Needed a coconut pie, needed a fix
/When traveling, I much prefer to rent an apartment or house rather than stay in a hotel. Often, it's less expensive, and you get a kitchen. What's fun too is that because it's not your own kitchen with your usual suspect accoutrements, you frequently must experiment with creative fixes for missing utensils, pots, special pans, and so forth. We are at my brother- and sister-in-law's beach house in N.C. which is beautiful and extremely well-appointed. Most people don't, however, make pies during a quick week at the beach and so in most cases, there isn't a pie plate just waiting at the ready. But, most people are not moi, and I simply had to make a coconut cream pie today (mine recently won a Community Pick on Food52, btw, and was professionally photographed in stunning fashion; yee-ha!).
There also wasn't a rolling pin or waxed paper but not to worry! Observe!
Instead of a 9" pie plate, I turned a pyrex dish into a slightly rectangular shape of roughly the same size, using a foil bumper to prop up the fourth side. I made the bumper from the foil sheets between which I'd rolled out the crust (I usually use waxed paper). You might spray the foil lightly with Pam or the like. And speaking of rolling out, a heavy, not-yet-empty can worked wonders. Instead of pie weights (because a coconut pie requires a pre-baked pie shell), I placed an oven-proof pan stop some foil. Everything worked beautifully.
And now I'm off to spread the chilled pastry cream into this golden shell!