Thursday, November 25, 2010

Lemon Pie ala Ecuador

Many of you have said you enjoyed my description of baking in Ecuador. So I thought I might tell of my adventure in baking a lemon pie for our Thanksgiving dinner. First off there is no lemon pudding here. So I went online and found a recipe for lemon meringue pie from scratch. We had to find fresh lemons which I thought would be easy here since there is lots of fresh produce everywhere. But alas, we found only limons, a cross between lemons and limes. Finally I found what appeared to be lemons, at least they were yellow. I baked the crust, I must say the shortening here does make for a pretty good crust. It was a bit of a challenge rolling the dough since I have very little counter space and it is very narrow. Then I started to make the filling. The 'lemons' were more of a 'limon', they did not smell or taste at all like lemons. I had found some Real Lemon juice (form the states) so I added some of that. The mixture was not very yellow so I added some yellow food coloring. Then I had to send Fred to the store for corn starch. He forgot his dictionary and had no idea how to say 'corn starch' in Spanish. The clerks were trying to help, the neighbor was shopping and was trying to help, he did finally find some, and it even said 'corn starch' on the package. Then I cooked for what seemed like forever, the mixture did get thick but still seemed to thin for pie filling, finally I was tired of stirring and cooking so I just poured it in the shell, made the meringue and baked it. Surprise, it looked wonderful, and when we ate it, it actually tasted like lemon (thanks Real Lemon) and we didn´t have to eat it like soup, it had set up very nicely. Maybe I´ll tell you about funeral potatoes sometime, that is another adventure in the kitchen.
(Sorry I didn't take a picture)

1 comment:

The Yosts said...

getting so creative! I loved www.allrecipes.com in Australia to make things from scratch when I couldn't find things I needed. It's a great site if you need more recipes :)