Gonna Make a Pie With a Heart in the Middle

So I am ashamed to say this, and it scares me a little given that I'm about to move back to scorching Texas in a couple of months, but I have become a real heat wimp in the last five years.  Last year the thermostat in Denver didn't even reach 80 degrees until around mid-June, and the hottest days we had all summer got up to 92 or 93 degrees.  Most of the time the temperatures stayed in the low 80s, and I recall complaining when I went swimming outdoors that it was too cold.

And that's why this summer has been a shock to my system.  By June we'd had temperatures reaching almost 100, and this past weekend we actually managed to reach those triple digits in Denver for the first time in a couple of years.  It turns out that even with the dry air in Colorado, a building without air conditioning doesn't quite cut it.  I've been sweltering all month.  So you can imagine my joy this past week when a rainstorm came through and, for an evening, cooled it all down.  I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and bake, since these blueberries in my fridge had been calling my name for a couple of days, saying "Robin! Bake us in a delicious pie!"

So many berries!

So I hauled out my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook, which is a little odd at times when you're looking for actual meals but is pretty fail-safe when it comes to dessert, and found the recipe.  It called for six cups of blueberries, which was pretty much the entire giant carton I had.  It seemed like an awful lot for one pie, but I shrugged and followed along.

Next came the pie dough.  Now, for years I used only my late grandmother's recipe for pie dough - it's easy, fast, and has a great flaky texture -- but for some reason (maybe the altitude) I've had a hard time with the oil-based pastry here.  I started using a butter crust (recipe from Baked, a fancy cookbook from a New York City bakery my brother gave me) last fall when I tried my hand at a pecan pie, and that's become my recent standard.  I mixed it up, chilled it in the fridge, and rolled it out for my pan, so there was just a little extra hanging over:

Mmmm, pie dough

Then I trimmed the extra and put it aside to use as a decorative cutout for the top (it must be said that I've never attempted the storybook double-crust pie; I am a little afraid of it, and at least this time it was impossible, as I only had one stick of butter; so this was a single-crust pie).  I mixed the blueberries up with flour, sugar, and cinnamon, coated it all, and then started plopping the filling into the pan.  This is where I realized that in fact my initial hesitation about the quantity of blueberries was a good instinct.  There was WAY too much filling to fit in my pie pan without a secure top crust to hold it in.  I know from experience that scraping burnt blueberry pie filling off the bottom of an oven is no fun, so I reserved about half the filling in the bowl and topped the filling in the pie pan with the extra dough.  I've always enjoyed using cookie cutters to make top pie crusts - they allow for sloppy non-perfectionist bakers like myself to make a pie pretty with very minimal effort, as a good lattice (or, I presume, the dreaded top crust) can be tricky.

Much prettier in its raw format

I was inspired to use the heart shape because a) I find blueberries to be adorable and deserving of heart-shaped cutouts, b) I simply heart pie, and c) whenever I make pie now, I find myself singing a little song from the movie Waitress, which goes "baby don't you cry, gonna make a pie, gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle ..." so it seemed appropriate.  I cut some tinfoil in strips and wrapped it around the edges of the crust to prevent excessive browning, which seemed a bit fussy but I figured I would try anyway.  As my pie was baking, I took the extra filling and dumped it in a saucepan, where I added a pat of butter and some extra spices (pretty much all the baking spices in my pantry - a little nutmeg, ground cloves, ginger, allspice ...) and turned on the heat.  I cooked it on low-ish heat until it resembled a sort of goopy stew, like this:

Stewed blueberries

At which point I took it off the heat, waited for it to cool, and stuck it in some Tupperware, from which I have been doling it out all week as a topping for oatmeal and Greek yoghurt and all sorts of things.  It's excellent, and I was really very proud of myself for the repurposing of these flour-and-sugar-coated berries.

And about forty-five minutes after my pie went in the oven, it came out.  Not as pretty as I would have hoped (they never are, at least in my kitchen), but as I can tell you after cutting into the thing, damned delicious.  And that is the story of a midsummer pie.

Ta-Da!