You want to know what’s for dinner tonight? Dunno. Leftovers. That doesn’t matter.
You want to know what’s for dinner on Monday, January 23, National Pie Day? Now we’re talking.
In keeping with the Presidential election year, this year’s National Pie Day (not to be confused with March 14, National Pi Day) will have Blueberry Pie.
Why blueberry? The Reverend Al Sharpton explains:
The GOP talks about the economy's bad, blaming Obama, and protesting "we didn't do it!" But the blueberry pie is all over their faces - they were the ones eating the pie!
Here's some not-so-yummy candidate pies:
The Bachmann Pie: Heavily spiked with mercury (from an unregulated coal plant), eating it will make you crazy.
The Cain Pie: Pizza, of course. Cold, hard, indigestible pizza.
The Gingrich Pie: eyes of Newt, puffed up with a lot of hot air.
The Huntsman Pie: no one notices this pie.
The Paul Pie: The marijuana-laced brownie surface tempts you, but underneath it’s just sour cream - not mixed with anything, just plain sour cream, rancid, long past its sell-by date, and white as a sheet.
The Perry Pie: Has a crust, a topping, and, ooops, I forgot the third thing.
The Romney Pie: It’s a cake! No, it’s a pie! The cake is a lie! The pie is also a lie! the only thing we know for sure: the dish was outsourced to India.
The Santorum Pie: A frothy substance that, at first glance, may be meringue. It’s not. You really don’t want to know. If you must, Google Santorum.
If none of those sound terribly appetizing, here's a recipe for an open-faced fresh-and-cooked blueberry pie recipe, adapted from Rose Levy Berenbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible.
1. Crust
1 cup flour
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt (if using unsalted butter)
Every time I post a pie diary, someone comments about skipping this step in favor of
store-bought pie crust. Banish this thought. You'll also banish ingredients such as "partially hydrogenated lard with BHA and BHT added to protect flavor, wheat starch, water. Contains less than 2% of salt, rice flour, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate and sodium propionate, citric acid, Yellow 5 and Red 40" (Pillsbury) and palm oil (Trader Joes).
Stir the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Cut the butter into chunks, then cut the butter into the dry ingredients, using a pastry cutter or a regular fork. Keep cutting (smashing) for about 10 minutes until the butter pieces are, for the most part, very small - somewhere between large grains of sand and fine gravel. A few larger (pea-sized) butter chunks are desirable. Then add 3 tablespoons of water and, if you must, a 4th tablespoon, and stir together until the dough starts to - but doesn't completely - stick together.
At this point, you're probably worried that you haven't added enough water, because the dough is crumbling and not sticking together very well. Pick up a chunk in your (well washed) hand. If it sticks together under pressure, it's good. Gather it all up into a flattened ball, refrigerate it for about an hour, and then roll it out.
This pie dough is baked before the blueberries are added, so bake it in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes while you cook some of the blueberries.
2. Filling
4 cups ripe blueberries
2 tablespoons cornstarch
about 1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice, or if you prefer 1 teaspoon almond extract and/or 2 tablespoons amaretto
In a small pot, add 1 cup ripe blueberries to 1/2 cup water, bring to a boil, and let it simmer about 5 minutes, until the blueberries start to burst.
Separately, mix 2 tablespoons cornstarch with 2 tablespoons cold water.
After the blueberry-water mixture has simmered about 5 minutes, put it in a large bowl and add, quickly, the cornstarch mixture, the remaining 3 cups uncooked blueberries, sugar, and lemon juice (or almond extract/amaretto). Stir gently until the cornstarch thickens the mixture, then spoon it into the pre-baked pie shell.
Note: Gentle readers who have advanced red-vs-blue detection skills may note that not all the berries in the photo are, actually, blueberries. I swapped 1 cup raspberries for 1 of the 3 cups fresh uncooked blueberries in the photo above before serving to my local Democratic club.
If you end up with blueberry juice all over your face, blame the Republicans.