For me, Memorial Day weekend always symbolizes the welcoming of summer. It's the first long weekend of the summer. The sun is shining, the collective smell of food on the grill wafts through the air, and shorts and sundresses get pulled out of the trenches of the closet where they have been hiding all winter. Ahhh, life is good on Memorial Day weekend, there is no work on Monday and it seems like there is all the time in the world. So to make this Memorial Day truly memorable I decided to take a culinary risk of epic proportions in hopes of delivering my Mom the perfect homemade present - my very first ever pie from scratch, and a strawberry rhubarb pie for that matter. Never mind that I had no clue what rhubarb was (did you know it's actually a vegetable?!) up until about 3 weeks ago when I came across a recipe in the archives of Deb's Smitten Kitchen site. I was mesmerized... the redness of the strawberries and rhubarb, the perfect latticed crust, the golden color of the cooked pie with juicy gooeyness peeking through. It was love at first sight. I had never wanted something so bad. (Well, that's not true, but it felt like it at the time.) But could I do it, I asked myself? Also I asked myself what's a pastry cutter and where do I find one? Finally, I decided to go for it and work out the pastry cutter issue as I went along. I mean, how hard could it be really? The phrase "easy as pie" had to come from some sort of truth, right?
First stop. Strawberry farm for some fresh, juicy goodness.
{strawberry farm}
Next, it was time to get my hands dirty... well more like doughy. I was shocked and in awe of the amount of butter that goes into a pie crust. It's crazy, but in a good way. I like butter.
{I can't believe it's all butter!}
{making the dough}
After the dough was made (with my $5 pastry cutter from Target), I cut it in half and formed two disks which I wrapped in saran wrap and put in the fridge over night. The next morning, yes this was a two day process, I let the dough sit out for about a half hour and then I was ready to roll!
{pie dish, dough, rolling pin}
Rolling the first disk of dough was rather hard but that's because I didn't give the dough enough time to come to room temperature. The second disk was much easier but then I felt it was too warm and tried to move it, completely rolled out, into the fridge, which resulted in flour going everywhere and an almost ruined rolled out piece of dough.
{rolled out crust}
Helpful tip! Roll out your dough sandwiched between two sheets of wax paper. But make sure you flour each sheet well! I made the mistake of not flouring the top sheet... that got me into a sticky situation.
And now the fun part!
{red - rhubarb and strawberries}
{Filling}
{new pie dish}
And then you wait... and check the oven obsessively because it would be such a shame to burn something this beautiful.
{pie}
And Voila! Like they say, easy as pie!
{so pretty!!}
Since I'm not much for baking I found it surprising that I loved making this pie. It was calming, therapeutic, and turned out so yummy I ate 2 slices... and I thought I didn't like pie!
Get the recipe from Smittenkitchen.com -->
here.
peace, love, pie, and happiness!!
