1. Today I defend my thesis. I'm excited and nervous, both. I'm trying to breathe deeply and resist the urge to overcaffeinate. 2. The most popular, most searched-out, most read post on this blog is my recipe for Raspberry Crumble Pie. Well, Ken Haedrich's recipe, which I faithfully transcribed. Second most read? Red huckleberry pie. Note to self: the unusual recipes make me stand out. Do I want to stand out? I don't know. But it makes me happy that strangers from Ireland, Belgium, Canada, and Australia have found my silly blog. 3. I just re-read Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt" and maintain it's one of the best novels ever. Read it, if you haven't! At least look it up. Fascinating story behind the story. 4. I am terrible at responding to phone calls, texts, emails, and facebook messages from my loved and neglected friends and family members. I am trying to rectify this. Just saying "I'm busy" is TRUE but somehow sounds flat.
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 hom
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
Comments