Slice of the Week - Key Lime Pie

I  mentioned this before, but I recently had the wonderful opportunity to take a vacation and visit some friends, family and theme park animatronics in Florida. So fun. So relaxing. So necessary.

One afternoon, I found myself with some free time in the seaside community of Vero Beach. This meant two things: 1.) I was to take a long walk on the beach. 2.) I was to take myself out to an unnecessarily long lunch. Why? Because those two things don't exist in New York. Yes, we have beaches and yes, we have restaurants, but when was the last time you had five hours to kill? 

I digress.

I ended up willing away the hours at the aptly named Mulligan's Beach House Bar and Grill. It was wonderful. I had an Adirondack chair all to myself, and save for a nice old couple from Michigan, a retired bussinessman from Ohio and some seagulls, I barely saw anyone. The service was was a bit unorganized and slow, but it resulted in an extra glass of Pinot Grigio for me, so I'm really not going to complain. 

After a mahi mahi BLT on toasted French bread with crispy sweet potato fries and two glasses of wine, I received my accidental complimentary third glass and ordered a slice of Key Lime Pie. Because when in Rome, ya know? According to Wikipedia, Key limes are grown in the Florida Keys, have thiner rinds than the Persian limes more commonly found in American grocery stores, and are known for their tart flavor and intense aroma. According to a Travel Channel show I once saw, Key limes are lighter in color, and as a result any Key lime pie that has an electric green hue has been altered with food dye. According to the inebriated businessman from Ohio, the winds whipping off the Atlantic ocean beat up against the thin rinds of limes when they're on the tree, but that's what gives them their tart flavor. I took all this information with a grain of salt (and that third glass of wine) and dug into my pie.

It was tart and filling and sweet and creamy and not electric green and I could taste the ocean and all those wind-beaten limes. Really, any time I'm eating pie while simultaneously running my bare feet through warm sand and softly gazing at waves crashing in the ocean is a good time. But it was a very good slice of pie ;)

Slice of the Week: Bubby's

A while back, I attended a birthday party where Bubby's pies were being served. I know this because I have a fuzzy memory of chowing down on a slice of pie and asking, "ohmygod where is this from?!?" and hearing someone shriek, "Bubby's, where else?!?" I'm still not sure why no one is able to speak in clear tones at the parties I attend, but that's a project for another time.

Naturally, this place made it on my list of Pies To Try. But even though it's in Manhattan, I'd never had the opportunity to eat there until the other day when I had both the afternoon off and some serious clothing shopping to accomplish. I knew that if I was going to be braving the SoHo tourists, there's nothing like a hearty slice of pie to get you ready to do battle for the last $12 striped sweater dress at H&M (that dress became mine!!!)

 Located in TriBeCa, Bubby's is a 24-hour diner with a casual feel and fancy prices. My single slice of pie and cup of coffe, with tax and tip, cost almost $15. I overheard the couple next to me as they perused the lunch menu exclaim "$17 for a ham and cheese sandwich!" That being said, the restaurant is located in an expensive part of an expensive borough, so plan accordingly.

The pie. I ordered a slice of Michigan Sour Cherry. My waitress did not ask if I wanted it heated up or not, but it arrived warm, so I was content. The cherries certainly lived up to their sour description, so much that I actually had to supplement each bite with a small helping from the mound of fluffy whipped cream that stood adjacent to the pie - and I'm really not a fan of whipped cream. They were fresh and tart though, with soft undertones of vanilla. What I could find of the top crust was sweet and flaky, but there could have been more of it since the holes between the latticework created a noticeable void atop my pie. When I finally got a good bite of crust at the end of the pie, I found chewy and overcooked crust that clogged up the tines of my fork - a bit disappointing.

Atmospherically however, Bubby's is fantastic. The tables are appropriately natural wood, the coffee mugs are huge and branded, the food is rustic and hearty, and the entire experience seems to be bathed in a soft Toaster filter. I'm just not sure it's all worth the price. Granted, this is coming from a starving artist who goes head to head with an unassuming tourist for the last $12 sweater dress at H&M, but still, Bubby's is an expensive diner even by New York standards.

