Nectarine Pie Is Good For You

This *is* a pie blog, so I'd better get cracking on the pie posts. Good thing I have a few up my sleeve before the Thanksgiving bonanza begins - because my days are swamped in papers, books, and applications, so the oven isn't firing up (though it's finally getting cold in Houston!) First in line is the last of the summery pies: the neglected, hearty nectarine. I've had plenty of peach pie in my life but never nectarine, and given these were on sale, I'd thought I'd try it. I don't know the technical difference between the two fruits, but as far as I'm concerned, it comes down to the skin alone. Peach=fuzzy, nectarine=smooth. For some reason nectarines run a little harder than your average peach, but they're golden and juicy and sweet, and they deliver in pie-form. I left the skins on, for a little extra fiber and, uh, vitamins?

It was popular with my fiction writing crowd, but my pies always are! I'm starting to think they're not very discriminating. Good thing they like to eat, though. It's the only thing that gets us through those slush readings, when we open hundreds of manila envelopes and read lots of bad, some mediocre, and a bit of good fiction. All sent by hopeful writers to our Gulf Coast.

The pic isn't the greatest, but it was a delicious, wholesome little pie. Very peach-esque. The fruit looks darker because of the brown sugar I added...

Recipe coming soon! It's from Ken Haedrich again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Made For Each Other: Strawberry Rhubarb

Image
This is a summertime classic, warm and gooey, with sour rhubarb to offset the sweet-but-predictable strawberry. It's a family favorite and definitely one of my pie staples. Plain old strawberry pie verges on saccharine, so you need the rhubarb to kick it up. You know how it is. The best couples usually have a sweet/sour factor going for them - good cop/bad cop, social butterfly/nerd, dreamer/breadwinner, Obama/Biden. Rhubarb is grown in huge quantities in the Northwest but it's hard to find in Texas. In fact, I bought a bunch at the grocery store here and the chec ker asked, "what is this? Is it some kind of red celery?" Gasp, no. It is heavenly. For this pie, I like to go fifty-fifty on the rhubarb to berry ratio, and I slice the strawberries only in half, so you get nice fat bites of them. One caveat: cook and sweeten the rhubarb before filling and baking . It's kind of a tough customer, though nothing a little heat and sugar can't fix. Strawberry-Rhu...
Read more

Home, Sweet Pie

Image
There's a reason I've been slow to post lately - I'm west of Seattle (yes, there is something west of Seattle), land of intermittent internet connections. The north Kitsap Peninsula contains trees, salmon, old loggers, new yuppies, rocky beaches, tons of berry bushes, my huge family, and hundreds of pie bakers. I come back here and I'm put in my place. Of course you make the crust from scratch. And my family will tell me if there's too much cinnamon or the filling is undercooked in the middle. They like my pies, don't get me wrong, but it's a far cry from the city kids I usually eat with. Turns out I'm a bit of city kid myself when I get back; the lazy days and long drive to the grocery store (well, to anything) throw me off at first. Then I adjust. I don't go online, I wander the seaweed-y beach, I tromp around for hours searching out berries ... I couldn't live like this all the time, but it's pretty good stuff for a couple weeks. Morgan an...
Read more