Making Lime Pie in Peru

Once upon a time there was this guy who came to Peru to visit his father who unknowingly met a girl and got married....what was I talking about again....oh right PIE!  Married life is definitely interesting because you discover that things you once never did are now the things you spend time doing, like cooking and baking.  Now in the States I cooked every now and then and I enjoyed it but I never saw an interest in baking and therefore never did it, the same is true of Zdenka with the cooking part included.  So as a newly married couple we have been cooking and baking like crazy every weekend, trying new recipes and experimenting with cooking/baking techniques that are new to us. 

This weekend we decided to bake since we hadn't done it in a while, not since we baked that orange cake (which could have used a little more orange).  I naturally came up with the idea of making a lime pie (not a key lime pie but a lime pie), especially since in the past Zdenka has never been really fond of lime pies (which they call lemon pies?).  Neither one of us had ever made a pie so we had to do some research (makes me glad there's the internet).  We found many different variations and picked the one which was the simplest but we couldn't find a pie crust recipe that we liked so I called my grandmother who is a veteran at baking.  She sent me a few photos which she scanned from an old cookbook.

She gladly passed on her recipe and it required the following:

Basic Pie Crust
*to make one(1) pie crust

1 cup of flour
1/2 salt
1/3 cup of lard
1/8 cup of water

Looks simple enough right?  Well at first it started off rather simple but as we mixed all the ingredients together the end result was a little bit like cake batter so we added more flour until we got the consistency we figured was right for dough.  The dough itself was very sticky something both of us were not prepared for and we had a bit of difficulty forming it into a ball.  Through trial-and-error we got the hang of it and we proceeded to roll the dough using an empty wine bottle since we didn't have a rolling pin (very useful alternative).   Once the dough was rolled out enough we placed it into the pie tray and poke a few holes in the base to keep it from rising/inflating.  The crust went into the oven at 425 F for about 10 minutes and was then removed and left to cool while we prepared the filling.

The filling itself wasn't to complicated but it did require some work to get the end result.  the filling recipe is the following:

Lime Pie Filling:

4 large eggs
2 14oz cups of condensed milk (though I would recommend 1 and a half)
1 cup of lime juice (about 25 key limes/other small limes)
a good quantity of lime zest

The most time comsuming task was probably cutting and squeezing all the limes along with removing the zest.  Once all the ingredients were in the mixing bowl I whisked for about 10 minutes and then poured it into the pie crust.  Then the pie was place back into the oven at 325 F for another 10 minutes where it was then removed and left to cool before being placed in the fridge to set overnight. 

It was a lot of fun to prepare a pie and a lot of work but the end result was good and we had pie for breakfast today!