Slice of the Week - Four & Twenty Blackbirds

Hi, I'd like to order four slices of pie.

Ok no problem, is that to go?

... No.

*******************************************************************************************************************************************

When I first started this blog, I made a list of all the best places in the city to get pie. Pulled mainly from a "best pie NYC" Goggle search, results like this and this made a few things clear. First, that there aren't actually too many bakeries in this city devoted solely to pie. Second, that Brooklyn seems to be a hub for not just shaggy hipsters with ironic clothing choices, but for all things pie. And finally, I learned that there is a place, a mecca if you will, deep in the heart of Gowanas that is the epitome of pie. Enthusiasts from near and far whisper it's name with awe, tomes have been written about it, soccer moms name their firstborn after it.

     (Ok, that last one might be an exaggeration. But then again, it might not.)

Anyway, Four & Twenty Blackbirds immediately moved to the top of my Pie to Try list. The problem, however, was that it's located off of the 9th Street stop on the R train in Brooklyn - about an hour away from my apartment, and in an area I never have a reason to frequent. My roommate and I started to refer to the trek to Four & Twenty as our Pie Pilgrimage, and decided to make the trip a reality as soon as possible.

10 months later, she and I finally found a four-hour block of time in which we were both in the city but without work or rehearsal. Sometimes I marvel at how artists ever get ANYTHING scheduled or accomplished.

So, on a rainy Tuesday in October, Amanda and I took the subway to Brooklyn and ordered slices of four of the five available sweet pies. Was this a healthy idea? No. Did we almost go into anaphylactic shock halfway through the meal? Possibly, but I don't really know what anaphylactic shock is. Was this the most delicious pie tasting ever? Absolutely.

Salted Carmel Apple

Soft, sweet apples nestled under a buttery salted crust. At first, this pie isn't anything special, just a really good apple pie. Then comes a burst of salty goodness. It's a crazy, surprising juxtaposition of flavor.

Brown Butter Pumpkin
Everything about this pie is so light and airy that you assume it's made with angel kisses (or at the very least, that it must be fat-free). Consisting of the fluffiest pumpkin puree known to man and a flaky crust that actually melts in your mouth, this slice was Amanda's favorite.

Black Bottom Oat

This pie is the lovechild of Mr. Shaker Oat and Ms. Nestlee Tollhouse. Both decadent and comforting, it's dessert at its' best. Shortbread crust, crunchy oat topping, a thick layer of chocolate on the bottom - there is nothing this pie can't do. We named it the "break-up pie" and told our server that this pie will be replacing the requisite tub of ice cream for all our future heartbreaks. 

Bourbon Pear Crumble

With tart pear slices and brown sugared oats, I was surprised to call this pie my favorite (I'm not a huge fan of pears). It wasn't overly sweet and I appreciated the crunch of both the crust and pears.

It's safe to say that I will go back to Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Not only do they change up their pie menu on a daily basis, they also feature a selection of savory pies that we didn't even attempt to try. The slices also weren't even that expensive - about $5 each, and they were served on actual plates with real silverware (low standards? Maybe, but realize that the last pie I tried was in a cardboard box in a train station).

food coma.

Magnolia Bakery - Peanut Butter Icebox Pie

Last weekend, I had a day off and was able to participate in Smithsonian Magazine's Museum Day Live!, a national event in which museums across the country provide free admission to various sites and museums. It's a celebration of the no-cost nature of Smithsonian museums, and being a frugal and frequent museum-nerd, I immediately signed up for my free ticket to The Morgan Library.

Featuring a collection of rare books, manuscripts, letters and correspondance, the Morgan Library was once the personal library of J. Pierpont Morgan, New York's industrious banker of the early 20th century. The architecture and design of the library is beautiful, and more than a few times I had to stop myself from breaking out into half the songs from Beauty and the Beast.

But enough about the library.

I had some time to kill after the museum and needed a snack. I found myself near Grand Central Station and wandered in. There's something about the hustle and bustle of train stations that excites me to no end, and Grand Central's stunning beaux arts architecture seemed to be the perfect compliment to my artsy Saturday. With thoughts and hopes of a slice of pie, I walked down to the food court - and to my delight, discovered that Magnolia Bakery has a counter selling their sweets to weary travelers.

