Whether you call it stuffing or dressing, Thanksgiving (and Christmas, in my family) is utterly incomplete without it. I was never much of a dressing fan until a couple of years ago; something about the texture was unappealing, and there were far too many other dishes vying for space on my plate for me to give dressing a real chance.

Strangely, I was converted by the same dressing that’s been present at every holiday meal of my life: oyster dressing. Conventional wisdom would dictate that anyone who has problems with the texture of dressing would probably also find oysters repulsive, but I am anything but conventional. I love oysters—recently had a wonderful meal at one of the best places currently shucking them in Seattle—and I love this oyster dressing.

I might be mistaken, but it seems like oyster dressing is a regional thing—yes, it’s Southern, but it’s more prevalent in coastal areas like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. However it managed to make its way 100 miles inland to the kitchens of my grandmothers, I’m glad it did.

While both of my grandmothers make/made cornbread dressing, neither of them have/had an exact recipe. Once you have all of your ingredients on hand it’s a bit intuitive as to how much broth to use and which spices to add, so what follows is my maternal grandmother’s (Mema) basic guideline for dressing. Oh, and feel free to omit the oysters if you’d like. I followed her precedent and made both oyster dressing and the oyster-less variety; she served hers in separate dishes, but I only had one pan so I fashioned a tinfoil barricade so that oysters (1/3 of the pan) didn’t touch the rest.

Oyster dressing
A combination of my grandmothers’ recipes; makes one large Pyrex dish full of dressing.

6 cups cornbread (I used two boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix)
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1 1/2 cups chopped celery
4 slices dried bread
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp. dried sage
1 tsp. poultry seasoning
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 carton chicken stock
1 small container fresh oysters (I used canned because I’m a lazy bum)

Make the cornbread, homemade or Jiffy mix. (I used mini muffin tins for my Jiffy because I already had them out.) Break up the cornbread into pieces. This is one step of the process that really depends on your preference; I left my cornbread in larger chunks than my grandmothers (or aunts or mother or cousins or uncles) and ended up liking it like that rather than the smaller chunks. Large chunks give the dish more texture, the lack of which used to be my main issue with dressing.

Anyway.

Put the cornbread in a large mixing bowl. Chop up your onion and celery and sauté them in the butter, and then add them to the bowl with the cornbread. Add the pieces of bread and seasonings, and then stir in the eggs.

Now here’s where it gets dicey. There isn’t a specific amount of chicken broth to add…you just kind of have to add some and determine if it needs more or not. I probably ended up using half of a box of stock. The goal is to add just enough to make the mixture moist, but not soggy.

If you’re making dressing without oysters:
Go ahead and put the mixture into a Pyrex dish.

If you’re making both kinds:
Pour half of the mixture into a dish. Add the oysters to the remaining mixture in the bowl—you can chop them in half or leave them whole—and pour into another dish. (Unless you’re like me and baked them in the same dish.)

If you’re making dressing with oysters:
Add the oysters to the mixture in the bowl (again, whole or halved). Pour into your baking dish.

Bake at 350˚ for 35–45 minutes.

The oyster part of the pan wasn’t quite as popular as the regular dressing at Thanksgiving, but those of us who ate it thought it was tasty! I was quite proud of myself for how it turned out—I’d never made dressing before, or even helped my mom make it.

I hope 2012 is treating you well so far! It’s snowing outside as I type this, as if Seattle could get any more gorgeous than the neon sunrises I saw on my morning commute this past week. I had a wonderful time at home for Christmas and New Year’s—hit all of my favorite places and saw my favorite people, including most of you who read this blog. It all came crashing to a halt the night I returned to Seattle (loooong story) but I’m back in the swing of things and looking forward to what this new year brings.

Like cilantro, George W. Bush, and Oxford commas, Bloody Marys are polarizing—you either love them or hate them. I love them.

