A Pie a Week - Midweek pie

Sometimes you just want a pie. The other day I realized our tree was full of ripe plums that no one but a fat gray squirrel was appreciating - you could watch the branches tremble as he leapt from one to the next, munching on ripe plums.


I went outside and gathered what I could reach. The ripe ones simply fell into my hand at a touch.


They were so immediate, so fragile, and so fragrant that I knew I couldn't let them stand overnight without cooking them. Plum pie!


Here's where I used a little trick from Ken Haedrich's book "Pie." You know how, whenever you make a pie, you end up with the outer pieces of dough? My mother used to gather those together, roll them out, and bake them on a cookie sheet, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. But Haedrich has another suggestion - flatten the remaining dough into a disc, put it in a ziplock bag, and freeze it. Every time you make a pie you'll have a little bit of dough. There's not very much dough there but if you freeze these bits each time, soon you will have enough for a whole pie.

Thaw them and stack the discs up and flatten them all together again. It doesn't really matter if the dough is from different recipes - some with butter, some with shortening. (as long as they're all basic dough, not flavored or with different kinds of flour). They will meld and blend together as you roll it out.


You can see here patches where one of my bits of dough perhaps had egg yolk or was all-butter.


But it doesn't matter. You'll soon have a nice pie shell, without the hassle of messing with flour and mixing.

For this plum pie, I cut the plums into chunks and sprinkled them with a cup of sugar. I took a cup of confectioner's sugar and a 1/4 cup of pine nuts and whirled them in the food processor, resulting in a mealy kind of powder. I sprinkled a layer of this powder on the bottom of the crust, then topped it with the fruit - using a slotted spoon to keep some of the liquid out.


I had held back some plums and now I sliced them into prettier slices, which I laid in a pattern on the top. Then I sprinkled the pie with the remaining sugar-pine nut mixture, and then with whole pine nuts.

Into a 350 degree oven it went for 45 minutes.


Then I pulled out a plum pie! Mmmm. The flavor was tart, vivid, and delicious. And the crust? Not bad for a quickie!