Retro Recipe Redo - Impossible Turkey Taco Pie

Way back when, there were a whole bunch of recipes for what were called Impossible Pies. They were magical recipes that made their own "crust" as they baked. And they all used Bisquick to make that magical crust.

I was browsing through some old newspaper and magazine clippings I had saved and scanned, and I found a recipe for Impossible Taco Pie. I had made that recipe many times back in the day, and I really liked it. I decided to make it again, to see if I still liked it.

But of course I made some changes.

I used turkey instead of beef, and I have to say that I doubt anyone could tell the difference in this recipe. Which is a good thing.

I didn't have any Bisquick in the house the first time I made this, but there are a lot of "make your own Bisquick" recipes online, so I figured I could do that rather than run to the store.

Nope. It didn't work. Not at all. I made it with Bisquick, and it was perfect. So, although that "make your own" recipe is probably a fine substitution for some recipes, it didn't work for this one. Maybe if I fiddled around with it some more, I could work it out, but that doesn't seem like a good use of my time.

Or my ingredients.

So now I have Bisquick. So it's a pretty sure bet I'll be making this again. Or maybe some other version of it. Because, seriously, this is comfort food, in the best possible way.

Panela cheese is interesting. It's a fresh cheese with a mild flavor. It softens when warm, but it doesn't really melt. So you'll end up with soft pockets of cheese in the pie, but they won't melt and get disappear into the pie.

Impossible Turkey Taco Pie

1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 large onion, diced
1 pound ground turkey
2 tablespoons chili powder (or to taste)
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1 fire-roasted red pepper, diced
4 ounces panela cheese, cut in small cubes
3/4 cup Bisquick
1 1/4 cup milk
3 eggs
1 4-ounce can diced Hatch chiles
4 ounces shredded provolone cheese
Diced tomatoes (as needed for garnish)
Diced avocado (as needed for garnish)
Green salsa (for garnish)

Green Salsa

8 medium tomatillos
1 small green pepper, cored and seeded
1 serrano pepper, cored and seeded
1 small bunch cilantro
1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
2 teaspoons lime juice (or to taste)

Heat your oven to 400 degrees and have a 9-inch pie plate standing by.

To make the taco pie:
Heat the olive oil in a saute pan. Add the onion, turkey, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, and salt. Cook, stirring as needed, until the turkey and onion is cooked through. Take it off the heat and add the roasted red pepper and the panela cheese.

Add the meat mixture to the pie plate and level it.

Mix the Bisquick, milk, and eggs in a medium bowl. Pour over the meat in the pan. Sprinkle the chiles on top.

Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Sprinkle the provolone cheese on top and return the pie to the oven. Bake for an additional 10 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean.

Let the pie rest for 5-10 minutes for easier slicing.

Garnish with chopped tomatoes, avocados, green salsa

To make the salsa:
Put all the ingredients in a blender, and blend until smooth.

Home Made Cheerios

Why yes, those are home made Cheery O's

I had a post half-written, and it was a long one. The history of why I started this blog, why I write about the things I write about, and where I'm going from here. It was a lot of self-indulgent navel-gazing, blah blah blah that no one would care about except me.

I can boil it down to something shorter. I blog about what's fun. What I'm excited about. What I'm eating. What I'm amused by. I cook things I like to eat, and I sometimes I create recipes just for the challenge involved.

That's how it's always been, and it's pretty much going to stay the same. So, nothing new, really.

Speaking of FUN, the nice folks at General Mills recently invited me to go on a trip to Winnipeg, Canada to learn about oats. They paid for the trip (let's face it - I couldn't have afforded it otherwise!) and they made sure all the participants had plenty to eat and a comfy place to sleep.

This guy followed us everywhere!

And there was a photographer who documented the whole adventure.

If you don't immediately get the connection between General Mills and oats, I can sum it up in one word: Cheerios.

Okay, they have other cereals and products that use oats, but I'm awfully fond of Cheerios.

A year ago, I wouldn't have gone on the trip. Ten years ago, I might have gone, but I wouldn't have been invited. This year, all the puzzle pieces fit, so I flew off to Winnipeg. I met farmers, artisans, and grain-storage gurus. There were also people from General Mills, who all seem to love their jobs a lot.

I learned more about oats than a normal person wants to know. I saw oats in the field and I saw wild oats and some invasive wheat and barley.

That's an oat.

I found out that oats are sort of an orphan crop. On my way home from the trip, the random stranger sitting next to me on the plane was a retired farmer who had nothing to do with General Mills or Cheerios. He said that many years ago, he used to grow oats on his farm, but it wasn't very profitable. It was mostly sold as horse feed.

I mean, people have been eating oatmeal for quite some time. But not enough, I guess.

So anyway, given the lack of excitement about oats in past years, the seeds have become sort of an open-source, school-project, crowd-sourcedw item. The varieties of oats that were in the fields we visited weren't owned and patented by companies. Instead, research is done in universities, and no one really owns the rights to those varieties. Anyone can grow the plants, harvest the seeds, and grow them again or sell to other farmers. It's like the Linux of the plant world.

Oats, almost ready for harvest.

Now, I don't know if that's true of every single oat being grown everywhere, but let's just say that there are a lot of freely available oat varieties out there.

On the trip, I saw where oats grew, and I saw where they were stored. And I found out that General Mills buys a lot of oats, and a lot of them come from the area we visited. Which is why we were there. Out standing in a field.