And I love this recipe, which was brought to my family by my grandparents many years ago from friends of theirs in Swainsboro. These Bloody Marys are perfect at tailgates, brunches, and, in my family, as a precursor to Thanksgiving dinner. As guests are arriving and the rolls and sweet potato soufflé are warming in the oven, a few cheese straws and a Bloody Mary are just about the perfect thing to get folks mingling before the meal. (At least that’s how it happened when I hosted Thanksgiving last month.)

You can get fancy with the garnishes if you’d like; I stuck to celery stalks, but I love restaurants that serve their Bloody Marys in a glass rimmed with seasoned salt and garnished with a green olive and a spear of pickled okra. One note: these Bloody Marys are best when you mix them up a day ahead of time, and they’ll keep for over a week in the refrigerator (but I doubt you’ll have much left over!).

Bloody Marys
recipe created by an old friend (whose name I have forgotten) of Ralph and Mary Helen Smith. Makes just over a gallon; can be halved (I made half a batch).

1 quart vodka (that’s four cups for all of y’all who don’t know your measurements)
2 large (46-oz) cans V8 juice
1 cup plus 1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
7 1/2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. Tabasco (I added more, just ’cause)
garnishes (celery, olives, pickled okra, lemon or lime wedge…I’ve seen asparagus spears and green beans, too)

Mix all ingredients together and chill for at least 12 hours. Serve over ice.

Because it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate to serve Bloody Marys at Christmas (in our family, Christmas Eve is a champagne affair), I suggest making these ahead of time to enjoy on New Year’s Day…perfect as a hair of the dog to sip on while watching bowl games.

Here are a few snapshots from the last month:

The Thanksgiving table (post-dinner)—wish I’d taken a picture of the whole group around the table! Lots of cranberry sauce left, but only a couple of sour cream rolls.

Our “foster kitty,” Pip, doing some Sunday afternoon napping.

The halls (and doors) are decked! I can hardly believe Christmas is a week from today. So ready to be home.

And just because she’s cute and I miss her (she found a permanent home two weeks ago), here’s another one of Pip.

Wow, I was really on a roll there for awhile—cooking up lots of good things and posting almost every week. Well, friends, the last couple of months have been full of change and, consequently, I’ve fallen behind on the blog. (That, and the whole sunset at 5pm thing is not conducive to photographing stuff at night.)

Last month I made what is to date the hardest decision I’ve made in my not-actually-so-short life…I left my amazing, incredible, and a million other adjectives job and co-workers/friends at BCC to take a job at World Vision (another amazing, incredible place). Those of you who got roped into the saga know how long I hemmed and hawed about this decision. For a few days, I’m pretty sure I called my mom every hour on the hour, and the first thing out of my mouth every time was, “I still don’t know what to do.” I never got anywhere near 100% clarity, but at some point I had to make a decision and I chose to do the (somewhat) scary thing. I started at WV last Monday and my first week went about as well as it could have…I’m excited for what’s to come, and inexpressibly grateful for the outpouring of support and encouragement from family and friends (including those co-workers/friends I was leaving behind).

Whew.

How about some pretty flowers?

They’re from a few weeks ago when I hosted an “orphans” Thanksgiving at my house in Seattle for all of those (mostly Georgia and Texas folks) who weren’t going home for the holiday. It was a huge success and the best alternative to not being with my family. I wasn’t brave enough to undertake the turkey, but I made a whole host of other things—all of which were from family recipes. I knew from the beginning that I would make sweet potatoes, so I’ll share that recipe with you first and post about all of the others (including oyster dressing, bloody marys, sour cream rolls, and pecan pie) in the weeks to come.

These also made an appearance:

According to my mom, this recipe appears in the 1970-something First Baptist Church Swainsboro cookbook (my grandparents’ church in Swainsboro, Ga.), but I’m not sure whether my grandmother submitted it or if it was originally someone else’s recipe that she took a liking to. Either way, it entered the family culinary tradition and has graced the table at pretty much every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner of my life. It can also be made with marshmallows on top, but I prefer the pecan/brown sugar topping for a little crunch. I’m excited to share this recipe with y’all!

Sweet potato soufflé
From the First Baptist Church Swainsboro cookbook; makes a casserole dish full of the good stuff.

