Saturday, April 12, 2008

2 Pies


The first pie was a vegetable pie and it was kind of a miserable failure. Despite it's delicious looking ingredients:


It took FOREVER to cook (3 hours!) and came out dry and rather uninteresting - unlike our previous 4 attempts. Vegetable pies are a great alternative to soup when you have a lot of vegetables that you purchased with the best intentions but now need to be eaten-up-or-else. I unfortunately neglected to put the recipes in this blog, but I assure you they are hearty, yummy and last for several days (nice for breakfast, lunch or dinner). I'll post a recipe up here soon.

The second pie pictured was a Delicious Strawberry Pie. I had over zealously purchased 3 punnets of strawberries and only managed to eat one in a timely manner. I started by chopping up all the strawberries into 3rds or halves, whatever their shape warranted. I took some of them, along with some frozen raspberries that we had hanging around the freezer and pureed the lot in a blender and then heated the resulting puree, adding sugar and butter (not a large amount of sugar because I think pies are supposed to showcase the deliciousness of the fruit, not the sweetness of sugar). The un pureed strawberries went in a bowl to marinade with some more sugar for a bit. Ryan made his signature crust and the puree + chopped strawberries went in the crust, he finished by making the delicate lattice work you see above. Then it went in the oven and, following that, we ate it.

1 comment:

La Nina said...

mmm, strawberry pie. Rhubarb is just coming into season here in NY and I know a woman who has more than she knows what to do with, hence, I'll be making rhubarb pies by the dozen before long. I second your conviction that pies should taste like their fillings and not like sugar. I've tasted more than a few tragic pies in which perfectly good berries or crusts were squandered because the baker did not have a sufficiently subtle sense of sweetening.