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!

We Be Jammin'!

We picked strawberries this past weekend at our local u-pick strawberry farm. Such a highlight of the year! I always make enough strawberry freezer jam to last us all winter and pretty much every time we get out a new jar we have a conversation about how good the jam is and how when it is June, we'll go pick more together. I am part squirrel, I swear, there's a manic little rodent thing in my soul that is mad for storing away goods. I love to pick and dry and can and freeze and all the other things one can do to fruits and nuts and berries and mushrooms. One of the hardest things about our annual strawberry pick for me is stopping. There are so many berries and I could pick for hours...days maybe, I've never tested my resolve.

When I was a little girl, I always rallied all my younger sisters (all four of them) and marched them down the road with baskets in hand to the top of a meadow on a two-track where wild strawberries grew. We'd pick every last wild strawberry we could find, and then I'd come home with my greedy little hoard of tiny berries and I'd make wild berry jam. My siblings were incredibly tolerant of my driving really, that's love. I hope I didn't injure any of their psyches too deeply, I still think gratefully about their faithful support of my obsession every year when we go picking big, abundant domestic berries.

It was important to the little girl me to be out there in the field on my hands and knees every summer, with all my sisters around me, rolling those tiny red bits into our baskets. I looked forward to it every year, it made me feel frugal and special and I felt really loved by my little sisters for their dedicated picking, even though it wasn't their personal dream. I don't think I could have made wild strawberry jam by myself, but many hands made light enough work that we could pull it off. And I felt like I had rubies in my pantry after I'd jarred up a glittering jar or two, all full of our tiny, hard earned prizes.

 Delicious, and mommy-friendly level of work recipe for the strawberry pie I made with the "leftovers," can be found right here!

I was lucky to marry a man who loves fresh fruit and u-picking almost as much as I do. He's absorbed my foraging love and eats my canned goods with gusto. (I love you A!) He marks strawberry season and cherry season and peach picking in his calendar and makes sure that we schedule each picking event. And my little boys have now the joined the team, energetic pickers, even little Nib plucking berries and saying smilingly "Hep! Hep!" ( Baby-speak for "I help, Mommy!") And my squirrel-mommy heart swells. Such a good life.

Apple Picking

We had a great little excursion to pick apples at Blue Jay Orchards and finished the fun with a warm box of apple cider donuts, rolled in cinnamon sugar. Autumn joy abounds.

Blue sky, red fruit, green leaves....beautiful.

I love the bounty of fruit rolling around under your feet, everywhere you step.

Snow White apple all shined up and glowing

I love that Dee puts little bits of flora that he finds behind his ears.

Witness...

Nib, riding in the baby pack during picking...

Ooo....new ones!

And yeah...you can see where Dee is getting the idea. Hee hee.

Apple cider donuts are so very, very good.

...lick your fingers off good.

Smiley babe, blazing blue sky.

And now there are bags of apples in the basement, rows of apples on the fruit table and apples in our minds and their dusky taste embedded in our mouths. Tasting every variety several times all the way through a mixed orchard will do that to you.

We are dreaming of warm pies ala mode, and apple dumplings, oozing buttery cinnamon...and I hoping this weekend to take my first crack at the bags of fruit and make something truly delicious...another apple cake could be squoze in too.

I leave you with this beautiful poem on the subject, which makes me want to be in my Mama's kitchen with sisters at my elbows.

Apple Season

by Joyce Sutphen

The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples,
big yellow pie apples, light in the hand,
their skins freckled, the stems knobby
and thick with bark, as if the tree
could not bear to let the apple go.
Baskets of apples circle the back door,
fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.

My mother and my grandmother are
running the apple brigade. My mother,
always better with machines, is standing
at the apple peeler; my grandmother,
more at home with a paring knife,
faces her across the breadboard.
My mother takes an apple in her hand,

She pushes it neatly onto the sharp
prong and turns the handle that turns
the apple that swivels the blade pressed
tight against the apple's side and peels
the skin away in long curling strips that
twist and fall to a bucket on the floor.
The apples, coming off the peeler,

Are winding staircases, little accordions,
slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until
my grandmother's paring knife goes slicing
through the rings and they become apple
pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon
they will be married to butter and live with
cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after.

Packing Jars and Suitcases

I don't exactly recommend canning peaches and making a pie right before hurriedly packing your bags, on the day you're planning to leave for the weekend....but, then, there are certain things in life that we just do. I really feel like I must have homemade canned peaches in the midst of winter and as the rest of the month of August we'll either be hosting company or frantically packing and unpacking at our new house....it was now or never. So, we picked and they ripened and then of course they ripened slowly enough that they weren't ready until the day we were leaving for a weekend at the Jersey Shore. Urgh. What can't be cured must be endured, Ma Ingalls always said and truly, there's a fact. So, we canned and I made a pie and then we packed our heads off.....

Peeling blanched and scored peaches

Empty jars, waiting to be packed...

This is what Nib did to help.

And the big boys, packed jars for me.

The nice thing about being two is that nobody cares if you can peaches in your underwear.

Mmmm.....the "fruits of our labors"

And then I ran out of jars and there were leftovers that had to be used up....

So we put a  peach pie in the freezer for when we came home again.

The Shore was really lovely but, it was great to come home too. Back to our rows of shining jars and that freezer pie all ready for us. Such yummy proof of effort!

Peach Love

 We're off and running on a very busy week. Lots going on. Company for dinner, apricot jam to make, packing prep to do (ah, the ever-present), visitors to get ready for, friends to visit, a Bible study to lead (yipes!) and heaven knows what quantities of laundry. 

In amidst all of the business we keep stopping to eat another peach. We've been peach picking, see and all of three lugs of peaches are spread out in our kitchen, ripening slowly on our counter-top. We're waiting for that sensitive point when more peaches will be ripe than green or mushy brown. Its a special balancing act and to avoid the brown ones you have to eat a few as you go, lest they over ripen in the meantime, see? Such a delicious business. I do like peaches. They're my Papa's favorite and I sure think of him every single time I rub a velvet fruit between my cupped hands and then eat it leaning over the sink to drip the sunset juice down the drain. 

Next stop, peach canning!

The Garden

by Shel Silverstein

Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond,
Grew hisself a garden the likes of none.
Sprouts all growin', comin' up glowin',
Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun.
Colors of the rainbow,
See the sun and rain grow
Sapphires and rubies on ivory vines,
Grapes of jade, just
Ripenin' in the shade, just
Ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine.
Pure gold corn there,
Blowin' in the warm air,
Ol' crow nibblin' on the amethyst seeds.
In between the diamonds, ol' man Simon
Crawls about pullin' platinum weeds.
Pink pearl berries,
All you can carry,
Put 'em in a bushel and
Haul 'em into town.
Up in the tree there's
Opal nuts and gold pears –
Hurry quick, grab a stick
And shake some down.
Take a silver tater,
Emerald tomater,
Fresh plump coral melons,
Hangin' in reach.
Ol' man Simon,
Diggin' in his diamonds,
Stops and rests and dreams about
One... real... peach.