When we were there, the oat crop was a week or two away from the harvest. The farmer said that while there are tools to tell when the oats have dried enough to be harvested, he could tell by simply pressing into an oat with his thumbnail to see how much of an indent he could make. The oats need to have under a certain percentage of moisture in order to be milled.

After I got home, just for the fun of it, I decided to see if I could make my own Cheerios.

Yes, sometimes I have an odd idea of fun.

These won't look exactly like Cheerios, since they'll be flat on the side that's on the baking sheet, so feel free to use a decorative pastry tip, or pipe in shapes other than O's, if you want to. I used a tip that created ridges.

These don't taste exactly like Cheerios, either, but they're pretty tasty as a snack. I didn't eat mine with milk in a bowl, I just snacked on them until they were all gone. The fun thing about making these is that you could add flavors if you wanted to, or pipe whatever shapes you want. The not-fun thing is that it's a LOT of piping of little O's to make a small bowl of O's.

Home Made Cheerios
Just for the fun of it

Lots and lots of piped O's, ready for baking.

1 cup oat berries
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Water, as needed

Heat the oven to 325 degrees and like a baking sheet with parchment paper

Toast the oat berries in a dry skillet until they smell fragrant and begin to brown slightly. Let them cool before grinding in a grain mill. Or, if you have a capable blender, grind the oats in your blender, until you have flour.

Combine the oat flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Add water. Start with a cup of water, then add more as needed to create a soft dough that you'll be able to squeeze through a piping tip. Mix with a spoon, or you can use the paddle attachment on your stand mixer. How much water the dough will absorb depends on how dry the flour is.

Cheerios, and baby Cheerios. Okay, they're oat seeds.

Let the dough sit for at least five minutes to hydrate. Check it again and add more water if it stiffened up. Make sure it's evenly mixed, because if you have tiny bits of denser dough, it will be harder to pipe. Trust me, I know.

Use a pastry bag fitted with a small tip to pipe Cheerio-sized circles on the prepared baking sheet. I used a tip that had ridges rather than a round one. Just for fun, you know.

These won't rise or spread, so you can pipe them pretty close to each other, but you don't want to let them touch.

Use a second baking sheet for more O's if you need it.

Bake at 325 until the O's are completely dry and crisp. If the ones around the outside of the sheet start to brown while the ones in the center of the sheet are still pale and uncooked, move them around so they bake more evenly.

When they're baked through, allow them to cool, then store. Or eat!

In case you missed it, General Mills paid for and hosted my trip to an oat farm in Canada. I was not required to re-engineer Cheerios or to even post about the trip.

Real Pickles

Not long ago, I reviewed a product called Kraut Source, and to do the review I made sauerkraut using the device. Later, they sent me a copy of the Kraut Source Recipe Book which includes 26 recipes for fermenting and for using the fermented foods.

Since I had fresh pickling cucumbers from the farmer's market, I decided to make pickles using one of the recipes in the book. These are the old-fashioned brined pickles that ferment naturally. No vinegar needed.

You can sometimes find this sort of pickle at delis in large jars, or sometimes they're available in jars at the grocery store - they're the ones you'll find refrigerated.

But they're pretty simple to make if you have some patience. It takes a week or more for the pickles to ferment, but you don't really need to do much during that time.

The good thing about the Kraut source and the book I got is that the recipes are for fermenting small batches, right in a canning jar. So you don't need to have a lot of space for fermenting or for storing the pickles later. You can make a batch, taste, and then adjust the flavors for the next batch.

If you decide you want to buy yourself a Kraut Source, the recipe book is a good, particularly if you've never worked with fermented foods before. If you don't get the book, you can still use the Kraut Source since there are recipes in the small booklet that comes with the device, and other recipes on the website. And of course, there are other fermenting recipe that you could use.

Oh, and if the pickles in that jar look dark, it's because it's a purple canning jar.

If you want to know more about the product, here's the review.

Real Pickles
Adapted from Kraut Source Recipe Book

2 1/2 cups filtered water
1-2 tablespoons sea salt
6-8 pickling cucumbers (to fit jar)
2 sprigs fresh dill (I used dried)
1 tablespoon yellow or brown mustard seeds (I used brown)
1/4 onion, thinly sliced (I skipped this; I'm not sure why)
5-6 cloves garlic, peeled (I used three)
1 rounded teaspoon green tea leaves (I used one teabag of green tea)

Bring the water to a boil, add the salt, and let it cool completely.

Put the dill, mustard seeds, onion, garlic, and tea leaves into a clean 1-quart jar. Trim 1/4 inch off the blossom end of the cucumbers and pack them into the jar. It's fine to cut pickles in half to get them to fit in the jar. I only managed to get five pickles into the jar - four standing upright and the fifth one cut in half to fit on top.

Pour the cooled brine into the jar until the pickles are covered by about an inch of liquid.

Place the Kraut Source on the jar. Put the cap on and add water to the moat.

Allow the pickles to ferment out of direct sunlight for 7-10 days, or until the pickles reach your desired taste. Remove the Kraut Source and place a standard lid on the jar for storage. (I like the plastic lids.) Refrigerate the jar.

The Kraut Source book had two recipes for using the brine - a pickle-brined chicken recipe, and a cultured mayonnaise. I haven't tried either one yet, but the pickled-brined chicken sounds like it would be pretty awesome.