An Eye For Pies

Proverbs 23:21 KJV - For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.

I have to tell you my weakness.  Sweets.  I've never met a dessert that I didn't like.  I don't even know how to rank my favorites.  Do you have a favorite dessert?  Might you be a confectionary confederate?  As I ponder that deep philosophical question of what dessert is my favorite I would have to say homemade pies.  There is just something about a homemade pie!  Now, I would never look down my nose at a store-bought pie, but goodness gracious, a pie made from scratch with a nice meringue sends shivers down my spine.

On Sunday afternoon right after lunch, when we've pushed the dinner plates aside and set the coffee to brewing, that's the best time to cut open a homemade pie.  Tricia had told us that she was working in the kitchen on Saturday whipping up a Chocolate Pie with a meringue and homemade crust.  It had been chilling in the ice box overnight.  With the the after-church meal complete, our anticipation level was red-lined, we waited with all the patience we could muster as the pie was served and brought to the table.  Would you just look at this thing it all its glory?

We savored each bite and, I'm not the slightest bit embarrassed to tell you, we licked our plates clean.  Like animals, savages even.  Let's keep that information between just you and me, shall we?  We wouldn't do that in front of company.  We're not that uncouth.

Well, you can about imagine my excitement Saturday night, when Tricia notified the pie guys (Benjamin and me) that homemade pie was on the menu for the Sunday after church dinner.  This time, she was pulling out all the stops, for it was homemade Coconut Cream Pie on the menu.  Good golly, Miss Molly.

We generally like to talk around the table, planning the week ahead, talking of events of the last week.  We keep a list of conversation starter questions that we ask of each other.  There wasn't a lot of conversation during dessert time as we primarily just ate pie.

As I pontificate on pies, it reminds me of something.  When I was growing up, we would travel to a place in LeCompte, Louisiana called Lea's Lunchroom.  We'd eat ham with collard greens and butter beans and cornbread.  His specialty was homemade pies.  Who knows?  Maybe that started my affinity for pies.  Mr. Lea, who resembled Colonel Sanders, would walk around and greet all the patrons of his restaurant.  He was a southern gentleman.  He'd walk up to the table and shake my hand and say, "Boy, yo momma and daddy brought you to Sunday School today?"  I'd answer, "Yessir."

As I was writing this, I had the recollection that he was on the Johnny Carson show.  Wouldn't you know I found it on Youtube!  Enjoy the clip by pressing the button below.  (Then go enjoy a slice of homemade pie!)

Dewberries By the Fenceline

 

A week ago I showed you some photos of our thornless blackberries.  They are blooming like there's no tomorrow and there are tiny unripe berries all over the bushes.  It will be a couple weeks, I imagine, before they are ripe.  Russ took a few cuttings off of them and has them successfully rooted.  He is going to start a berry patch at his house.  That gives me an idea to do the same at our place.  It would spread the patch and give us more yield.

While we are waiting for them to ripen, we have other berries to choose from that God has propagated along the fencelines and ditches.  Dewberries.  They are similar to blackberries, except they ripen a little earlier, run along the ground instead of bushes/canes, and they are plumper and sweeter.  I stumbled across a patch of dewberries on Saturday.  What I didn't eat right off the vine, I picked and brought inside.  Tricia skimmed some heavy cream off of Clarabelle's milk and mixed the fresh-picked berries with the cream.  What a treat!

Dewberries and blackberries remind me of my great-grandmother.  I remember she would make homemade blackberry pie with a sweet-dough crust.  She made a sweet white sauce that she would ladle on top of the pie.  Good golly!  I miss her.  She made a mean pie.  I think we could solve most of the world's problems over a slice of homemade pie and a good cup of coffee.

Thornless Blackberry Harvest is Underway

A couple years ago we planted two thornless blackberry bushes.  They were cultivars called Arapaho and were developed by the University of Arkansas.  Every blackberry bush I've ever been associated grew wild along fence rows and had thorns.  These are different - we planted them in the yard and they have absolutely no thorns.  Last year they produced a few, fat, juicy berries.  This year they have put out new canes and have gotten larger.  The berries are also numerous.  Each day we pick them to try to stay ahead of the birds who have also discovered them.

One of the two bushes, loaded with berries

First, they turn red and then black.

The berries are big and juicy.  We'll normally eat one while picking.  It is sweet and juicy and warm from the summer sun.

I hope we are able to keep it growing so that it gets bigger and spreads out.

We've just started to pick, but we'll bring them inside and wash them and then place them on a tray in the freezer.  When adequately frozen, we use a spatula to remove them from the tray and put them into zip loc bags, the gallon size.  They are individually frozen so they are easy to measure out to make pies or cobblers.

It is hard to beat a homemade blackberry pie and a cup of coffee!