I know what you're thinking. Magnolia Bakery? The cupcake place? But Mary, this is a PIE blog - you don't even like cupcakes!!

And you're right. This is a pie blog, and I don't like cupcakes (sorry). BUT Magnolia serves goodies other than their famous cupcakes, and I had been itching to try their pie for some time now but had always been turned off by the long lines of pastelled women who believe that one cupcake will turn them into Carrie Bradshaw. Luckily, there wasn't a line at all at the Magnolia at the train station and I was able to order a slice of Peanut Butter Icebox Pie.

It was a HUGE slice of pie. And it was good. Not great, but good. The whipped cream/cream cheese filling was indeed smooth and creamy, but too much. After a few bites, I wanted more taste variation, and the filling-to-topping ratio left me needing less creamy and more crunchy nuts and Reese's. Same with the crust - it was decent, but way too thick to be your average wafer-graham cracker crust. A dash or three of nutmeg would have gone a long way. Most disappointingly, the pie was not cold enough. When I order a slice of ice box pie, I expect it to be freezing. Like ice.

I ended up not finishing my slice (although I made quite sure to eat all the Reese's bits). I suppose the real draw of Magnolia is the cupcakes. Or it's the sociological phenomenon that a popular style or trend will become more popular simply because it's thought to be popular. Whatever it is, I'm glad I finally got around to trying something from Magnolia, but I think I'll continue to see what the rest of the city has to offer.

P&H Truck Stop

I found pie.

In Vermont.

At a truck stop.

On a Sunday.

And it was delightful.

Leave it to the Green Mountain state to finally provide me with some pie during my summer in the woods. I had heard rumors of a truck stop in Vermont that doubled as a pretty decent bakery, and last Sunday morning I was able to convince a friend to get up early on our day off to drive an hour to another state to get pie and breakfast.

Before I go any further into the pie portion of this post, let me express my undying love for diner food. It's greasy. It's cheap. It's served by surly waitresses in polo shirts who look like they've worked that same section since 1974. And my egg-ham-cheese sandwich was not only made with real Vermont white cheddar cheese, but also with homemade oatmeal bread.

Then came the pie.

While there was an ample selection of fancier pies (chocolate/banana/coconut cream, Reses', etc.), we decided to go the simple route - apple for me, raspberry a la mode for my friend.

Let me add that while the server was taking our pie orders, she asked if we wanted our slices warmed up. Immediate points. I think applauded with glee.

The slices were simple. The fruit was fresh. There weren't any overbearing or unnecessary spices sprinkled throughout. The crust tasted like it had been made that morning and with as few ingredients as necessary. The pies were so pure and uncomplicated that for the first few bites I thought there was something missing. Then I realized that what I was eating was pure, unadulterated, American-as-apple-pie, homemade apple pie.

Haute cuisine bakeries everywhere should take a page from P&H's cookbook. It's fine and wonderful to add seven thousand ingredients to a pie and give it a modern slant and update an old standard and whatever else they do to it. But sometimes all you really want is a slice of honest-to-goodness, no frills pie.

P&H Truck Stop is located at 2886 U.S. 302, Wells River, VT. They don't have a website, but are open 24 hours, 7 days a week. Pies run between $3.49 and $3.69 for a slice, coffee is served in a real mug, and you'll share the dining room with some actual truckers.

Slice of the Week - Once Upon a Tart

I'm working in the tony neighborhood of New York's SoHo this week, and amongst the cobblestone streets, colorful buildings, stunningly overpriced boutiques and even more stunningly overdressed tourists, I snacked at a tart shop I'd been dying to try.

Charmingly named Once Upon a Tart, this quick-bite restaurant gives good face. It's cloyingly cute, there are the requisite cafe tables and chairs set for streetside dining, and the menu is handwritten on chalkboards above the counter. The allure ends right about there, however. I had perused their online menu beforehand and knew they served both savory and sweet tarts, and was going to decide which to get when I got there. The sweet tarts were presented beautifully on display trays in the window and on the counter, but the savory tarts were wrapped in plastic, piled inside a case, and left to look like they were made three days ago. So...I went in the sweet direction and ordered a blueberry walnut tart.

