Kat of All Trades

After not making time to post for two weeks – it’s my busy season at work! – I’ve got so many photographs, recipes, and stories to share. Since pie seems to be everyone’s favorite topic, I figured I’d start with a post about that!

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been involved with Gotham Girls Roller Derby since 2007, first as a skater for the Bronx Gridlock, and now as their manager. When you’ve been working together for a while – practice  three or four nights a week, plus other events – you start to develop team traditions, superstitions, and inside jokes. The more you bond off the track, the better your connection will be when you’re skating together as a team. You trust each other.

Throughout those three and a half seasons, one of the traditions we’ve developed is sharing a victory pie for each bout that we win. That’s 13 pies so far: we play four bouts per season including the championship, and have only lost one in that time frame. One of my other teammates usually bakes; however, after our last bout, she was hosting our team barbecue, so we decided that I would take a turn. I have, after all, made a few pies in my time.

I still had plenty of rhubarb left from rhubarb fest, and at that point, strawberries were still plentiful at the greenmarket, so I’d picked up quite a few. The perfect early summer victory pie? Strawberry-rhubarb. One of my teammates doesn’t eat sugar, so I looked up some information about baking with agave nectar and went for it. If nothing else, I knew it smelled amazing when it came out of the oven, and it looked stunning in the yellow pie dish my teammates gave me as a manager’s gift at the end of last season.

I’d be exaggerating if I said that people dove at me when I arrived at the barbecue; however, I mean it when I say that the 12-inch, deep-dish pie plate was empty in under ten minutes! I’m pretty sure there isn’t a better way to spend a summer evening than celebrating victory, conversing, and sharing pie with friends.

Part of why I’m telling you this particular story is that I believe that pie is an amazing food that carries on a long tradition of friendship, community, and sharing food. My friend Lauren is in the last days of her Pie in the Park Kickstarter project, and she needs your help to make it a success. She’s planning to publish a Pie in the Park cookbook, which will include stories of baking, recipes, and pie tips. Proceeds from book sales will go to Clinton Hill CSA to help fund their low-income shares. The money raised from her Kickstarter project will help cover printing costs, as well as paying the book’s designer and illustrator a fair rate.

If you love pie as much as I do – and I’m pretty sure you do – consider donating!

Either way, you can still enjoy this recipe.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, sans Sugar
Makes one 12-inch pie.

1 unbaked double crust
5 c rhubarb (1 lb)
4 c hulled and halved strawberries
1/3 c cornstarch
3/4 c raw agave nectar
1/4 c spring wildflower honey
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/8 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and coat the bottom and sides of  12-inch pie plate with butter.

Roll out half of the dough for the bottom crust. Put in pie dish and crimp the edges of the crust.

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl, making sure that the fruit is thoroughly coated with the cornstarch, sweeteners, and seasonings.

Roll out the other half of the dough for the top crust. If you prefer to do a lattice crust, cut the dough into long strips.

Pour the fruit mixture into the bottom crust. Top with the rolled out dough or the lattice.

Bake for 15 minutes, then add a foil ring around the edge of the pie plate to prevent the crust from burning. Bake for 25 more minutes, and allow to cool before slicing and serving.

(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.

Remember those gorgeous strawberries I showed you last week? Well, I ate some, and then decided that I wanted the rest to be jam. I know the strawberry bounty is coming soon, and I wanted more small-batch jam-making practice.

At the recommendation of Kate from The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, I picked up Eugenia Bone‘s fantastic book, Well-Preserved, which contains “recipes and techniques for putting up small batches of seasonal foods.” I love the layout of the book: Bone provides you will a recipe to preserve a seasonal food, and then shows you two or three ways you can use your canned goods later. Plus, the photos are stunning. Yum!

I was flipping through all my canning books trying to decide which jam to make with the strawberries, and Bone’s strawberry balsamic jam looked stunning. Now, it did not look like jam – more fruit in syrup – but I decided to see what would happen.

I may have cooked it too long because I didn’t start my boiling-water bath early enough, or maybe my making a small batch even smaller meant that it cooked down more, leaving me without whole strawberries. Either way, it’s still delicious and I’ll be eating it very soon. Possibly between layers of cake, as Ian suggested.

Strawberry-Balsamic Jam (adapted from Eugenia Bones’ Well-Preserved)

2 c washed and hulled strawberries
1-1/4 c unrefined sugar
1/8 tsp unsalted butter
1-1/4 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Start your boiling-water bath! Sterilize your jars when your jam has been boiling for about 30 minutes.

Place the strawberries in a pot and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once the strawberries are boiling, add the sugar and stir until it is thoroughly dissolved.

Bring to a boil and then add the butter, which will help keep the foam volume down. Turn the heat down to medium-low and gently boil the jam for 40 minutes, until thickened to a loose, soft jam.

Stir in the balsamic vinegar.

Carefully ladle the jam into a sterilized jar. Process in a boiling-water bath for ten minutes, then remove the lid and leave the jars in the water for five more minutes.

This made 1/2 pint of jam.

Today is a most exciting day: the first of the strawberries are showing up at the farmer’s market! I couldn’t resist picking some up; the smell is one of my favorites of summer.

Strawberries remind me of being a kid and going with my mom, grandfather, and brother to pick strawberries at a nearby farm. They’d weigh your containers when you arrived, you’d go pick until you couldn’t fit anymore strawberries in your buckets or bowls, and then they’d charge you per pound after a final weigh-in. My mom used to joke that my brother ate so many strawberries – one for the bowl, one for him – that the farm needed to check his weight before we left!

When we got home, the strawberries became jam, or went into a bowl with a little sugar for strawberry shortcake, or we’d pop them straight into our mouths.

I can’t stop smiling when I catch a whiff of the basket.