3 large or 4 medium sweet potatoes
1 cup sugar (this is why it tastes like dessert)
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt

Topping:
1/2 cup pecans
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 stick butter, softened (not melted!)
1/3 cup flour

Peel and cube the sweet potatoes. Make sure the cubes are all the same size so that they’ll cook evenly. Drop them into a pot, cover with water, and bring it to a boil. Continue to boil for 15 minutes, or until a cube of sweet potato breaks apart easily with a fork.

Obviously, I should have used one large stockpot from the beginning, because I ended up using three smaller pots.

Meanwhile, get the butter, sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, and salt out and ready to go. My mom said she usually puts the butter in the bottom of a big mixing bowl so that it melts easier when you pile the sweet potatoes on top.

When the sweet potatoes are done boiling, drain them and add them to the bowl with the butter. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

The sweet potato part of this recipe can be made ahead of time and frozen (I’d recommend it, actually—less work on the actual day). Just let the mixture cool completely, put it into big Ziploc freezer bags or tupperware, and stick it in the freezer. To defrost, put it in the fridge the night before you plan to bake the dish and it should be good to go when you need it.

After you’ve defrosted the sweet potatoes, pour them into a baking dish sprayed with cooking spray. To make the topping, combine the softened butter, brown sugar, flour, and pecans in a small mixing bowl and spread the mixture over the sweet potatoes. A tip for the topping: Leave the butter out to soften way before you plan to make the topping mixture. It takes awhile to soften and it’s essential that the butter is soft (not melted—so no microwaving!). (Pretend like there’s a picture of the pecan/brown sugar topping being mixed in a bowl. And a picture of the dish before it goes in the oven.) Bake at 350˚ for 35 minutes.

Now pretend like there’s a picture of the dish of sweet potatoes fresh out of the oven.

All that was left of the sweet potato soufflé.

Apologies for the lack of photos; the sweet potatoes went into the oven as people began to arrive and I wasn’t about to be that girl who holds up Thanksgiving dinner so that I can photograph the food we were about to eat. To make up for it, here’s a photo of a fraction of the dishes I had to do the next day:

This is plum recipe four of five, and it’s easily the best of them all.

I’d had it in my mind to use this recipe, minus the apples, to make a plum-only pie, until my friend Andrea came over to help me bake one Sunday afternoon and brought with her a paper bag full of apples from the tree in her backyard. Plum and apple pie it was.

Because plums are juicy and get even more so when mixed with sugar and put in the oven, this is a single-crust pie; a double-crust would result it a soggy bottom crust. Therefore, the single crust really has to be spectacular, and I’m happy to report that this crust is amazing. It’s really a big sugar cookie with a hint of lemon and cinnamon and it puffs up perfectly when baked…definitely worthy of eating in its own right, but add sweet, ripe plums and crisp, tart apples, and you end up with the stuff pie dreams are made of.

Plum and apple pie
Again, from Smitten Kitchen. She can do no wrong. I substituted lemon zest for the orange zest she calls for in the original recipe.

Crust:
7 Tbsp. unsalted butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. grated lemon zest
1 egg, beaten
1 cup plus 6 1/2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour (excuse the strange quantities; I believe this recipe was adapted from a British recipe)
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
sugar for sprinkling crust

Filling:
1 pound plums, pitted and quartered
1 pound apples, peeled, cored, and cut into smaller chunks (so that everything will bake evenly)
2 Tbsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon
a squeeze or lemon juice

To make the crust, cream the butter, sugar, and lemon zest until light and fluffy. Mix in the egg, and then slowly add the flour, baking powder, and salt; beat until combined. Scrape dough onto a piece of waxed paper and stick it in the freezer for 20 minutes.

Time to assemble the pie. Preheat the oven to 350˚ and butter a pie dish. In a large bowl (or in the pie dish), add the fruit and sprinkle it with the sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice. Gently toss it all together a couple of times and transfer to the pie dish.

Roll out the pie dough on a well-floured surface and then lift it onto the pie and trim off the overhang. Feel free to eat some scraps of dough, or use them to make a fancy star on the crust.

