Snow & Rhubarb Pie

It's snowing! We woke to a dusting and now it's a blizzard. Schools closed anticipating a typical spring dump. The airport has canceled afternoon flights and businesses are suggesting closing by noon too. Denver's talking about 1 - 1 1/2 ft, so of course we'll get more! Good day for the wood stove fire going. We designed our great room with a cookstove setting between the kitchen and dining area. I leave the stove's oven door open for more heat to flow out. The upper little left opening is the fire box. I'd cleaned out the ash box below it last week, adding the ashes to my compost bin, so it's burning fast and hot.

"Wouldn't this be a good time for a piece of Rhubarb Pie?" - Prairie Home Companion's ending to many stories and then a song: "Mama's little baby loves Rhubarb, rhubarb/Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie ... Just one little thing can revive a guy/ and that is a piece of rhubarb pie/ serve it up, nice and hot/ maybe things aren't as bad as you thought ..."

We were going to have company for supper last night, so I had supper preparations pretty well underway before they decided to fly out earlier ... just-in-case ... So Monte and me had a meal of the white chicken chili soup, nice salad, homemade bread ... and rhubarb pie. I took pictures of the pie making process, and here's the recipe from my Hearth & Home cookbook. When looking for recipes I'll often lay out many varieties, so I created this recipe from combining things I thought sounded good together.

Rhubarb Custard Pie

First, I freeze the 1/2" cut-up rhubarb from our garden in a heaping quart measuring bowl, so it's about 5 cups of rhubarb.

Second, you need pie crust for a double crust pie. I use my ground white whole wheat or pastry wheat I've always got in freezer. Since I had kamut in there too, this pie is half wheat and half kamut. I always use butter, unsalted if I have it. I've used lard or the newer organic shortening which is palm oil. I never use shortening. It's vegetable oil heated so hot it's next step would be plastic. Our body does not know how to break this fat down - it's what's now called trans-fat. And labels that have "partially" hydrogenated anything I never get. It's the word partial that's killing people. It races around our body looking for a home and latches onto cells, hurting them, and today we have way more cancer, diabetes, and heart disease than ever.

I use a food processor all the time now for the preliminary processing of the dough, unless I'm making a larger amount, then I use the whips in my regular Bosch bowl, putting the cut-up butter in first. But I always finish up both processes by hand with a pastry blender. Mixing the final bits of water in is when we often over-process pie dough, which makes it tough. Then I flatten the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate it while putting together the filling. Keeping the dough chilled is another key to a flaky crust.

Filling -

the 5 cups cut up fresh or frozen rhubarb put in pie first.

Mix together -

3 eggs

2 Tb whole wheat flour

2 Tb tapioca

1/3 c honey

1 c sugar (we've been practically eliminating sugar, so I'm going to cut this back next time cuz it was too sweet for us now)

1/2-1 tsp orange peel

pinch of salt

Pour the filling over the rhubarb and cover with a top crust and make steam vents. I usually sprinkle it with a touch of cinnamon, but forgot yesterday. Bake for 10 minutes at 400, then lower to 350 and continue baking another 45-60 minutes. We like pie crust well-browned and giving the bottom crust a chance to thoroughly cook too.

When I put on the top crust I knife off the excess dough before crimping the edges.

I roll out this excess dough for little cinnamon tarts. Sometimes I'll put pats of butter then sprinkle on lots of cinnamon. The very little bit of sugar added on these is Sucanat. It can't really be called a sugar, cuz by its very nature, sugar is processed. Sucanat is plain dehydrated sugar cane.

Maybe this storm won't be as bad as we thought.