Happy Pi Day, everyone! For this year's Pi Day, we had Pizza Pi, fresh Pi-Napple (ha ha ha!), blueberry pie, and mini key lime pies. I am pie crust-making challenged, obviously. I like the crust recipe I use, but I have an extremely hard time rolling out the dough in a nice circle, and not having it tear or break on me. I always have some tearing and breakage. Then I can't make the edges look nice in a pie pan. Oh well. Some might call the pie above rustic, and I would be one of those people. It was a pain to make (not to mention edges burning and then leaking juice in my oven!) but it was such a joy to eat. I love blueberry pie, and this one was so tasty and juicy.
For our pizzas, I did my old stand-by of the copycat Pizza Hut pan crust. It makes 3 small-ish pizzas. On two of them, I used red sauce, mozz, and pepperoni, but on one, I spread it with homemade basil pesto instead of red sauce, and topped it with Provolone and mozz, and then black olives. Red onion and feta would have been awesome, as well. This one was by far the best- the oil from the pesto seeped into the crust as it was baking, giving it awesome flavor all over. I also used roasted garlic instead of raw in the pesto, which tasted wonderful. I might do roasted garlic in my pesto all the time from now on.
I'm posting the blueberry pie recipe below- I think it was too sweet, so in the future, I'd cut the sugar down to 1/2 cup. I'll reflect that in my post below. If you like things sweeter, or if you are using fresh blueberries that are more tart, use 3/4 cup. I used frozen blueberries. I set them in a bowl in the fridge a few hours before making the pie, thinking they would thaw a little, but they didn't, so they just went in frozen. If I had thawed them, though, I wouldn't get rid of that precious juice (just be prepared for a juicy pie!) I added the seeds from one scraped vanilla bean to the blueberry filling.
For the mini key lime pies, I used 6 store-bought mini graham cracker pie crusts, and made a half-recipe of my Key Lime Pie filling. This was the perfect amount of filling for the 6 mini pies. I made these mostly for the kids- they all LOVE Key Lime Pie, and it's easier for them to eat than the messy blueberry.
Betty Crocker's Blueberry Pie
adapted from my Betty Crocker cookbook
Pastry for double-crust pie
1/2 cup sugar (can use 3/4 cup if desired)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
one vanilla bean, seeds scraped (optional)
6 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
1. Heat oven to 400. Prepare pie crust.
2. Mix sugar, flour and cinnamon in large bowl. Stir in blueberries. Turn into pie-crust lined pie plate. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Dot with butter. Cover with top pie crust; cut slits in the top pie crust, and seal and flute the edges. Cover edge with 2-3 inch strip of aluminum foil to prevent excessive browning. Remove foil during last 15 minutes of baking.
3. Bake 35-45 minutes or until crust is browned and juices begin to bubble through slits in crust. Cool in pie plate on wire rack.
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