Bake for 40 minutes, until it’s lightly golden on top.

The plums turn the most beautiful shade of scarlet, which is lovely when it’s safely in a bowl or in your mouth, but not so much when it’s on your white shirt. So be careful.

I don’t usually post songs on here because I figure once I start, I won’t be able to not post music. However, I’m making an exception for this song because it so wonderfully captures Seattle for me right now (the video was shot around town, I believe). It’s “White Daisy Passing” by Rocky Votolato—enjoy!

Can’t believe it’s been three years.

(The Puget Sound from Carkeek Park, taken my first week here.)

Fall is on the cusp of being in full swing in Seattle…the leaves at the tips of trees are beginning to yellow and red, I’ve been sleeping with the window closed, and the forecast for this week is rain and highs in the mid 50s. Every day. I have to say I’m ready for fall. It’s my favorite season; I just love being able to snuggle up with a comfy faux fur blanket (I call it The Pelt) with a hot cup of coffee and read for hours on a weekend. I’m ready for scarves, jackets, and warm comfort food.

However, we’re not there quite yet. The last of summer’s bounty is just in, and it includes a lot of zucchini, tomatoes, and—if you’ve read any of my last posts—lots of plums. I thought I’d give y’all a break from the plum talk and share this delicious recipe that will make all of your zucchini dreams come true. Every last one of them.

This recipe is basically a potato latke if you substituted zucchini for potato. Topped with a lemony, garlicky, sour creamy dallop, it tasted bright and clean and downright springy. Kind of like zucchini and squash casserole in fritter form, so that’s it’s light and fresh instead of heavy and nap-inducing.

Other than the apple and plum pie I made a few weeks ago (recipe to come soon), this is the best recipe I’ve made in awhile, so give it a try!

P.S. Did y’all notice that I’m not just pimentocheeseplease.wordpress.com anymore? That’s right, I’m all fancy and official-like with a new address—pimentocheeseplease.com.

Zucchini fritters
from Smitten Kitchen, of course; the recipe makes ten 2 1/2-inch fritters, but I ended up with 12 because I used more zucchini than it calls for. If you have more than two medium zucchini on hand, it’s easy to adjust the recipe to accommodate for it—just use a few more scallions, add another egg, and use a bit more flour, salt, and baking powder.

1 pound (2 medium) zucchini
1 tsp. salt
2 scallions, sliced thin (I kept mine a bit chunky because I like the texture they had in the fritters)
1 large egg, lightly beaten
pepper
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
olive oil or whatever oil you want to fry the little guys in

Delicious topping:
1 cup sour cream or plain, full-fat yogurt
1-2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. lemon zest
a couple of pinches of salt
1 small minced or crushed clove of garlic

Trim the ends off of the zucchini and grate them on the large holes of a box grater or in the food processor (with the shredding blade). I went the food processor route and it was super easy and not bad clean-up wise.

Put the zucchini in a large bowl and stir in a teaspoon of salt; set it aside for 10 minutes.

Now is the fun/gross part: wringing the water out of the zucchini. There are a few methods, but the easiest one (to me, at least) is to wrap it up in a clean dishtowel and squeeze it over the sink.

Thanks to sis-in-law Sara for the Russian day-of-the-week dishtowels! This is Thursday (Четверг).

A couple of minutes—and lots of green water—later, dump the zucchini back in the bowl. Add a bit more salt (1/4 tsp. or so) because most of the salt you added beforehand got washed down the drain. Stir in the egg, scallions, and some pepper. Stir the flour and baking soda together in a small bowl and add it to the zucchini mixture.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Drop heaping spoonfuls of zucchini mixture into the pan (four at the most); lightly flatten them with the back of a spatula.

While they’re cooking (3ish minutes on each side), grab some paper towels and have them ready for the hot fritters to rest on. When the fritters are lightly browned on both sides, remove them from the pan and drain them on the paper towels. Repeat with the rest. To get the fritters extra crisp, preheat the oven to 200˚ (this step should be at the top of the instructions); after they drain for a couple of minutes on paper towels, transfer them to a baking sheet and keep them in the oven for 10 minutes or so.

