I have decided to be selfish and add a component to this website that is entirely for me, and for my own recollection of neat things that I make in the kitchen while I try to figure out how the hell to feed myself, now that I am all alone and will likely remain so for the duration of my pathetic life.

Aaaaaaaaanyhoo, after a fun and friendly lesson on the pitfalls and delights of pastry from my mother on the weekend, I came away with a number of things:

  • A 9-inch chopped chicken stew pie
  • Five 5-inch chicken stew and ground chicken pies
  • A pretty darned easy pastry recipe that is, for all intents and purposes, foolproof
  • Foolhardiness enough to undo a foolproof recipe

It is important to understand that I can learn things very quickly when shown how to do them — often only needing to see it once — but when I don’t actually see it, it does not stick. Thus, I doubt my mother understood the damage she was doing when she pre-mixed the dry ingredients of the pastry before I arrived for my lesson.

So, last night when I was making this pie, I managed to get every single part correct except for the simple measure of salt that I had to add to the flour. I misjudged it by a devastating margin, transforming the mixture from pastry dough to Play Doh, and requiring me to zip over to the all-night Sobey’s to pick up another pound of lard. Fortunately, along with lard and a load of other groceries I didn’t need, Sobey’s also sells sweet, delicious chocolate-covered almonds.

Super Bonus Question: Guess what’s delicious to snack on while you’re making raspberry pie? (The answer is hidden in this article!!!!)

Anyway.

You might wonder why I’d tackle something as obscure as raspberry for my first fruit pie, and while I was watching it bubble in the oven I considered the same thing. A few weeks ago over dinner, my father waxed absolutely rhapsodic over a raspberry mousse cake we were eating, and suddenly demanded to know why you never see a good god damned raspberry pie anywhere. My mother protested that it’s because you can’t find a decent recipe for one, and even if you did, raspberries are so prohibitively expensive that it’s hardly worth doing.

In fact, it isn’t all that easy to find a straightforward raspberry pie recipe that doesn’t involve sour cream, mousse, other kinds of berries, or gelatin of one form or another. Fortunately I was able to overcome that, and undertook the task of making a raspberry pie for my father’s birthday, which is coming up this weekend.

Raspberries are still pretty costly, though, so points to my mother also on that one.

When you’re not busy fucking up the pastry, the recipe I was working from is actually stupendously easy, and the resulting pie looks beautiful and tastes fantastic. All I would do next time around is boost the starch a little bit, since it juiced up a whole lot more than I expected while it was in the oven, and perhaps let it sit in the fridge overnight before I serve it to anyone.

As a bright, sweet and fragrant last hurrah to the summertime, though, I don’t think you can beat it.