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but a restaurant's charm will only get you so far if a.) you serve your food on a paper plate with a plastic fork and b.) you don't offer to heat up said food. I'm ordering a pie (tart). Some people like warm fruit pie. I am one of those people. I would like the option of choosing whether or not my pie is to be heated.

That being said, it was a decent tart. Not the greatest, for the blueberries were most likely frozen and re-baked at some point in their short little lives, but they had a pleasantly sweet and tangy taste, they paired wonderfully with the bitterness of the walnuts, and the tart's crust was great - flaky, sweet, and completely complimentary to it's supporting contents. It was also incredibly rich, and I made it about 3/4 of the way through the 6" tart before calling it a day.

I can't say I'll be back for another tart anytime soon. At $6.50 for one tart, I should be getting silverware, table service and a glass of water (but I'll settle for any of the three). There are a zillion cute and overpriced cafes in SoHo, and I think I'll see what they have to offer.

New Haven Pizza Wars - Modern

My fourth and final battle of the New Haven Pizza Wars took place the other day at Modern Apizza, which I choose for a few reasons: it has some pretty stellar Yelp reviews, a handful of people I've met in New Haven mentioned it in their list of apizzarias to hit up ("oh, you gotta go to Sally's, definitely Moderne, Pepe's too..."), and it's not nestled within the much-hyped Wooster Square area that's home to my now-familiar apizza haunts. It was time to branch out from the usual.

By this point I knew the drill - arrive early on a weekday, marvel at the amount of people who already have giant pizzas on their tables, grab the first booth I can find, order myself a small mozzarella-and-mushroom-pie.

I first noticed how extremely nice and speedy the waitstaff was. While the folks at the other three restaurants weren't not nice, they were pretty blasé about the whole serving thing, and I definitely waited quite a while for things like water, food, and my check. At Modern, I was greeted immediately upon sitting down, given water mere seconds after that, and though the restaurant was almost completely full by the time I place my order (New Havenites really like their apizza), my lunch arrived just 9 minutes later.

It wasn't the most photogenic of apizzas. And at first sight, I wasn't too impressed - the cheese was an odd, pale color, I was uninspired by the mushrooms, and as I had since come to expect, burnt sections dotted the edges.

It was, however, pretty tasty. Ample amounts of cheese covered the crust - so much more than I'm now used to that I realized just how much cheese actually goes on a pizza (versus an apizza). Under my old Chicago-style circumstances, I would never had thought this was a lot of cheese.  The sauce was sweet, the crust had a nice crunch to it, and I was delighted to discover what I thought were completely burnt parts were instead just tastefully blackened. The mushrooms, though, were definitely out of a can.

With tax and tip, it cost $12.50, and I was happy to eat the leftovers for lunch breakfast the next day.

Stay tuned for next week, when I wrap up the war correspondence and determine, once and for all, who makes the best apizza in New Haven.

Want to read the previous Pizza War entries? Here's where I talk about Abate's, Pepe's, and Sally's! 

New Haven Pizza Wars - Sally's

The following is an almost accurate transcription of the notes I took during the third and most fateful battle of the New Haven Pizza Wars.

Date: Sunday, April 15, 2012

Location: Sally's Apizza, New Haven, CT.

4:01pm - I begin the walk from my apartment to Sally's. My sources tell me this is the hardest of all apizzas to obtain, for the restaurant is only open six days a week, five hours a day (Tues-Sun, 5-10pm). This is parallel to almost all my work hours here in New Haven, so I have one chance, and one chance only to catch the elusive pie.

4:15pm - I arrive at Sally's. It's dark inside. No activity is spotted in the immediate area. In contrast, the line outside of Pepe's is nearing 20-deep. I question the "get here early" advice found on both Yelp and Sally's website, shrug, and walk around the neighborhood.

4:19pm - I find a nearby park playing host to the Wooster Square Cherry Blossom Festival. My allergies flare up. I stop to pet some dachshunds. This brightens my day.