For the topping, stir the sour cream, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt, and garlic together and taste for seasoning.

Top each fritter with a dallop and dig in. Seriously…these things are so delicious. I wish I’d known about this recipe a few months ago because I would have been making zucchini fritters all summer long. If you can still get good zucchini at the store or the produce stand, grab a few and make some fritters this week!

In other news…counting down the days until the family is reunited (since last Christmas!) at the end of the month at a friend’s wedding in Connecticut. It’ll be quite a weekend—wedding on Friday, Georgia/Florida party on Saturday, and then Brooklyn on Sunday to celebrate my brother’s 30th (!!!) birthday and see his and Sara’s new place. And Saturday is Oktoberfest in Leavenworth (Leavenworth = Washington state’s version of Helen, Ga.).

And finally…how ’bout them dawgs?! After a disappointing start we’re on a four-game winning streak that will hopefully extend at least until Oct. 28. Watching the games with the rest of the Dawg fans out here has been more fun this season than ever. It feels weird to say that I’ve met some good friends through the football watching parties, but I have! Football brings people together, and, well, the Southerners out here tend to find each other anyway and stick together.

I’ll be back next week with plum recipe #4 of 5!

This whole plum situation has reminded me of why I should always look to Smitten Kitchen before any other site for fail-proof recipes. With this and this, I erroneously went to Martha Stewart; when those recipes didn’t succeed, I knew where to turn (and where I should have started) with the approximately 234982347 pounds of plums that remained.

Dimply plum cake
adapted, just barely, from Smitten Kitchen; I substituted lemon zest for the original orange zest, and used Italian plums instead of red or purple plums

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
5 Tbsp. unsalted butter at room temperature
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/3 cup canola oil
grated zest of one lemon
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
10 Italian plums (or 8 red or purple plums)

Preheat the oven to 350˚. Spray a baking pan (8×8, or a Pyrex casserole dish like I used; I have a feeling my lack of success in round one can partially be attributed to using the wrong cake pan) with cooking spray.

Halve the plums and remove the pits.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon together in a bowl.

Beat the butter at medium speed until it’s soft and creamy (3 minutes). Add the sugar and beat for three more minutes; add the eggs one at a time and beat for a minute after each egg to incorporate. With the mixer running, beat in the oil, lemon zest, and vanilla. Kick the mixer down to low speed and gradually add the dry ingredients until they’re incorporated (don’t overbeat.)

Pour the batter into your prepared pan and smooth it out. Arrange the plums cut-side up in the batter…you can gently push the plums down so that they’re nestled in the batter (but not submerged). I think I was a little heavy handed with this step because when the cake was done, the plums weren’t sitting up nice and pretty like they should have been; most of them had sunk down quite a bit. Whatever, it still tastes great.

Bake for 30-40 minutes until the top is brown and the batter has puffed up around the plums. Cool for 15 minutes or so and enjoy! The cake keeps for several days and gets more soft and moist by the day.

Maybe I should re-name this blog “Elizabeth’s kitchen mis-adventures.” Should I blog about recipes that didn’t turn out well…recipes I’ll never make again?

Too late, I’m already doing it.

If you’re keeping track, this is plum recipe two of five (yes, five). If you don’t like plums, come back sometime in 2012 because that’s probably when I’ll be finished posting about all of the plum stuff I made. This particular one was another Martha Stewart disappointment, made on the same day as this. I’m hesitant to recommend this recipe, even though it ended up being pretty tasty despite my troubles with it. Things took a turn toward the problematic with the tart dough…maybe if I’d worked with it a bit longer it would’ve gotten less crumbly. (It was a bit too salty, as well.)

BUT all that to say, the end product tasted good. If I rated the five plum recipes from best to worst, this would probably come in second to last (it only beats out plum cake, round one because it has lots of crust, which is my favorite part), which I realize isn’t a great endorsement but what can you do. Definitely follow Martha’s instructions to line a baking sheet with foil and parchment paper, though; this thing gets really messy in the oven.

