I’m perturbed right now. I wrote most of the following when I wasn’t so perturbed so expect brief injections of perturbation throughout.
Written 2 weeks ago or something:
I have a lot of whims. One of these whims was to go blueberry picking. Due to my limited number of friends (read: i have one) I forced the G to come along. I suppose it wasn’t really by force. I promised blueberry pie/muffin making for the benefit of hpj and jvj, as a means to my domestication of Gina ends.
We of course, pick a day involving severe thunderstorm warnings. Not the “watch”, WARNING. Oh well. So I went to pick up Gina and it started to rain. SWEET. As she got in the car, it started to pour. We considered purchasing blueberries at the store and lying to the aforementioned acronymed boys but decided to throw caution to the wind and drive out to to Reilly’s Summer Seat Farm and hope for clearing skies and sweet blueberry pickin’ weather. (The fact that I actually typed pickin’ there is making me cringe.) Well, we got there. We were the only ones there. We wandered around hoping that they might have pre-picked blueberries to buy since it was raining still. We couldn’t find the blueberries but started to take pictures in the green houses with the flowers. As I handed G a random potted plant to hold as I took her picture, we noticed a worker staring at us curiously. We scurried away embarrassed because we’re 14 and find amusement in taking pictures of ourselves.
Finally, another customer drove up and we found some more employees. We asked about the blueberries and to our surprise, he said we could go and pick them. Ahoy, glorious blueberry fields.
So we went and speed picked these lovely blueberries because we only had about 40 minutes before they closed.
We got a wee bit lost on the way home but made it back after stopping for some coffee and set out to make the pies.
I decided that I should look for a recipe in the many cookbooks that I’ve been acquiring but rarely use. I spliced together a couple of recipes and the following is what I came up with.
Fresh Blueberry Pie
A combination of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking from my Home to Yours and Great American Brand Name Baking(available for $1.49 on Amazon.
Thank you Tutu’s basement and 1991.)
For the innards:
For the streusel top:
Directions:
Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat to 425. (We baked two pies side by side and it worked great). Put the berries in a large bowl and gently stir in sugar, flour, salt and juice. Let sit for five minutes. Taste the filling and add more sugar if you’d like. (I added more because mine was a bit watery. Gina did not. Either way works). Sprinkle an even layer of the bread crumbs over the bottom of the pie shell. (Prevents the bottom from getting soggy). Pour the berry mixture into the crust.
In a small bowl, combine all of the streusel ingredients. Crumble it all together with your hands until you get the streuselesque consistency. Sprinkle generously on top of the berries, covering completely. Gina and I ended up making a third batch of this. We each used a batch and 1/2 on our pies.
Bake the pie for 30 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 375 and bake another 30 minutes or until the filling is bubbling through the topping. Our crust started to brown pretty quickly so I put loose aluminum foil dooms over the tops for about the last 15 minutes.
Take out your pie, let cool and serve.
It turned out AWESOMELY. My first success with pie. We were quite pleased with ourselves. The pie innards of each of ours looked completely different because mine had extra water. I added some more sugar and a little cornstarch to absorb that shit and all worked out well. Our pies looked glorious! Triumph.
Look at them:
That looks like a picture from a 1970s cookbook thanks to my overzealous editing.We high fived our success and set out to deliver them. Everyone was pleased. Everyone got to eat pie. Gina and I got to high five a whole bunch. All in all, a good, baking/cooking filled weekend. Oh, and there were many a gin and tonic to placate any problems.