4:27pm - I remember why I'm in the area in the first place and head back to Sally's.

4:33pm - In the 18 minutes I spent listening to someone from the New Haven Historical Society tell me about their cherry blossoms, people started lining up for pizza. I am now the 8th person in line.

4:37pm - 5 more people get in line

4:41pm - It starts drizzling. Not a heavy rain, but enough for me to notice that Sally's does not have an awning.

4:49pm - I put away the book I've been reading to occupy my wait in line because it's drizzling harder and I realize it's too hard to hold an umbrella and a hardcover book at the same time.

4:53pm - 18 people in line, and not a lot of them have umbrellas.

4:55pm - On his walk past Sally's, a gentleman from the neighborhood stops near the front of the line and loudly proclaims, "I can name three things better than Sally's: my mom, my wife, and my daughter!" He continues walking.

4:57pm - The group in front of me are passing the time by fondly recalling past Sally's visits ("Oh, I got mozzarella on mine once...oo yeah, you gotta get the mooz...and the clam pie, I had that once...oh yeah, you gotta get the clams...")

4:59pm - The group behind me notices that there's one minute left. "I am starving!" the lady calls out.

5:01pm - My stomach starts growling.

5:03pm - A cop and his brunette lady-friend walk past the line, into the restaurant, and get seated. 25 people in line now have mixed expressions of annoyance, respect, jealousy and awe.

5:07pm - There are now two lines - those of us waiting for a table, and a gaggle of locals watching those of us in line. The air is a mixture of excitement, hunger and humidity, and I feel like that time I spent 105 minutes waiting in line for a turn on Superman - The Ride at Great America and right before I got buckled in, I had this immense fear that it wasn't going to as good as those 2 hours of waiting had built it up to be.

5:08pm - Fluorescent lights go on, the door opens and...the groups of people who have been watching us are let in. Apparently they made reservations. "So much for being the first in line," says the guy at the (former) front of the line.

5:10pm - I enter the hallowed doorway. There is a brief reshuffling of seats when I tell the waiter "Just one...nope, only me, I'm by myself" and he moves two people from a really small table to a booth so I can be seated at the really small table.

5:13pm - Sally starts working the room, greeting guests and hugging old friends. She's wearing a flowery blouse I'm pretty sure my grandmother once owned, an orange and yellow apron with 50-year old grease stains, and bifocals with the longest and most garishly beaded chain I've ever seen. She's adorable. I'm enchanted.

5:16pm - The waiter takes my order.

5:19pm - I notice the enthusiastic gentleman from outside laughing with Sally and others near the kitchen. It turns out he's an old friend of the establishment, not a crazy person as I had originally thought.

5:28pm - I get antsy and start taking still life's.

5:44pm - My apizza arrives.

5:47pm - It's not bad...it's ok, but it doesn't really taste like...anything? That can't be right.

5:49pm - I eat. I think. What makes this so different from not just all the (regular) pizza slices I've eaten, but the other two apizzas I've had?

5:51pm - Enlightenment. I get it. I get the point of an apizza - it's the perfect blend of the crust, sauce, and toppings - so that no one component outshines the others. Most other pizza's have a theme - Meat Lover's Pizza. Four-cheese. Hot-dog-in-crust. But a Sally's apizza isn't that at all. It doesn't have to showcase one ingredient over another, because it's created so everything fuses together. You don't really taste the sauce, the crust isn't that noticeable, the cheese doesn't come out and scream, "hey! I'm cheese!!" Instead, what you taste is the harmonic combination of it all - and it tastes good.

5:56pm - I get the check. My small mozzarella and mushroom cost around $8, but I ordered a ginger ale as well. With tax and tip, $12 total.

6pm - I'm out the door, giving my table to the next lucky customer.