Plum tart
from Martha Stewart

For the crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup fine yellow cornmeal
1/2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt (should’ve cut this down to 1/4 tsp.)
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter

For the filling:
1 1/2 pounds of plums, quartered, pitted, and sliced 1/4-inch thick
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 large egg yolk

To make the crust, pulse flour, cornmeal, sugar, and salt in a food processor to combine. Cut the butter into small pieces and add it to the mixture; pulse until it resembles course meal. Add 2 Tbsp. ice water and pulse again until the dough is crumbly but holds together when squeezed. (? OK.) If you need to (I did) add up to 2 Tbsp. more ice water.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead once or twice. Flatten it into a disk, wrap in plastic, and stick it in the fridge for an hour.

In the meantime…line a baking sheet with tinfoil. Flour a large piece of parchment paper (Martha recommends 16 inches) and place the refrigerated dough on it. Here’s where it gets weird: Using your knuckles, press edges of dough so it doesn’t crack when rolling. (It’ll crack anyway, but humor Martha and stick those knuckles in the dough.) Roll the dough out into a 14-inch round and transfer (still on parchment) to the foil-covered baking sheet.

Preheat the oven to 400˚. In a large bowl, toss the plums, sugar, and flour together. Mound the plum mixture in the middle of the crust; leave a two-inch border all around. Fold the border over the fruit in a pleated pattern (!). Brush dough with egg wash (I didn’t do this).

Bake for about 45 minutes, until the crust is brown and the filling is bubbling. If your tart is anything like mine, it’ll bubble like an elementary school science project volcano that you’ve dumped an entire bottle of vinegar on.

One of the innumerable fantastic things about the house where I live is the plum tree in the yard. There are two, actually, and this year’s produce is a bumper crop compared to last year’s. I think they’re Italian plums—they’re egg-shaped, not round, with purple skin and a freestone seed. The side yard is littered with them, so last weekend I picked through the plums that hadn’t split open yet and looked up a few recipes.

Y’all, I was disappointed. I trusted Martha Stewart to give me great recipes and she let me down. The plum cake, despite sticking to the recipe with uncharacteristic precision, overflowed out of the cake pan and made a huge mess in the oven. The rising batter completely sunk the plums so you couldn’t tell that Mckenzie and I laid them in a pretty pattern; I ended up turning the cake upside down onto a plate because it was such a mess. Still not clear on what I did wrong—I read and re-read that recipe at least a dozen times and couldn’t figure out what happened. (I also used a Martha recipe for a rustic plum tart, and it was a disaster. More on that in another post.)

Anyway, the good news is that even if the cake didn’t look like the prettiest thing, it was delicious. It tasted like the cake version of a blueberry muffin, if you substituted plums for the blueberries. So I guess it tasted like plum muffins? The lemon zest is essential in this recipe, so don’t skip it.

There are even more ripe plums on the tree today, so I just gathered a bowl full of them and am going to attempt another plum cake recipe (and a plum pie!) today or tomorrow. I’ll post plum cake, round two later this week.

Plum cake
from Martha Stewart…maybe you’ll have more luck with this recipe than I did.

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 1/2 cups, plus 2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tsp. grated lemon zest
1/4 cup sour cream
3 plums (I used 6 Italian plums because they’re smaller than regular plums)
confectioner’s sugar

Preheat oven to 375˚. Butter a 9-inch or 8×2-inch cake pan. Whisk together 1 1/2 cups flour, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.

Beat butter and sugars with an electric mixer until it’s light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time; beat in vanilla and lemon zest. Beat in 1/2 the flour mixture, then the sour cream, and then the rest of the flour mixture.

Spread the batter into the pan; toss plums with remaining flour in a bowl and sprinkle over the batter. (Or, spend some time arranging them in an intricate pattern even though it won’t matter in the end.)

