 was tried and true, so I knew there would be pie... but not pumpkin pie!
Saturday was my rest day. I haven't had one in several weeks - even our surprise national holiday was spent cleaning the house all day. Saturday was much anticipated and greatly appreciated. I slept in, didn't do any work, wandered around Kobe with Russell and spent a great deal of time chatting in a cafe over enormous coffees. Not bad.
By the end of my relaxing day, I was getting over mourning for our lack of pumpkin pie and trying to figure out how to still make it happen.
Then it hit me - if you can cook cake in a rice cooker, you should CERTAINLY be able to cook custard, right?
I looked up a recipe for home-made pumpkin. There was even a reported success story with kabocha (local Japanese pumpkin and the highlight of my Fall). I ran down to the grocery store, bought eggs, whipping cream, kabocha and some spices and ran home again. I steamed the kabocha and scraped the meat away from the skin and mashed the kabocha up. Kabocha, unlike real pumpkin, is perfect for pumpkin pie. Its mostly meat with a very thin skin and small cavity with seeds, its perfectly sweet and it mashes up smooth with a fork - no need to food process. Its also relatively dry. Even after sitting all night no extra liquid pressed out. Perfect. Unfortuantely, 3/4 of a kabocha added up to too much pumpkin for my rice cooker (it only makes 3 cups of rice). I decided to split the pumpkin into two portions, halve the recipe and save the rest in case this all worked out.
So 3/8 of a kabocha, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup of sugar, a small carton of whipping cream (4-6 oz?) and spices to taste. I dumped the resulting mixture in the rice cooker, hit the cake setting and waited 45 minutes to see what would come out. When I opened the lid, the center still hadn't puffed up, so I decided to run the cake cycle one more time (a tip I had seen online). After another 45 minutes, the center had fully risen, so I turned it off and once it was a bit cooler, Russell and I dug in. (You'll note the large dent we made before I realized I should really take a picture).Success! There was a nice flavorful skin over a light and fluffy pumpkin pie custard. We deemed it a bit too fluffy and not spicy enough, but we still managed to eat the whole darn thing between us in one sitting. Tummy aches aside, we were back in business for Thanksgiving. Russell suggested I make pie crust and bake it tortilla chip style so we could do pumpkin pie nachos. It was tempting, but the oven was pretty well spoken for at my friend's house. After starting up the rice cooker with a significantly spicier custard mix and on the hot rice setting instead of a cake setting, I went out and bought a bunch of small butter cookies to act as make-shift crust. We also make homemade, unsweetened whipped cream, assembled into pumpkin pie towers and enjoyed. It definitely hit the spot. I also brought along a couple of the apple-sweet potato pies I had tried before - no sense on skimping on dessert, right?
I was also very pleased by the positive reviews from my Japanese colleagues and students the next day at work. We were all so stuffed from dinner that there was at least half a rice cooker's worth of pumpkin pie left the next day, so I spread the goodness around. Now, in the U.S. Japanese students never seem to like pumpkin pie, so I wasn't expecting much success. Everyone seemed to sincerely enjoy the little pie towers, though. Maybe because I didn't use as much sugar, maybe because I still wasn't to American standards of spiciness, maybe because pairing anything with fresh-baked butter cookies and fresh whipped cream is bound to be a winner. In any case, it was a total success. Rice cookers are clearly way under-rated.
And now you know.
