Texas Red Plum Pie

The color is as psychedelic as Prickly Pear juice! (Is Texas a naturally psychedelic place? Perhaps! Psilocybin mushrooms DO grow here naturally.)

I bought a few pounds of red plums last year, and what I didn’t eat, I made into PLUM JAM. It is the B*E*S*T Jam I have ever made, and not only that, IT JELLED the very first time (I think because the plums are rather small and tart.)

So, this year, I bought a few pounds at the Farmers Market, and I have been eating them; but I have enough jam from last summer to do me just fine for this summer. And then, they started to get a little ripe. Okay, a few were getting OVER RIPE! What to do?

I thought, do people make Plum Pie? It doesn’t sound familiar. So I looked it up on the innertubes, and I saw that “Rustic Plum Tart” is super popular. I thought about making a couple of them (I needed to make my neighbor Jeannie a pie, too), but, I have MADE these “Rustic Tarts” before (I made a Rustic Apple Tart once, out of the Hudson’s on the Bend cookbook), and I found that I missed the crumb topping that I usually use on fruit pies.

So, I decided to make PIE, not a TART, and to use a crumb topping. For the filling, I decided to use unpeeled plums (the Rustic Tart recipes didn’t peel) and I thought it sounded nice to use lemon zest and almond extract and brown sugar. And lemon juice.

The pies turned out SPECTACULARLY. So well, that Dave said it is his new favorite kind of pie. I wonder why Plum Pie isn’t as well known as Cherry Pie? Because it is just as red and vibrant as cherry.

MADE UP PLUM PIE

Enough red plums to make a pie

3/4 cup light brown sugar

a lemon

a teaspoon of almond extract

1/4 cup cornstarch

PASTRY

1 1/2 cups flour

2  sticks butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

I suddenly realize I haven’t ever blogged my SPECIFIC instructions for PIE CRUST. OY!! I don’t want to get into the specifics NOW! It will take a million years! I am just going to assume you know how to make a pie crust.

1. Using one cup a flour, 1/4 t of salt, and 3/4 a stick of butter, MAKE A PIECRUST.

2. Slice the red plums off of the pits, using a little paring knife, into a bowl.

3. In another bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, cornstarch, and almond extract, in that order.

4. Pour the brown sugar mixture over the plums, and toss around with a rubber spatula.

5. Dump fruit into pie crust. The fruit should be sort of shallow, not deep-dish, about an inch and a half to two inches deep.

6. Zest the lemon over the plums in the pie pan.

7. Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze the juice of half the lemon over the plums. Put the other half off the lemon into your ice tea, or vodka and tonic. Or beer. Or water!

8. Put the remaining flour, white sugar, and quarter teaspoon of salt into the food processor. Pulse. Add the stick of butter, sliced, and pulse until it is crumbs.

9. Arrange crumbs on top of fruit, and bake entire pie in a 350˚ oven until the crust is visibly browning and the plum juice is visibly bubbling at the rim. About 40-50 minutes.

It rained THREE INCHES yesterday (a little bit of Alex) and then probably ANOTHER inch TODAY! For Texas, this is like a month's worth in two days.It was so wet and humid out, my camera fogged up just from going outside. That is why it looks like a picture of the Olden Days.

Book Review: Sweety Pies

Here is a Cookbook review I did in the Chronicle for a cookbook with great pie recipes. You know, it is usual that I haven’t written about pies that much. I am THE PIE LADY. Probably because I have no wish to reveal all my recipes,  but after all I could just SHOW THE PICTURE, I don’t have to TELL YOU HOW I MADE IT!  A few of the recipes I make are from this book though!

Note the PROFESSIONALISM of my writing when I am doing it for COLD HARD CASH.

Sweety Pies

By Patty Pinner

The Taunton Press (2007) 171 Pages

There is nothing else on Earth like the pink glaze of a Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie clinging to the last shard of flaky, fluted crust, or the piles of breathtaking meringue crowning a tart Key Lime Pie.  A home baked pie is one of the things that actually make people happy, yet eating one is an experience that grows increasingly rare for most Americans. The art of pie-baking is in danger of being lost; how many times have you heard someone lament that they “just can’t make piecrust”?

In the small, Mayberry-like town of Saginaw Michigan, before the Second World War, pie baking was considered an essential womanly art: one of the many “strings to a woman’s bow”. The pillbox-hat-wearing, church-going, soul-food-cooking ladies of Patty Pinner’s childhood took their pie-making very seriously, and Ruth Pinner made sure that her daughter mastered the art. She passed along to her daughter not only her own skills and recipes, but also the best recipes of her friends and relations, which Ruth had diligently collected over the years.

In this captivating book, Patty Pinner remembers these mothers, aunts, neighbor-ladies and friends in colorful vignettes, and gives each woman’s premier pie recipe. Along with each recipe are truly inspiring photographs of each pie: no cookbook I have ever come across has managed to catalog so many varieties. Buttermilk Pie, Fresh Raspberry Pie, Peanut Butter Cream Pie, Rice Pie, Pumpkin-Coconut Pie, Tangerine Meringue Pie, and 64 other kinds, each one a particular woman’s tour de force.

The recipes are clear, simple, and easy to use. Pinner also gives her mother’s excellent, extraordinarily rich and flaky pie-crust recipe, as well as useful instructions on the shaping and decorating of pies. If your life suffers from inadequate amounts of home-baked pie, this book is the remedy.