Golden, Garden Days

This is life at our house lately.

 We're planting and weeding and raking and planting and trimming and watering and planting. The highbush blueberries are in, the lily bulbs are in, the ornamental shrubs arrived this evening and our planters by the doors are full of pansies and daffodils and grape hyacinth, all starting to bloom beautifully.

 It's dirty fingernails from here on our for the whole gang! Nothing for it but to jump in with both feet and a trowel. Lots of gardening to do before the third trimester finishes up as we take our leisure on the lawn with Baby lolling about on a blanket.

Pie Secrets

 Just making and eating pie again, as is my usual custom this time of year. It seems like pie would be a great thing to make in winter when it is cold (and it is, if you freeze or can some of the summer fruit!) but I seem to mostly make it in warm weather when the bushes and trees are dripping with fruit and all hands are stained with juice. I love pie. Passionately. You can keep your cake...I'll stick with pie.

 I was busily making pies this week and then eating pies and think to myself about a small correction or two that I owe the pie making section of my blog audience. A while back I shared my favorite pie making cookbook and typed up the recipe I always use for blueberry pie.

 Well, a good friend used that recipe to make a pie and was much disgruntled to find that it sank down a very slumped in, and pale version of itself and came marching back to me to ask exactly why her pie didn't look anything like mine even though she'd used my recipe.

 I am my mother's daughter. I use recipes but I am also not afraid to experiment, and sometimes do so without my conscious or deliberate thought, even habitually. Can you believe that of me?

The hitch with my pie making is that I discovered in my newlywed pie making days that any standard recipe seems to yield those sort of sunken results and so requires tweaking. I follow the recipe's suggestions for sugar and thickening agent (usually cornstarch) but I pour in far more fruit than anyone would advise. They say, for instance, to add 3 1/2 cups of blueberries? I put in 6-8 cups. Pies should be teeteringly piled with fruit, so much so that the crust is required to hold it all in, because during the baking everything will shrink and compact and a bit of evaporation will occur. Always add more fruit. Add as much fruit as you can practically manage to squeeze in. Truly.

Another thing I always change in my pie recipes is the amount of water in the crust. Invariably recipes suggest far too little water for me to be able to get it to work. I just add water in tiny amounts...say a tablespoon or two at a time until I am able to get a dough to form. It is easy to go to far so go slow, and try to stir briskly and minimally in order to avoid making your dough tough, but I often end up adding as much as a half a cup of water. I just keep dribbling it in until the dough behaves.

So, there are my secret pie confessions....go forth and make pastry!

Muffin Love

I love muffins. I am not sure why they are such comfort food for me but they are. I know everything will be alright if I have a muffin. They can be sweet or savory, pretty much any flavor, homemade or bakery purchased, there's just something cozy and reassuring about them to me. I also love making muffins. Blueberry (wild if possible please!) and lemon poppyseed are my two deep favorites.

A thinks muffins are silly. A bizzare idea, little psuedo-cakes wrapped in annoying paper that you eat at breakfast and call appropriate. Such a waste of calories.

And yet I persist. Never one for rampant sensibility, I am not to be daunted by such views.(Doesn't this recipe look amazing?) Nothing makes me feel more surely that all is well with the world than a sizable pat of butter melting into the open halves of a warm muffin.

Dee has recently started telling me how much he loves muffins and begun not only asking for them to eat but me to make them for him from scratch. Makes a muffin loving mommy's heart bubble right over. Last night A took Ru for a Big Boys Only Outing to the local skateboard park and left me with the smallest littles. I asked Dee what he thought we should do while they were gone and his answer was, "Make muffins mommy!!!! Blueberry muffins, because those are my favorite!" And so I promptly kissed him.

Related articles

• Breakfast Muffins: The Classic and the Unusual (blogher.com)
• Muffins! (bigideaslittleblog.wordpress.com)

Old Fashioned Pie

I made a blueberry pie recently, after we got home with a lug full of fresh berries from our u-pick excursion. Yum! And then I froze it because we had ice cream we were trying to eat up and we were also about to take off for parts further West to visit family.

Now that we're back home and then fierce heat has abated for a day to drench us with torrential showers, I decided it was time to QUICK bake that pie! It is browning in the oven as we speak and starting to smell as delicious as only homemade pastry can. I am a pie addict. Is it showing?

Someone asked, after I posted about my pie making before I put it in the chill to keep while we traveled, if I would be kind enough to post my blueberry pie recipe. And I will!

While I'm at it folks, I have a source you all need to know about. I made pies from all sorts of places: family recipes, Joy of Cooking, magazine clippings and all kinds of baking and dessert cookbooks, hoping to find just the right pie recipe with various varieties of fruit. And then one day I was browsing my way through a little family owned shop that sold farm fresh, local milk and butter and I happened on a little bookshelf with cookbooks for sale...and in the mix was a liberal sprinkling of these funny almost pamphlety little old fashioned recipe books, obviously newly printed but of clearly ancient sourcing by a company called Bear Wallow Books. I bought the one on pies. Today, I'm sharing with you their pie dough recipe (which I always use now) and the recipe for blueberry pie but, there's gobs more in the book. I love it because every single pie I make from the little booklet turns out beautifully and also because any kind of pie I want to make, they've got: strawberry rhubarb, sweet potato, elderberry, gooseberry, grape...etc. etc. None of the stand-by favorites has been forgotten. These are the pies of our grandmothers made from berry and fruit gathered in the orchard or the roadside ditch. I sure am thrilled that I found this obscure little company and hoping that I never, ever lose my pie book because its gold and I've never seen them anywhere else!

Go check out Bear Wallow Books and see the other enticing options that they sell, or snap up your own pie book.

Now that the pie is out of the oven, I'll give you a peek at its rich, golden brown finish and then leave you with directions to replicate this fabulous blueberry smell in your own house.

Blueberry Pie

1 9 inch pie shell (I used two as I like a double crust for blueberry)
3 1/2 cups of fresh blueberries
1 cup of sugar
1 T lemon juice
2 T cornstarch
1 T butter
Dash of nutmeg
Dash of cinnamon

In a mixing bowl combine berries, sugar, lemon juice and cornstarch. Toss the berries lightly to coat and let stand 20 minutes. Pour into pie shell. Dot with butter and sprinkle with dash of nutmeg and cinnamon (and then if you're me, cover with the top crust, and crimp the edge to seal). Bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, reduce to 325 and bake for 30 minutes longer.


 Basic Flour Pie Crust

2 cups of flour
3/4 t of salt
1/2 c of shortening (I use lard or butter)
1/3 c of cold water

Sift flour and salt into mixing bowl. Cut in shortening with pastry blender or two knives scissors style. Shape dough into two balls (and here I chill the dough for about 20-30 minutes too). Roll out to size and place in pie pan.


Happy baking!

Pie and Company

FINALLY....made that blueberry pie this morning. And since, we also have blueberry cheesecake ice-cream to use up I put this in the freezer to pull out and bake later on a cool day when we're running low on sweets.

I love pie. Did I ever tell you that? *sigh* I really love pie.

And look who we collected today! We have cousins! In-house. A's brother Miq (of previously featured video fame) is off in Iraq and although we aren't going to be able to have him visit with us we have his sweet short girls and his wife, Penny. (much joy! yay!)

              I think they'll fit right in. Two minutes in the door and we're already effortlessly manifesting idyllic scenes like this.