To my delight, I spent most of this past Sunday in the kitchen. It was pouring outside (Los Angeles got a whopping 1.5″ of rain) and I loved bustling about my kitchen playing around with fondant, chocolate, blueberries and Pate Brisee (pie dough) as the rain pounding upon the windows with such intensity it wasn’t hard to imagine I was back in Michigan.
As the rain fell, I crafted two dozen dark chocolate Cadbury-style creme eggs and a pie. Here’s something I need to admit: I’ve never been a big fan of pie. Nope, not pumpkin pie or key lime or lemon meringue or pecan or strawberry or…shall I go on? There was one, and only one exception: My mother’s apple pie.
Growing up, my mom would make her special apple pie at Thanksgiving, and sometimes, if we were lucky, at Christmastime too. The filling was good, but it was her crumb topping that I looked forward to every year. Though she adds her own touches to it, it’s inspired by this one from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.
Apple Pie Crumb Topping:
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
Chop up butter into 1/3 cubes. Mix all ingredients together until the mixture is even and crumbly. Try not to eat all of it before cooking the pie.
So, there I was, making pie for a dinner that night with some friends. My co-host was crafting pork tenderloin and fennel soup, and my dessert – served with honey rosemary ice cream that I had made a few weeks prior – was to be the closer for the meals. And it wasn’t apple pie. It was blueberry pie. But this wasn’t going to be a sugary sweet, gag-inducing, blueberry pie. Heck, no.
Using three different recipes, I concocted a sweet, but tart, blueberry 9″ pie using 8 cups of blueberries. And the crust? It was a classic Pate Brisee, but I added parmesan to it to give it a savory kick. I was really happy with it and would definitely make it again, but I’ll let those who ate it comment with their own opinions.
I’m not going to give away the recipe, as it was my first time truly experimenting and creating something from three different recipes to make my own, but it acquired its name because when I was baking it, I didn’t put a cookie sheet under it and some of the lattice-cut top dripped onto the bottom of the oven and burned to a blackened crisp. To make matters worse, the whole house filled with smoke! Hence, smokin’ blueberry pie.