Pastry Fillings

Here are our recipes for dessert pie fillings: Apple Pie . Apple Tarts . Berry . Cherry . Pecan . Plum . Pumpkin . Rhubarb
Here are our recipes for strudel: Strudel (Cherry) . Strudel (Peach)

Cherry Pie

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Roll out pastry and put in pie plate; trim. Roll out top crust and loosely roll around rolling pin; rest on top of pie plate. Refrigerate til filling is made.
2. Empty the jar of cherries into a sieve catching the juice below in a bowl. Check each cherry to make sure there are no pits in the cherries. (There's nothing more upsetting than having to make a trip to the dentist because of a broken tooth.) Bring to a boil all the juice, sugar and cornstarch. Cool. Add the pitted cherries to the juice. Put the cherries into the pie shell.
3. Using some of the juice of the cherries, rub all around the outer edge of the bottom crust. Put top crust on; trim. Using your index fingers and thumbs, press the two edges together to make a fluted edge. Slash through the top crust two or three times.
4. Bake at 450F until you've got the colour you like then turn down heat to 350F. Cooking time should be around 40 minutes total. It's done when the juice is bubbling.

Serve with vanilla icecream, crème fraiche or high fat yoghurt.

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Plum Pie

Santa Rosa plums are wonderful - sweet with some tartness. This plum pie tastes like a cross between sour red cherry and rhubarb pie. Get plums that are juicy but firm. It's remarkable that plums are not one of the standard fruits for pie.

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Two or three hours before making the pie, wash the plums well. Remove stems and pits. Cut plums in wedges and put in a largish pyrex bowl.
2. Add sugar, flour and salt and gently stir to mix into plums. Judge the quantity of flour by how juicy the plums are. If they seem a little dry, add 2 heaping dessert spoons of flour. If they are very juicy, add 3 heaping dessert spoons of flour. Cover the plums and allow to macerate in refrigerator for 2 or 3 hours.
3. Roll out pastry and put in pie plate; trim. Roll out top crust and loosely roll around rolling pin; rest on top of pie plate. Refrigerate til adding the filling.
4. When the plums have macerated, preheat oven to 450F. Put the plums into the bottom pie shell. Using some of the juice of the plums, rub all around the outer edge of the bottom crust. Put top crust on; trim. Using your index fingers and thumbs, press the two edges together to make a fluted edge. Use a fork to make many many holes through the top crust. Avoid piercing through to the bottom!
5. Put the pie on the middle shelf of the oven and a broiling tray on the shelf below the pie to catch any juice that might boil over. Bake at 450F for about 20 minutes - until you've got the colour you like - then turn down heat to 350F. Cooking time should be around 40 minutes total. It's done when the juice is bubbling.

Serve with vanilla icecream, crème fraiche or high fat yoghurt.

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Pecan Pie

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Roll out pastry and put in pie plate. Flute edges. Refrigerate til filling is made.
2. In a bowl, beat together sugar, eggs and salt. Add corn syrup, melted butter and vanilla extract. Whisk until frothy.
3. Spread pecans over the bottom of the pie shell. Pour filling over top.
4. Bake for 30 minutes at 350F. We bake ours in our toaster oven - the pecans get a bit toasty that way.

Serve with whipped cream, crème fraiche or high fat yoghurt.

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Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Roll out pastry and put in pie plate. Flute edges. Refrigerate til filling is made.
2. Mix all the ingredients well. If you are using tinned pumpkin, use a tin that is marked "for one pie". Please ensure that it is unsweetened pumpkin.
3. Pour into a pie shell.
4. Bake for 15 minutes at 425F. Turn the oven down to 350F and bake 45 minutes more til a knife comes out clean.

Serve with whipped cream. Pumpkin pie isn't just for Thanksgiving Day. In fact, we're usually too stuffed from eating Thanksgiving Dinner to have pie. We prefer to have it a couple of days later after having a dinner of leftover sandwiches.

Preparing an Actual Pumpkin for Pie Filling

First of all, do make sure that the pumpkin you have is a "pie" pumpkin. Jack-o-lantern pumpkins are very watery and don't have much flavour. This year for Hallowe'en, we made sure to buy a pie pumpkin. It was a bit of a pain to remove the seeds and carve but the resulting pie was worth the extra effort.

1. Cut the pumpkin in half and remove any seeds and threads that are still there. Place the pumpkin halves shell side up on a cookie sheet and bake at 350F until the flesh inside the pumpkin can be pierced easily with a fork. The skin will be quite dark and the features of the jackolantern will look even more sinister as they will have collapsed and shrivelled to a certain extent. (The small pumpkin I had took a couple of hours)
2. When the pumpkin is done, scrape the flesh out and push it through a sieve (or food mill) to get rid of any thready fibers.

And there you have it. Yes, it's labour intensive but at least the pumpkin has been used for something other than just composting.

to our recipe for pumpkin pie
to recipe for roasting pumpkin seeds

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ejm (aka llizard) 2000,2002,2003
Toronto Ontario Canada