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!

Poetry Friday: A Pruning Poem

Image via Wikipedia

Happy Poetry Friday to you! A pruning poem for you all today. It is pruning season, or at least the tale end thereof. (We must celebrate something in the bleak end of winter after all)  Time for all overgrown trees to get haircuts and all shrubs to get trim jobs that will have them prancing around in high-style once the warm weather has them leafing and blossoming all over the place.

I have been working, little by little on pruning our very large and very neglected apple tree and hoping on one hand that spring comes soon to rescue me but on the other hand that it holds off long enough to let me finish all the snipping and clipping this old tree needs. If a tree is clipped once the sap has really begun to flow hard it can "bleed out" and pour sap from all its wounds and end up dying in the warming, early spring. As I work, racing spring I have been thinking out a poem about the whole thing. This morning I took a little stab at putting down the bits that have been rattling around in my mind as I traded clippers for saw and then saw again for clippers in the chill wind.

Pruning The Apple Tree
I am pruning the dear, ancient apple tree
That leans, reclining over the back hedge
Behind our new home: a tall, old colonial.
It might turn out to bear nothing at all but
Small, hard crab apples like bitter marbles
(For some reason the neighbor can't remember)
Then, I know, my husband will see no point
And archly suggest a chainsaw at the trunk.
I finger all the thickly twisted branchings
And tilt my head as I envision each of the
Diagnostic choices: this branch or that gone.
My glittering saw makes fragrant, smooth
Work of the chosen amputation and the wound
Yawns open, fresh and yellow in the cold.
I am glad the ice-wind is blowing stiffly,
From the north, the better to anesthetize
The patient who sits numbly through my surgery.   
I see signs of other years here on the boughs:
Roughly hacked, black stubs of once-limbs,
Places where the tree has grown a living mace
And one limb that has gone thickly into
The very flesh of its widely forked neighbor
I drop branch bits on the snow and wonder as I
Climb a broad trunk, my palms splayed open,
Against the icy bark if the tree will
Shake its head pinkly, rouse as fragrant cloud
And bear me saving fruit for pies or if it
Sleeps deeply, sunk into a peaceful reverie
Tiny, unborn marble-fruit held tight in every bud,
Knowing this is the last cold, drowsy winter
It will arch sagely over my back hedge.

Image via Wikipedia

I really do hope it turns out to be a grand, old standard apple of some kind, don't you? Even if it is a crab, I have half a mind to try to convince A to save it just so I can make glittering apple jelly every year. I do hate to lose a wise old tree like this. I wonder who planted it and when. Guessing the age of trees is a very tricky game although even I can tell ours is quite old. I'd have taken a picture for you but it's doing a cold drizzle outside and there's no real love for a camera in that kind of weather.

You can find more Poetry Friday entries at our host Sara's blog, Read Write Believe.

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!

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!

Picnicking in Earnest

It was one of those idyllic days with perfect weather. Just exactly perfect. 75 degrees, brilliantly sunny, poofs of clouds, blazing blue sky, light breeze, and as many happy children as you can possibly cram into one minivan. Its crazy at our house lately but, its that good kind of crazy that leaves you collapsing into a droopy, smiley puddle at the end of the day.

This is ideal, dreamy summer. We had a picnic lunch today with Penny, my good friend Nutmeg and also Painterly, another good chum and of course our grand tumble of children. Amazing experience really...the kind of thing that happens in books. There was a big pitcher of ice water, lots of fresh fruit, quilts on the grass, multiple hampers of goods, potato chips, chicken salad, fresh garden greens, goldfish in quantity and a bar of chocolate to share all around, not to mention plenty of babies to pass to any open lap.

All this sunshine has my brain desperately hung up on lemon. Somehow, even though they are ripe in winter and cheapest then and freshest then my mind craves the flavor right about now. To go along with the theme I have this song stuck in my head pretty much perpetually these days. Wish I could share Mason Jennings playing it with you but instead you get to hear this happy little ukulele dude cover it.

Dreaming of making a grand and floaty lemon meringue pie in July...and satiating myself by heading downstairs to mix up the dry portion of these for breakfast. I do so love muffins. And lemon poppyseed is my top, all-time favorite...I think. I also really love blueberry. I had lemon poppyseed muffins for the very first time, made from a really exciting Jiffy mix (mixes were verboten in our house) when I was a little girl by my very artistic and glamorous aunt with the corkscrew curls and the face splitting grin. She was an amazing aunt to have in your back pocket. She knew all kinds of fabulous people, collected black beach rocks, told breath-taking stories and loved chocolate intensely. I was somewhat adoring. And she made lemon poppyseed muffins for me and I was smitten and have loved them ever since.

And while we're on the lemon theme...what about this? Doesn't that look like fun? Can just imagine drizzling it over the fresh ravioli I'm going to make with herbs from my garden in July! Yay summer!

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.