I Am A Pie Guy

I leave the house each morning about 5:30 am and drive approximately 42 minutes to work.  While driving, I enjoy a thermos of coffee, sweetened slightly by a half teaspoon of local honey with pour of heavy cream from our cows.  I was about 20 minutes into my trip and had finished about half of the coffee.  I reached over and took a sip of coffee, but something was odd.  There was something solid in my mouth.  Coffee is supposed to be liquid.  I spit the solid substance into my hand and turned on the light.  It looked like a raisin.  Who put a raisin in my coffee? 

Wait a minute!  That's not a raisin.  It's a FLY!!!  I spit it out and sat there driving.  Should I pour the rest of the coffee out?  The coffee that has been marinating in fly juice?  Nah, I just finished it and tried real hard not to think about it.  It took every bit of concentration I could muster.  Let's think about more pleasant thoughts, shall we?

Since the land has been purchased across the road and plowed, our dewberry patch is gone.  We found some growing in the back and picked three quarts, and that's not bad.  It's just not the 3 gallons we used to pick.  Our thornless blackberries are growing nicely, but with two bushes, we primarily pick them just to eat one by one. 

One evening a friend dropped by with a bucket of berries he had picked from his blackberry patch and wanted to give them to us!  What a blessing!!  Big, plump, sweet blackberries...

You'll never see my turn down dessert.  I have a sweet tooth, so I like all types of sweets.  I think my favorite, though, is homemade pie.  Coconut cream with a tall meringue, pecan, apple, peach, chocolate.  I've not found a pie that I didn't like, although I heard in England they serve a kidney pie.  I don't think that sounds good.

Anyway, Tricia decided to make a blackberry pie with our bucket of berries.  She made up a homemade crust, added flour, berries, and butter...

It wasn't long before it was ready to come out of the oven.

I attempted and failed to get a slice of pie without it falling apart. 

A slice of homemade pie and a cup of coffee (minus the fly).  One of life's simple pleasures.

Processing Homegrown Pumpkins

Pumpkins can be seen all over the place right now being used as a fall decorations, placed beside doorways, on hay bales, and on tables as a centerpiece.  Although they look nice, the best thing about pumpkins is eating them.  We grew some New England Sugar Pie pumpkins and and, as their name suggests, they are made for eating.  These aren't the big jack o'lantern type pumpkins.  These are smaller pumpkins than those.

Here are a batch of seven of them that are ready for processing.  We'll go through this process pretty quickly, because it is a simple job, but it is important to know how to process them, because if you grow them, you'll want to make some pies. Processing pumpkins readies them for pie making.  Let's do this.

Seven New England Sugar Pie Pumpkins

Get a sharp knife and cut the top off and then cut them in half.

Use a spoon to scoop out all of the seeds from the interior of the pumpkin.  Be sure to save all the seeds!

Scooping out all of the seeds

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and lined the cut up pumpkin, skin side down, in a baking pan and cooked the pumpkin for about 45 minutes or until tender.

Into the oven!

Once you remove the pumpkin from the oven, I used a sharp knife to remove the skins, just leaving the pumpkin flesh.

Removing the skins

Load the pieces of pumpkin with the skins removed into food processor.

I hit the puree button and let the blade chop it all up, checking it a few times until all of the pieces were uniformly pureed.

Here is what the beautiful pumpkin puree looks like.  This is the main ingredient of some delicious pumpkin pies and empanadas. 

Pumpkin Puree

The pumpkin pies that Tricia makes call for 2 cups of pumpkin, so I store 2 cups of pumpkin puree in each quart-sized freezer bag.

We'll squeeze out all the air out of the freezer bags and flatten out the bags.  Then we will stack them in the freezer.  Flattened out like that, they don't take up much space at all.

Two future pumpkin pies

Soon we'll be experiencing colder weather and will have a roaring fire in the fireplace.  A nice pumpkin pie will be baking in the oven, filling the house with the aroma of the season.  I can't wait!

Dewberries - Enjoying berries you don't have to plant!

About ten years ago, I was browsing through the garden department in one of the large stores - either Home Depot or Lowe's and ran across some raspberry canes for sale.  I remember thinking how cool it would be to plant and harvest our own raspberries.  I never see them growing around here and sort of see them as an 'exotic' berry.  I picked up a raspberry cane package and brought it to the checkout, envisioning eating fresh raspberries on top of homemade vanilla ice cream.

I planted the raspberry cane according to the directions and watched in despair as the plant made a feeble attempt at growing in our harsh summer before finally calling it quits and withered away.  So much for my raspberry adventure.  I have since learned that raspberries are just not well adapted to our conditions here in South Louisiana.  It made me think: There are enough hassles, why try to force things that aren't going to work?  Like the candy positioned strategically around the checkout counter, I made a impulse purchase based on emotion with the raspberry purchase.  I learned to research first and plant varieties that are known to grow in our climate and zone.  But even better yet, I learned to not plant things that grow for free in the wild!