New Haven Pizza Wars - Pepe's

Reasons I think I'm qualified to eat and critique pizza pies:

* I was born and raised in Chicago, home of the gooey, cheesey delicious monstrosity known as the Deep Dish Pizza
* I have spent the better part of the last decade as a waitress in various sports bars and mid-scale (but with cloth napkins!) restaurants, so I know my way around a table setting
* One of those waitressing jobs was in my uncle's (now cousin's) pizza joint The Pizza Factory of Barrington. It was an immersion into the wild and wonderful world of pizza making, and I actually got good enough to just "know" when the slice was heated to perfection and ready to come out of the oven.
* I'm an American, dammit, and I have opinions, and if I self-publish any of them, they become official.

That being said, I ventured out of my apartment the other day to find and eat the second of my New Haven Pizza War's pie - Pepe's Pizza, home of the original New Haven apizza. Founded in 1925 by Frank Pepe, this apizza set the standard by which all other apizzas were to be baked. As is customary, ordering a "plain" will get you fresh tomato sauce, some grated cheese, olive oil, garlic, oregano, and not much else. Mozzarella is considered a topping.

I arrived at Pepe's around 11:45am on a Wednesday morning. Yes, that's early for pizza. That's actually too early for anything besides a bagel or maybe a breakfast sandwich, but here's the thing - Pepe's opens at 11:30am each day, but when I arrived just 15 minutes after the doors opened, the place was already half full. I had heard that waiting up to an hour for a table is common, regardless of the time or day of the week. I'm a busy person and had no desire to wait that long for a slice of pizza, so I arrived much earlier than I normally would have for a mid-week lunch.

Most of the patrons were elderly couples with only a few young families and solo business lunchers dotting the diner-like booths, which allows me to believe that this isn't just a tourist trap - people have been coming here for apizza for years. Maybe this wouldn't be quite the case on a Friday night in the summer, but I actually have no intention of seeing what that's like.

I luckily found a table right away and it wasn't too long before the waiter approached. I inquired of the difference between a tomato pizza with cheese and a margherita pizza, and was told that the margherita is made with fresh mozzarella, while everyday (processed) cheese is used on all the rest. Great! I ordered a margherita with mushrooms...and was told I couldn't alter the margherita pizza. Ok, fine, so instead I ordered the tomato pizza with mozzarella and mushrooms (I like mushrooms, and decided right then and there that if I was doing a true cross-pizza comparison, I should keep my toppings consistant).

Not gonna lie - I had high expectations for Pepe's. It's "the" pizza place in New Haven, a bunch of people told me I absolutely had to go there, and after finding a really good pizza at last week's restaurant, I was expecting nothing short of cullinary gold. And when I finally bit into the slice...it wasn't good.

I don't want to bash the place too much. It is, after all, one of New Haven's most-loved restaurants. And it's very possible I caught them on an off day. Or maybe they bring in their B-Team on Wednesday mornings. But in no particular order, here is how an 87-year-old pizzeria screwed up my lunch:

   - The sauce - bland. I'm pretty sure it had no spices whatsoever, and I like a sweeter sauce with a bit of a bite.

   - The cheese - meh. And VERY oily. There were pools of grease atop the pizza, so many that I had to blot each slice like I did back in high school when it was pizza day and I was concerned about fitting into my Winter Dance dress.

   - The crust - awful. It was doughy cardboard for the first half of the slice, but then switched to crisp cardboard for the latter half.
   - Large swaths of the cheese and crust were burnt. I'm all for a coal-oven cooking method, but I think someone in the kitchen forgot to take my pizza out on time.
   - Mushrooms - there could have been more. And I guess they were fresh, but I was too busy gnawing at the crust to really notice.

And I was one of the first customers of the day! Maybe the ovens were still working their way to regulation temperatures, maybe the chefs were still warming and/or waking up, but still. I ate three pieces because I was hungry, but didn't enjoy any of them. I took the rest to go in hopes that it would make for some good cold pizza - on the contrary, I think it got worse in the fridge.

Ho hum. You win some, you lose some. I suppose that at $12 (pizza, tax, and tip) it wasn't a huge monetary loss. And I did eat the rest of the leftovers over the next few days (it was bad, not inedible. And I don't believe in wasting food). But here's hoping my the next New Haven apizza I order doesn't leave me seriously considering a permanent relocation back to Chicago.

In search of whoopie pies.

