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!

A Fabulous Wind Up

Had a great end to the week today. Visited with Nutmeg, took a delivery of grassfed beef for our second freezer from a local farmer, picked out paint for my new trash table project, made another apple cake, did some picking up around the house, ran the laundry and generally kicked some patootie.

This latest apple cake is a strange animal. A really yummy strange animal, but an odd one nonetheless. Its not really a cake. Its maybe a pastry? Coffee cake? Pudding? Not sure exactly, but as it isn't a cake it isn't gonna be able to take the prize. Its still not what I was looking for although as noted, its good.

 It has a shortbready crust, a lot of sliced apples piled in the center and then a thickening dairy laden sweet batterish thing poured on top and then a streusal over the whole thing. Oh....and you bake it in a springform pan, and it requires a genuine European pudding mix to make it just the right way. The fabulous things you find yourself mixing up and tasting when you let your brother-in-law sail away to Europe and bring back an extremely lovely woman as a wife. Thanks Gigi! Its really yum!

I also am finally ready for the full reveal on the living room paint job. See? Raspberry...not Barbie. I told you. Whew!

I think its good although the mirror needs a frame and needs to be raised and I'm nervous about the balance and arrangement of all the "stuff" I have in here to decorate. I am never sure if I'm arranging correctly or if I'm over-cluttering which is my tendency for sure.

And look at the new valance I put up in the kitchen? Isn't that winning? I love it. Now I'm just dreaming of a narrow little glass shelf mounted halfway up the window to put houseplants on.

And one more treasure, witness this intricate mother-of-pearl crucifix I found in the cellar! And also this beautiful antique malted milk bottle found in the same treasure hunting spot. Gotta love old houses. I cannot even tell you how cool I think it is to find these little hints of the past that were left here. Major bonus.

Oh....and one more thing. You should all go check out my wonderful friend Sam's website. Sam is a cartoonist (for real, that's his real job) and he lives in Vermont and he's an old school friend of mine from my theatre days. Does he get cooler? Perhaps, he's only in his 20's. Isn't life grand? Anyhow...his website where he recently featured my family in one of his cartoons can be found here. Stop by, check his stuff out and tell him I sent you. He's a good man, is Sam.

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!