I'm talking about dewberries.  We have dewberries that grow wild in the overgrown field across from our home.  Dewberries ripen a little earlier than blackberries and they run along the ground and on top of other weeds that grow.  They have a reddish-colored cane or vine that grows with a gazillion pointy spines.  It is a difficult operation to pick dewberries without getting scratched up.  No pain, no gain, though.  We pick them each year at this time and the best part is, we don't have to do anything. No planting, watering, pruning, fertilizing...  They just appear every year, begging us to pick them. We oblige.

Dewberries, to me, are bigger, juicier and sweeter than their cousin, the blackberry, but I wouldn't turn down blackberries, for sure.  You can see how plump this dewberry is:

Juicy Dewberry

All the rain we've experienced in April has put a dent in the amount of time we've had to get out there and pick, so we're a little late and have missed a lot of the crop. We'll still get enough for our use. Fortunately, we still have a gallon or so frozen from last year's crop, along with a good number of jars of seedless dewberry jelly put up in the pantry.  Here is Benjamin reaching in to pick a dewberry or two:

Picking dewberries

Here's a view of what he's trying to grab, without getting all scratched up:

Success!!  For every berry that goes in the bucket, two or three get eaten.  By the time we get back to the house, our fingers are stained purple!

Plump berries!

We just stayed out for a brief time but were able to pick a nice bucketful that we placed in a colander in the vegetable sink and filled with water.  Once the sink filled with water, you start seeing lots of little critters float to the surface - worms, stink bugs, tiny beetles - all things that you don't want to be eating along with your dewberries.  We scoop them all out along with twigs, branches and other trash.

Cleaning the berries

We freeze the cleaned berries spread out on trays.  Once frozen, we scoop them up with a spatula and put in gallon sized freezer bags.  That way they stay individually frozen and are easy to pull out and measure for making things like ---  Homemade Pies!!

This is a nice one that just came out of the oven.  We call it The Black and Blue Pie because it is made with both Dewberries (which are black) and Blueberries.  It is jam-packed with flavor that was harvested right out the front door (dewberries) and right out the back door (blueberries).

Black & Blue Pie

I had a nice slice of pie after supper last night.  We did plant the blueberry bushes, but the dewberries are one of those things that just occur naturally, and I'm thankful for that.

A little slice of happiness

Here is a side view where you can evidence the fact that this pie is loaded with berries!

Even though my raspberry experiment didn't work out as planned, the dewberries that naturally spring up each year across the ditch helped me to see that sometimes the easy way is the best way. Sometimes the best things in life are free!

Dewberry Pie for Dessert

Life is Good!

When I came in from work this afternoon, I noticed a sight that made me salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs.  Friends, a rolling pin coupled with a rounded glob of dough is a happy sight that should warm the cockles of your heart.  An angry woman with a rolling pin, on the other hand, is a completely different story.

Good things to come...

Tricia was out milking Rosie, so I began to look around the kitchen for clues as to the identity of the mystery pastry.  Aha! Dewberries defrosting...


Dewberry Pie tonight

So Tricia adds a little sugar, flour and cinnamon to the bowl of dewberries. 

Mixing in the flour, sugar and cinnamon to the berries

She puts the homemade pie crust in the pie plate.  The secret ingredient in this crust is a whole stick of Daisy butter.  Gonna be goood.


A good lookin' crust

After pouring the dewberries and a tablespoon or so of lemon juice in the pie crust, we'll add a little more butter.

The pie's taking shape

Now she puts the top crust on the pie and pinches the edges together.


The upper crust

Then we put the pie in the oven and bake at 425 for 45 minutes. 

Lovin' in the Oven

About mid-way through baking, Tricia will put a ring around the outer crust to keep it from burning and then she'll remove it when it is about to come out to allow it to brown.  Now the pie is ready and is pulled out of the oven to cool.  This is an important step.  See that purplish, gooey, mass, flowing out of the holes in the pie?  Yep, that liquid dewberry 'magma' is hot like molten lava flowing from an active volcano threatening to incinerate anything in its path .  If you don't exercise patience and risk putting a forkful of pie in your mouth now, you'll burn all the skin off the roof of your mouth.


Hot Fresh baked pie

Time to call the crew for dessert.  The boys came running.  We had no visitors tonight, and I know it is not good table manners, but we literally licked the plates clean.  Emily Post would be disappointed.


Delish!

What a chore it is to use up this last gallon of frozen dewberries before the fresh crop of berries ripens a little later this Spring. \sarcasm