The bake

I wasn’t a big pie fan when I was younger. But as I’ve grown, so have my tastes, and I find myself craving a fruit pie quite a bit these days. I’d been wanting a cherry pie in particular for the last few weeks. (I’m not sure why, as I’ve probably eaten cherry pie only a couple of times in my entire life.) And this weekend I baked one.

I used frozen cherries, since it’s not quite cherry season in Ontario (bonus: the frozen cherries were already pitted). I’ve heard that sour cherries are best for pie, but I could find only sweet cherries in the freezer, and this recipe from Baker by Nature stated any type of cherries would work. Still, I added more lemon juice than the recipe called for, as I didn’t want the pie to be too sweet. (By the way, I used this recipe for the filling only, and I used my tried-and-true pie pastry recipe from Canadian Living.) It was my first time doing a lattice pie crust, too. At first, I was a little confused on how to do it, but this video tutorial from Sally’s Baking Addiction quickly cleared that up.

The result was a technically great pie that I definitely have enjoyed eating. But after weeks of craving a cherry pie, I’m not so sure it’s one of my favourite fruit pie fillings. I think I’ll be making other fruit pies before trying cherry again. (I do want to work on perfecting the lattice pie crust, though.)

The book

I have read and enjoyed every novel Claire Fuller has published, so when I heard that she was releasing her fourth, Unsettled Ground, there was no doubt I would read that one, too. The book was published a couple of months earlier in the UK, and since then it has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. I picked up my copy last week after it was available in Canada and started it a couple of days ago.

The story follows 51-year-old twins Julius and Jeanie who live with their mother, Dot, in a run-down cottage in the British countryside. Within the first pages, Dot dies suddenly, and the twins struggle to survive as they sort through what their mother has left behind: all of her debts and secrets. I am about halfway through, and I can’t wait to see what will happen with the twins.

The bake

I want more pie in my life. And frozen fruit provides the opportunity to make any type of pie no matter what’s currently in season. Earlier this week, I bought a package of frozen strawberries and rhubarb, figuring I’d find a recipe for pie later. To my surprise, most of the strawberry-rhubarb pie recipes I found advised against using frozen fruit. And the ones that said it was an option warned to make sure the fruit was thawed and drained well, since there was a lot of moisture that could make the filling soupy. So I thawed the fruit in the fridge overnight, drained it in a colander the next morning, and then placed it in a container lined and covered with paper towel. I used the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction for the filling. (I omitted the orange juice, only because I didn’t have it, and I figured I could probably stand losing the extra liquid.) I made the pastry from the apple pie recipe I use because I like it and know that it’s easy to work with.

The end result? A tasty pie that could use some improvement. The filling was well set–not soupy at all–and a good balance of sweet and tart. And I already knew the pastry would be a winner. The only problem was that I would have liked a bit more filling in the pie. Sally’s recipe called for 5.5 cups of fruit. I measured the entire package of frozen fruit and it came to about 5.5 cups. The issue, I think, was that I measured it frozen, so it may have been slightly less if I had measured the fruit after it was drained. The next time I make a strawberry-rhubarb pie, I’ll use fresh fruit, just to see if it makes much of a difference.

The book

This weekend, I cracked open The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, a novel about twin sisters who run away from their hometown when they are teenagers. Years later, one ends up living her life passing as white, while the other returns with her daughter to live in the black community she and her twin left behind.

I’m looking forward to returning to this novel, as I’ve heard so much about it over the past year. But it took this novel becoming a book club pick for me to finally grab a copy (book club is next weekend). Sometimes it seems that when you hear a lot about a book, it just can’t live up to the hype, and that might be why I sometimes take my time getting to those ones (or never getting to them). I’m trying to manage my expectations. In any case, it’s always fun to hear about the experiences of others with a book, so no matter how I end up feeling about The Vanishing Half, I’m sure our book club discussion will be interesting.