Bake 30 minutes until cake is golden. Loosely tent tinfoil over it and bake 35 minutes more, until the cake pulls away from the pan and a toothpick comes out clean. (Or, bake for 10 minutes; check on the cake; realize it’s overflowing and smoking; take the smoke detector off the wall and put it by a window; clean out as much of the overflow as possible from the bottom of the oven; put cake pan on a cookie sheet to catch the anticipated future overflow.)

This isn’t how it’s supposed to look. Martha, what happened?

Let the cake cool completely in the pan. Put it on a plate or whatever and then dust it with confectioner’s sugar.

The finished product:

Quick—what are your top five favorite desserts? If your list looks like mine, it says:

1. Key lime pie
2. Key lime pie
3. Peach or blackberry cobbler
4. My mom’s chocolate, coffee, and Kahlua bundt cake
5. Key lime pie

Homemade Key lime pie really impresses people, and here’s the secret…it’s embarrassingly easy to make. Like, five ingredients easy (fewer if you omit the lime zest, which I strongly discourage). But it’s SO MUCH BETTER than anything from a restaurant or the store.

There are two essentials to making a good Key lime pie. As the name suggests, you must use Key limes and Key lime juice rather than regular limes and juice. If you use the regular limes, your pie will neither be as delicious as it could be, nor can it technically be called Key lime pie. Key limes are more tart and have more lime flavor than the regular ol’ limes. Trust me on this—nobody wants to eat a regular lime pie. It sounds gross. And if you ever get served a slice of “Key lime” pie that is green, don’t eat it. Step away from the plate and do not eat the pie. Key lime juice is yellow, not green, so any green pies masquerading as Key lime pie are 100% fraudulent.

Whoa. Sorry to get so worked up there.

The second essential is lime zest. Now, the recipe on the bottle of Nellie & Joe’s Famous Key West Lime Juice doesn’t have zest in the recipe, but I stuck with the good folks at Southern Living and added zest to my pie. I highly recommend you do the same.

This is the perfect summer dessert…cool, refreshing, tart, and tangy. Cut yourself a big slice before you set it out on the table at a cookout, because I guarantee you that people will scarf down this pie in about 15 minutes. (I speak from experience.)

Key lime pie
from Southern Living; makes 8 to 10 servings, depending on how big your slices are.

1 graham cracker pie crust (store-bought or homemade)
1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup Key lime juice (I used Nellie & Joe’s, which was much easier and less messy than juicing 20 Key limes)
2 tsp. (or more) Key lime zest
whipped topping (optional): 1 cup heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. confectioners sugar

If you’re making your own pie crust, do that first. I used this recipe, which was the first one that came up when I googled “graham cracker pie crust.” Basically, throw some graham crackers in the food processor, grind ‘em up, and add sugar and melted butter.

Preheat the oven to 350˚. Whisk together egg yolks, lime zest, and juice until well blended.

Add the sweetened condensed milk.

Pour the mixture into the pie crust.

Bake at 350˚ for 15 minutes, or until the pie is set. Cool for about an hour, until it’s cooled completely. Chill for an hour before serving.

For the whipped topping, beat the whipping cream on high until it forms soft peaks. Gradually add in the powdered sugar and top the pie with the sweetened whipped cream.

I had a couple of extra limes so I sliced them as a garnish. (And if you couldn’t tell, the photos in this post were taken from several different pie-making sessions…when I’m short on time, I go for the pre-made, store-bought crust in the two pictures above and below.)

So…what’s been going on with everybody? Summer is going out strong here with weeks and weeks of warm, sunny weather. It’s been a good one…lots of family visiting, a trip up to Orcas Island, Pickathon with Okie BFF Margo, outdoor movies, another flash mob, cookouts, camping over on the Peninsula, farmers markets, concerts, and lots of frozen yogurt. It was hard to say goodbye to Laura Belle a couple of weeks ago when she and her husband left for nine months (!) to travel around South America, but I’ll hopefully see them in the spring down in Buenos Aires! Work has had its ups and downs, but by and large I’m happy where I am. And where I am is…ready for fall. Summer has been great but I’m ready for chilly weather, sweaters and scarves, and football. Lots of football.

Also, if there’s a recipe you really want to see on here, please let me know—I’d love your suggestions!