Kat of All Trades

(If you’re looking for bake-off details, scroll to the bottom! I think you should read about pie first, though.)

I’ve been experimenting with some pie recipes recently, taking seasonal favorites rhubarb and strawberry and playing around with flavors to see what I like best. They’re not quite ready for recipe sharing, but they are pretty enough for a peek!

I brought this pie to the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm pie potluck a few weeks ago (where I had the pleasure of seeing Brooklyn Homesteader and meeting Pie in the Park!). I’d been pondering what type of pie to bring, and then I remembered that I’d purchased 25 pounds of rhubarb the day before. I recalled baking a rhubarb custard pie last year, so I went back through my pie notes and decided to change up that recipe a bit.

In addition to the eggs for the light custard, I added some vanilla, cardamom, and orange zest. I think it needs a bit more work to balance things, but overall, people seemed to enjoy it, and I was pretty happy with the flavors. I think I’d like to try it without the custard, or with more time for the custard to chill; the day of the potluck, the pie came out of the oven and went directly to Greenpoint.

This beauty is a strawberry pie that I baked when I went to visit my cousins in Pennsylvania. Black pepper and balsamic vinegar both amp up the flavor of strawberries, so I tried them in tandem. It was good, but a little too much, or perhaps not quite the right amounts of each. More experimenting will be necessary!

In other pie-related news, I’ll be competing in a pie bake-off this Saturday, June 12! The bake-off, which Jimmy’s No. 43 is hosting, is a fundraiser for the awesome bk farmyards, a Brooklyn-based decentralized farming network. Tickets are $20 at the door, and doors open at 1:00 p.m. There will be so many amazing people bringing pies, and I’m super excited to be part of the competition. I’ll be bringing my balsamic pie – this time with strawberries – and I promise you won’t want to miss it. You can get all of the details here. Come early and bring friends! (And after the bake-off, come to Hunter College, where I’ll be managing the Bronx Gridlock to victory over the Manhattan Mayhem! Tickets are available here; that will sell out before Saturday.)

That’s a previous iteration of the balsamic pie. It’s as delicious as it looks.