The New - Week 2 (Baking blueberry pie)

It's week 2 - time to do something new!

First of all - my mom is an amazing cook! Most of the great recipes I make now came from her. I make her spaghetti sauce, her pork tenderloin, her broccoli & cauliflower casserole...so it may come as sort of a surprise that I have NEVER made her blueberry pie. Or any pie for that matter. Yup, I am 36 years old and I have never made a pie. And there really isn't any reason why I haven't. I'm certainly not afraid of baking. In fact, I make a pretty mean cheesecake (several varieties actually) - just ask my hubby, brothers and sister-in-law (all huge fans of my cheesecakes). But never a pie...until today!

Yes, for this week's something NEW I have decided to make my very first blueberry pie (blueberry because it happens to be Theo & Joe's favourite). I also thought it would be fun to enjoy this first time experience with my son Theo. In truth, I needed to call in an expert and unlike me, Theo has made a blueberry pie before with  my mom.

To start, a phone call to my mom for her blueberry pie recipe. Then, blueberries were taken out of the freezer to thaw (this worked out fine since my little chef was at school during this time). Then pie making was delayed due to an unscheduled playdate. But one cannot delay pie making forever and later this afternoon we put on our invisible chef hats and got to work!

First, I get out all the ingredients and measuring utensils. What is most amazing is how few ingredients are needed to make a pie. The pie crust I made with butter and because I didn't have any unsalted butter, I didn't add any extra salt. So literally all I needed was flour, butter and water. Huh. As for the filling, simply blueberries, sugar and a bit of flour. Now we are ready to begin! 

I measured out the flour in a measuring cup and Theo used a spoon to scoop it out of the cup and into a mixing bowl (his technique, wondering if this somehow adds to the flakiness of the pie).

Next we added the butter. We don't have one of those fancy pastry cutters, so we ended up using a potato masher instead (worked just as good in my opinion). The blueberry filling took literally seconds to make - Theo poured in the sugar and the flour and mixed.

Then it was time to roll out the dough. We don't have one of those long rolling pins. What we do have is a fancy one from Pampered Chef. Theo again had a very special technique for doing this, kind of a constant rotation while rolling at the same time (I'm sure this pie crust is going to be amazing!). I put the first rolled out dough into the pie plate (yes, believe it or not I actually own two pie plates despite never having made a pie) and then added the blueberry mixture. Then we rolled out the second dough and I placed it on top of the first. I trimmed the edges of all the excess dough and then attempted to make the sides look pretty using the knuckle of my thumb and my two fingers.

Before going into the oven

You will notice that I also put a 'T' in the middle of the pie. I did this for two reasons: the first being to stand for 'Theo' since it is indeed his birthday pie and the second because I realized too late that we had rolled part of the dough a little bit too thin (oops). Problem solved!

The last thing to do was to put it in the oven and wait. Of course I checked on it every 5-10 minutes just to make sure it wasn't getting too brown. And voila! The pie is done and my first pie making attempt is a success...at least in terms of how the pie looks (we won't talk about the fact that the bottom of my oven now has a small pool of baked on blueberry filling on it, nor will we talk about the fact that the spilled blueberry caused my oven to start smoking and I had to turn on the fan and open several windows).

The finished product

I have no idea how the pie tastes and I won't be able to tell you today since we aren't having the pie until tomorrow. But if smell is any indication, then we are in for a real treat...Mmmmmmm!