I drove up to Maine over Easter weekend. Other than a few long drives on I-80 over the past few years and a wonderful 12 hours I spent wandering around Venice in late 2005, I have never gone somewhere new completely by myself. A last minute four-day holiday weekend and some really cheap rates on a Hertz car were all I needed to get me off the computer and on the road to my first attempt at solo travel.

That, and I had whoopie pies to find.

While there is some debate as to where the whoopie pie actually originated (some say Maine, some say Lancaster County, PA, and still others believe the town of Roxbury, Massachusetts gave birth to the dessert), it is a cold hard fact that the whoopie pie is the official state treat of Maine.

I got to Maine around 5ish on Saturday evening, and after a brief walk on York Beach, I settled in for a tall beer, a warm cup of clam chowder, and the aural pleasure of listening to the fantastic locals' accents at the hotel bar. I considered trying a slice of the blueberry pie that was offered on the menu, but after the beer and soup (and let's be honest: I may have eaten an entire bag of Chex-Mix on the drive up) I was stuffed.

Really, who can think of pie when you have a view like this?

Well-rested after a night of doing absolutely nothing and loving it, I set out into town to find some whoopie pie.

Unfortunately, it was April, and the town was all but completely closed.

Being a New Yorker, I tend to forget that some cities have "off-seasons" in which important things like stores and restaurants and pie shops close for the winter.

Nevertheless, I still managed to catch a glimpse of the country's first lighthouse.

After the Nubbe Lighthouse, I headed north to Ogunquit and the beaches that surrond it.

Just as in York, I found a would-be-charming-and-full-of-pie-had-it-not-been-April little town.

Now I was running out of time. It was after 1pm, and I wanted to be back in New Haven before it got dark (I'm not a big fan of driving at night...yes, I'm old.) I had just enough time to hit one more town on Route 1, but if they were sans-pie as well, I'd be out of luck. So with one last look at the beaches, I put my nose to the grindstone and focused on the pie at hand.

I realize at this point in my story, you're probably thinking "jeeze, Mary, the Internet probably could have helped you in your pie search, didn't you do any research before heading to Maine?!"

The answer is a.) you're right and b.) no, I did not.

I spend my days planning and scheduling other people's crazy lives, and I wanted 24 hours without pre-planning, without sticking to a schedule, without having to stay ten minutes ahead of everyone else.

So I threw caution to the wind and let the fates decide my future. In an existential haze, I headed to Kennebunkport. After declaring this the Fourth Most Fun Town Name To Say (#3 Keokuk.  #2 Sheboygan. #1 Cucamonga) I delighted upon this sign:

Though it looked exactly like Ms. Halpin's 2nd-grade classroom bulletin board, it contained all I needed to know. It belonged to the side wall of H.B. Provisions general store, and was indeed selling whoopie pies.

I hadn't intended to start a trend of buying pies at small-town general stores, but after the success(?) of Santa Fe's Frito Pie, I knew I had to keep on going.

The inside of the the store (like all general stores, I'm beginning to learn) wasn't great. But there were a handful of people sitting at tables and happily consuming food purchased from the store, so that was a good sign. I went over to the deli counter and was a little dismayed to see lots of fresh and expensive lobster rolls, but only a small table of pre-wrapped whoopie pies. I ordered a cup of coffee, grabbed a pie, and headed to a table.

There's not much to a whoopie pie. 2 cake-like rounds with creamy filling sandwiched inside. It's basically as if you took the bottom of a cupcake and put it on the top. Which isn't a bad idea, it's just not...quite...a pie.

Here's the thing. I started this blog because I like pie. If I liked cake, I probably would have started writing about cake. But I don't like cake. I like pie. And while the whoopie pie was well made with moist cake and fluffly filling, it just so happened to be comprised of two things I'm not very fond of. And, it was absolutely gigantic. I had about three bites and was stuffed, regardless of my affinity for the snack.

It's possible that I committed some sort of New England sin, but I threw out the rest of my whoopie pie. Had I a friend with me, we would have split it. But I did not, and I also didn't want to find out how well an unwrapped whoopie pie travelled across state lines in a rental car.


Oh well. Until the next small-town general store.