Retirement - Day 24: When life hands you limes, make Key Lime Pie!

True lemons don't grow in Costa Rica. Here, we have several varieties of limes. They grow everywhere. In fact, we have a few trees planted, but they aren't producing yet.

Fortunately for us, friends have been delivering bags of limes to us on a weekly basis. We have far too many limes for two people to consume. I mean really, how many lime cokes can one person drink? How about limeade? Then, there is lime in the salad dressing, or fresh squeezed on chicharrónes (fried pork) and chorizo sausage. The only thing we hadn't made with the limes, was a Key Lime Pie. That changed today!

Graham crackers are not found in Costa Rica, let alone a Graham cracker pie shell. The pie shell can probably be found in one of the high-end super market that caters to expats with expensive imported foodstuff. The lack of Graham crackers was not going to deter me from making us a Key Lime pie.

I remember years ago, my sons' grandmother used to make a crust with Galletas Maria. The Galleta Maria is a very popular sweet vanilla cookie with the crispness of a cracker. You can find it everywhere in Costa Rica, so I decided this would be my substitute for the Rev. Sylvester Graham's cracker. I crushed the galletas until I had about 1½ cups of fine crumbs. I then mixed this with ¼ cup of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon and ¾ of a stick of butter, melted.

Now comes the hard part. I still don't have an oven! I pressed the crumbs into a foil pie shell and then baked it for 15 minutes @ 280°F. in my electric skillet. While the pie crust was baking, I mixed all the ingredients for pie filling, using our favorite Key Lime Pie recipe. I poured the filling into the pie shell and put it back in the electric skillet for 10 more minutes, until it was firmly set.

Once the pie had cooled, I needed a topping. Since I didn't have any whipping cream, I made a simple topping from fresh natilla (sour cream) a little sugar and lime zest. Yum!