Lately I've discovered that late spring is blueberry season in Florida. I have lived here my entire life and never even knew blueberries grew in Florida! I've really been trying to buy as locally as is financially feasible for our family of 4, so when I saw giant boxes of Florida blues on sale at the store, I went nuts. There is reasonable debate on which is a more sound environmental priority: organic foods picked before their prime and shipped via tons of fossil fuels across the country, or conventionally grown in a neighboring county? Local won out over organic this time and I bought 2 huge containers.
They've been in my fridge for a few days while I decided how to most decadently serve them. Some had already been dipped into, and they were as good as they look! I originally wanted to make a light fluffy cake of some sort and top it with a goat cheese icing, with a few ripe strawberries to set off the blues. But alas, I'm am out of flour and our next co-op order was postponed 'til next week. What to do?
Well, I got out my cookbooks, digging to the bottom of the stack for a lovely Mediterranean pictoral book I picked up at a yard sale a few years ago, and the top of the stack: King Arthur Brand Whole Grain Baking. Both had lovely renditions including all american blueberry cream pie, lemon blueberry calfoutis ( which I still don't think I'm pronouncing correctly) and all sorts of nice looking things, but they all required cooking the berries. These berries were too perfect to cook! I wanted something to pile them on top of FRESH, so I had to do a little mixing up...
Here are the pics. The recipe will be posted tonight. Now I'm off to work off the pie at jujitsu!
Ok, Jujitsu was definitely a work out! Shihan at American JuJitsu Center decided to heat the room to about 92F! It felt like more than that, and delivered a workout to justify yet another slice of heaven, a.k.a. lemon pie with blueberries! The thought of that cool confection waiting at home helped me hang in 'til the last kick, kata and "KIA"!
So here's how it happened...
The King Arthur cookbook had a great pie crust recipe made from oats and pecans. But of course, I had no pecans, and also no brown sugar, which it also called for. Technically speaking though, turbinado sugar is brown, and I had plenty of that. I also ended up combining the lemon curd/tart recipe from the mediterranean book with a lemon filling from King Arthur to make something easy that included ingredients I had in the pantry. So here is the recipe modification I came up with:
Lemon Pie with Whipped Cream and Blueberries
-preheat oven to 350F
-on a cookie sheet spread out 1 1/3C whole rolled oats and 1/2C cashews
-bake them to toasted brown about 10 - 15 minutes, then cool before pulsing in a food processor to a uniform consistency ( I don't actually have a food processor, so I use my little chopper that came with my immersion blender and just do small batches)
-cut the oat/nut flour with about 6 TBS cold butter, a pinch of salt and about 1/4 - 1/3 turbinado sugar ( I do this with the whisk on my kitchen aid, mostly because its fun and I have one, but by hand is fairly easy to with either a big fork or a pastry cutter)
- turn out the crust mixture into a 9' pie plate and press with your fingers to evenly fill/line the pan and set aside.
The original crust recipe said to bake the crust without filling, but it was for a different type of pie with less time in the oven, so I elected not to, and I'm really glad. the nuts really brown up fast!
lemon filling:
-cream together 4 TBS butter with about a cup of turbinado sugar and a pinch of salt
-add 4 eggs one at a time
-add zest and juice of 2 lemons
Pour the filling into the crust and bake for about 50 minutes. Mine developed a dark sort of skin made of caramelized sugar, which was delicious, but not so pretty. I simply peeled it off (and ate it myself, fringe benefits of being the household chef) while the pie cooled on the counter for a few minutes. Then I stuck it in the fridge for about an hour. Once it was cooled through, I topped it with a generous layer of whipped cream ( 1C heavy cream, pinch of salt maybe a couple teaspoons of sugar whipped in the mixer 'til stiff) and then the glorious berries!A whole mountain of them!
So, so pretty, don't you think? And the flavor was A-MAZ-ING! As approved by my kids, my man, and my sister. ( My mom said it was good, but too fruity for her, so I still accept that as a compliment!) YUM!
::kristin::
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Dear lord, that looks so good I am going to lick the computer screen. I am coming down for another visit in a couple of weeks, I expect some good cookin' woman!
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