Penelope Pies

When people say, “It’s as easy as pie,” they’re not really getting it right. Simple is not always easy. Basic pie crust may have four main ingredients (flour, water, butter, and salt), but that doesn’t mean the perfect pie crust is only four ingredients away. Things take time to learn.
But the thing […]

For those of you who might never go to Provence because your boyfriend somehow ended up on the no-fly list, or because your boss would never give you two weeks in a row off without rescinding the company’s matching funds on your 401k, there’s always confectionary travel.
In some ways it’s better because there’s no […]

Do you know what a bounce rate is? Neither did Penelope before she started this website, but apparently the bounce rate is the number of people who, as the song says, “Come and go in a big rush.” According to those tracking services that can tell you who sneezed in Carlsbad, let alone who […]

The Greeks invented pie crust. For Greek warriors, pie was takeout. Then the Romans knocked it off and took it all over the world. Although the Roman fascination with plumbing and bathing never really caught on in England, the conquerors’ pie shells did. In the 15th century, English and European pyes were everywhere, except they […]

Penelope’s friend Gina (Gina’s Mother’s Lemon Meringue Pie) sent her a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about a 16-year old boy who traded an evening with his Nintendo Wii Resident Evil game for some apple pie making with his mom.
It made Penelope think of a recipe that was perfect for novice apple pie […]

Not that Penelope is competitive about pie baking, because she’s not a professional baker or even a proficient enough amateur to steal a glance over the blue ribbon wall, but when her neighbor, Katherine, came over with a piece of the very first pie she had ever baked in her life, and the crust was […]

The bakery at Russell Orchards sells five different kinds of apple pie (Apple, Apple Crumb Top, Apple Mince, Apple Cranberry, and Apple Crisp) because the orchards have that many different kinds of apple trees. Sounds logical, but if you were raised closer to a freeway interchange than an actual piece of farmland, you might not […]