Summer Fruit Parade

I have so many pies under my belt - um, literally and figuratively - from this past month I hardly know where to start. My hometown had a salmon bake that featured 100 homemade fruit pies, slices plopped into little paper boats and crowded onto plastic tables. I made a mixed berry they didn't even use, they had so many. After sampling several I'm pretty proud of my own pie. Well, my crust. The whole crust-is-key thing was confirmed. Thick and brittle? No. Blanched by shortening? Better but also bad. That's not to say I had crust success all the time. I overconfidently skimped on water and ended up with barely roll-able crumbly messes. I had to patch like crazy. My OCD cousin had a conniption as one crust broke into a gajillion pieces on folding.

Still, I didn't care very much about appearances. Of baked goods or my own self. It's not that I'm a fashionista - ha! - but I wear eyeliner every day and fuss over the amount of space between jeans and waistline. At home, I don't. Maybe that's just because I'm allowed to relax there - if my "real life" went down in the NW, I suppose all my neuroses would come along, too. But somehow I feel more insulated up there. Now it's back to muggy Houston and the countdown a packed semester. It's mostly good to be back on my own turf, but I miss my baking cohorts and commentators. Aforementioned cousin, who makes perfect lattice and doesn't bat an eye at endless huckleberry picking - opinionated, gregarious aunts who have their own crust secrets and could not stop teasing me about the Blog ("this is a blog pie! ah ha ha!") - my mom, who will NOT eat a slice of pie without vanilla ice cream, etc. Even my little niece, Tyler, got in on the action. Left to her own devices she overdosed hardcore on the flour, dumping huge piles of it on the counter, but hey. Everybody starts somewhere. Here we are posing for Hallmark.

And here I am covered in burrs feeling very serious about my berry count. Sexy, no? The berries, I mean. The berries.
Soon I'll do a couple showdown posts in honor of the SYTYCD finale and the Olympics (I admit I'm a little excited about the gymnastics. How predictable, right?) First up: key lime vs. lemon chess. After that, the battle of the crumb topped pies. And right freaking now, no more excuses, it's me vs. my evolving draft. Probably shouldn't put it in terms of combat. It's me vs. my own procrastination! Go team.