New ‘Books of Pies’ is filled with blue-ribbon dessert recipes

I’m a road-tripper.

I love meandering, traveling byways instead of highways and always braking for food finds.

I love diners — the more shine and neon, the better — and country cafés and roadside smokers.

Some of my best travel memories revolve around picking wild blueberries in Maine, or taking the perfect bite of melting peach ice cream over hot peach cobbler in Georgia. I remember my first taste of gooey butter cake in the shadow of the St. Louis arch, and burning my tongue gladly on flash-fried fish dockside on Florida’s Suwanee.

The Norske Nook is just that kind of place: a homespun café with Scandinavian roots founded in the small town of Osseo, Wisconsin, in 1973. It went on my travel wish list a few years ago, when it started winning blue ribbons at the National Pie Contest in Orlando, Florida.

So when “The Norske Nook Book of Pies and Other Recipes” by Jerry Bechard and Cindee Borton-Parker crossed my desk, I was more than ready to pull out my rolling pin.

This is for those who love pies — Dutch and praline-topped, double-crust, candy, berry, cream cheese, sour cream, meringue, single-crust, stirred pudding, frozen and sugar-free — though there are also chapters on cheesecakes, tortes, muffins, cookies and Scandinavian specialties.

If I have a nit, it is that the recipes are all tailored to 11-inch pie plates, and most of us don’t have that size. Of course that means you’ll have enough filling to make a tart or two.

— Linda Cicero, Miami Herald