Labor-of-love lime meringue pie 🍋 💚
Plus a way less laborious fluffy lime cheesecake, rainy day red wine spritzer, and more.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we mostly eat dessert which sounds about right. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Labor-of-love lime meringue pie at home
Recipe adapted from NYT Cooking.
During the summer, I consistently crave three desserts: Vanilla soft serve covered in rainbow sprinkles, gas station hazelnut iced coffee drenched in sugar and half and half, and key lime pie. Seeing that it was already 10PM when I finished dinner, which meant that both hunting for Mr. Softee on the streets of New York and consuming a big honking cup of sugar and caffeine were off-limits, I set out to make key lime pie. I was confident because the recipes for key lime pie seemed deceptively simple; all I needed was a crumb crust, limes, sweetened condensed milk, and eggs. It would be an after dinner breeze, I thought. I was wrong. Tricked by the sweet, home-grown image of the key lime pie, I quickly realized that juicing a dozen tiny limes by hand is an absolute nightmare. Those little fuckers will not yield their juice and if you have a papercut on your thumb, forget it. I also forgot that I have neither a food processor nor a blender because mine broke, which meant I spent a good 15 minutes smashing Nilla wafers with a rolling pin on the world’s tiniest work surface. Also, then I made a sea salt and vanilla meringue topping from scratch, the extra credit that absolutely no one asked for when whipped cream would have absolutely done just fine. What I have learned is in life you should never do extra credit; and that if someone ever makes you a key lime pie, you should thank them profusely.
Less-laborious no-bake lime cheesecake
Recipe from Eric Kim via Food52.
In the Second Act of the lime meringue pie, this story takes a steep plunge into tragedy: My tiny fridge, which barely holds itself together on a good day, did not properly shut on a hot summer’s day, so when I finally sat down for that perfect slice of well deserved lime pie, I realized that it had melted into a lukewarm puddle of weeping meringue. A few Google searches about food safety later, I realized that I could not in good faith keep eating this pie. Once again, I was left alone in my apartment at 10 p.m. with my key lime pie craving unfulfilled. But I never give up on a quest, so I set out to the World’s Worst Grocery Store, to purchase more ingredients. (Also, WAY bigger limes, which turns out really cuts down on the juicing time.) With few patience points remaining and no desire to turn on the oven, I followed a recipe from Eric Kim for Best No Bake Lime Cheesecake, using store-bought Keebler mini crumb crusts (because why not make everything mini?), and topped it with a thick layer of freshly whipped cream. This turned out to be the best choice I’ve made all week. Eric’s recipe uses whipped cream and sugar to lighten the cream cheese instead of sweetened condensed milk, and the resulting texture is divine. This is the best, fluffiest, Not Too Sweet cheesecake I’ve ever made, and it took all of 15 minutes. I froze the pies I didn’t immediately devour, whipped cream and all, which is how I learned that they’re also wonderful as a frozen treat. Run, don’t walk.
Rainy day red wine and bitters spritzer at home
Adapted from the one and only Martha Stewart (who probably had a minion write it for her)
I don’t care what any wine snobs have to say -- I love red wine and I love to drink it cold, straight from the fridge. I guess lambrusco (which I drink when I see it) is the only socially acceptable way to drink chilled red wine, but now I have found a second, even tastier method: The red wine spritzer. When you hear the word spritzer you think white dresses and lawn parties and this is none of that (no offense to white dresses or lawn parties, both of which have their place, which is not in New York, where nobody has a lawn or the dry cleaning budget to wear white on the subway). This is none of that. This is a blood-red, Not-Too-Sweet™️, complex and moody wine spritzer. You want to drink it as the rain pours down on the alley outside and you contemplate how long the Earth will last before it drowns. All you need is to fill a lowball (or rocks) glass with ice, add 2 oz of bold red wine (I like Malbec or anything from Chile and never anything French), 1 oz of bitters (I like Chiot, you can also use Aperol or anything complex and herby), mix and top with seltzer. Throw in a slice of lemon, or orange.
Matcha ice cream Taiyaki cone at Taiyaki NYC
119 Baxter St, New York, NY 10013 and several other locations
Taiyaki is a dessert mini-chain in NYC that specializes in Japanese fish-shaped waffles (taiyaki) topped with a big swirl of soft serve. As if that wasn’t Instagrammable enough, they’re currently doing a collaboration with the one and only San-x (not to be confused with Sanrio, the progenitor of Hello Kitty) character, Rilakkuma. Rilakkuma is a brown bear stuffie whose entire personality is relaxing, truly a mental health idol for our times. (However he also has a zipper on his back that suggests a secret double life that is never truly revealed.) I have told you too much already. All you need to know is that if soft-serve ice cream wasn’t squee-worthy enough, you can now get it in a teddy-bear shaped fresh waffle!!! Unfortunately, all the Rilakkuma waffles were sold out when we went but thankfully Taiyaki is not just Instagrammable, it actually makes excellent soft serve in any shape. The matcha soft serve, which is my favorite, is amazingly soft and fluffy and just slightly bitter. (Note: Steer clear of the fruit flavors, which are actually sorbet, unless that’s your thing.
Egg and avocado kimbap at home
Don’t be afraid, give it a whirl.
I used to be very intimidated by kimbap, but then I started watching a lot of Korean food vloggers on YouTube before bed. I find these vloggers really soothing because they are shot as headless torsos, without any narration (just captions). There is something nice and relaxing about not having the pressure of interpreting another human’s face, even if it is across the globe (and internet), and the lack of dialogue means I’m not constantly stressed about missing a word. Also, it is good inspiration for making every type of kimbap you could ever dream of. What the vloggers have taught me is that kimbap can be anything, including a breakfast sandwich in rice form! This is my favorite aesthetic video on how to roll kimbap, but honestly just lay a flat sheet of nori down, make fresh short grain rice and season one cup of the cooked rice with sesame oil and salt, scramble one egg with a little mirin and soy sauce, and pack the rice on top of the nori in a flat layer, lay down the eggs in a flat strip, and slices of avocado to follow that line, and roll tightly up. That’s it.
Hope you stayed safe in the storm,
Soph
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