It's a Pie Party! Blueberry Crumble Pie

So, first I made a pie crust (documented here), and then I made pie. Because even though as recently as a few months ago I was scared of pie crust, I wanted to be part of the pie party.

My friend Gina Hyams has just come out with a book called Pie Contest in a Box, and so she's made me think about pie more than I usually do. And then I read about Shauna Ahern, aka Gluten-free Girl, having an internet pie party. Apparently, thousands of people are making pies and many of them are blogging about it today. How could I resist?

I had to contemplate what kind of pie to make. Strawberries are almost gone here, and blueberries and peaches are not yet in season, though they will be soon. Rather than using non-local fruit, I decided to go for the local but frozen option--the blueberries still in my freezer from last summer's annual blueberry picking expedition.

I scoped out some recipes and relied mostly on a combination of Mark Bittman and King Arthur Flour. I decided that, despite my newfound comfort level with pie crust, I didn't want to make a 2-crusted pie. And given my love for peach-blueberry crumble and for blueberry crumble bars, it made sense to make a blueberry crumble pie.

I tossed the blueberries with sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, lemon juice and a dash of nutmeg. I made my standard crumble topping from oats, flour, brown sugar, melted butter and walnuts. I topped one with the other and baked. Delicious smells wafted from the oven.

What I didn't do was wait to cut it. It was after 9 p.m., and Alex was lying on the couch, sleepy and waiting for his pie. The King Arthur Flour Baking Book said "Hold your horses." (Really.) Don't even think of cutting that pie until it's cool. But reader, I cut it. I waited until the vanilla ice cream was sufficiently soft, and then I cut it.

And lo, it was wet. Yes, my blueberry pie had turned into blueberry pie soup.

But you know, between the blueberries and lemon, the oats and walnuts, the vanilla ice cream melting in rivulets across the plate, it didn't really matter.

There was pie, and it was good.

Blueberry Crumble Pie
loosely adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, with
additional help from The King Arthur Flour Baking Book

Crust
1 9 inch pie crust (I used Melissa Clark's all-butter Perfect Pie Crust.)

Filling
5 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen, picked over, rinsed and dried
1/2 - 1 cup sugar, depending on your preferences and the sweetness of your berries
2 tbsp. corn starch
Pinch nutmeg and/or cinnamon
Grated zest of 1 lemon
1 tbsp. lemon juice
Dash of salt

Crumble Topping
1 cup whole rolled oats
1/2 cup flour
3 tbsp. brown sugar
4 tbsp. melted butter
1/3 - 1/2 cup walnuts (optional)
pinch salt

Note: I did not bake my pie crust ahead of time. None of the recipes I looked at called for it. However, given the soupiness of the fruit, I probably would blind bake it next time. The outside of the crust was nicely crispy, but the bottom was soggy. That might just be the way of fruit pies, but I'm going to experiment.

Preheat oven to 450.

If desired, partially blind bake pie shell. Good instructions for doing so here: Blind Baking a Pie Crust

For filling, toss blueberries with sugar, corn starch, lemon zest, lemon juice, nutmeg and salt.

Pile berries into crust.

Combine oats, flour, brown sugar, salt, nuts (if using) and melted butter. Distribute over blueberries and pat into place.

Place pie pan on baking sheet (in case of drips). Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes and then reduce heat to 350 F and bake for another 40-50 minutes. (I baked mine for another 45.) Cool on a rack for as long as you can stand it (longer is, indeed, better). Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Muffins on Mondays: The Best Blueberry Muffins

Last year during the blogathon, I used Mondays to write Meatless Monday posts. I may do this again at some point, but on this particular Monday, I want to write about muffins.

I took full advantage of having run yesterday morning to have an especially leisurely afternoon. I ate a bagel; I read the paper; I took a little nap; I read some more. (It was too hot to garden til later in the afternoon.) And then as the afternoon progressed, I decided to make muffins. Most of the time, I make muffins that are slightly virtuous--they have whole grain flour in them, and not too much butter, and maybe there's some wheat germ in there, or fruit, or something else wholesome. Yesterday, however, I went the other way, towards more dessert-like and decadent muffins.

It was partly that, now that May is here and blueberry season is in sight again, I don't need to dole out last summer's frozen berries quite so sparingly. But it was also that I hadn't made blueberry muffins in ages, and when I try to be virtuous with blueberry muffins, I'm never happy. It's one case where I'd rather have the real thing than healthy-it-up and be vaguely unsatisfied.

I first learned of these muffins from a muffin cookbook owned by my friend Emily. It's by Elizabeth Alston and called, simply, Muffins. I borrowed it from Emily multiple times and finally copied down the recipes for the blueberry muffins and the banana bran muffins (also delicious). Even though the blueberry muffin recipe is now available online, whenever I want to make these muffins, I still open the notebook where I wrote the recipe down, the purple ink now faded, the page splotched with butter stains and bits of flour.

The recipe is not complicated. The only unusual thing, really, is the addition of a half cup of mashed berries to the batter. Since my berries were frozen, I popped the half cup into the microwave for a few minutes to soften them up. The addition of the berries at that early point is rather dramatic, as the batter turns a lovely shade of purple once it's mixed together.



I suspect that if you use fresh berries, there will be less liquid (I probably left mine in the microwave a bit too long), and the batter will not be as purple. I kind of like the color, but if purple muffin batter is not your thing, then either use fresh berries or microwave them until they're just mashable but not runny.

Otherwise, the recipe is quite straightforward. There's the flour, butter and eggs, the blueberries, the flour and milk added alternately. The final step is to sprinkle the tops of the muffins with a sugar/nutmeg mixture. Even though the muffins are sweet enough as is, I wouldn't skip this step, as the sugar makes the tops crackly, and the nutmeg adds a nice echo of flavor.

I need to add here that I am a recent convert to muffin liners and now can't imagine making muffins without them. I've ruined more than one muffin tin by either using spray oil that eventually gets all gummy or by letting burnt bits bake onto them. Muffin liners (mostly) eliminate both problems. I feel rather dumb that it took me so long.

And whether or not you feel virtuous because you ran a 5K that morning, you should enjoy these muffins without guilt. Life is too short to eat mediocre blueberry muffins, and these are anything but.

The Best Blueberry Muffins

Barely adapted from Muffins, by Elizabeth Alston, reprinted many places

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter at room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar (or a bit less, depending on the sweetness of the berries)

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 1/2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen will work), ½ cup mashed

2 cups all-purpose flour (can substitute 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, if desired)

1/2 cup milk

1 tablespoon granulated sugar, mixed with 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg for topping

Heat oven to 375°. Grease muffin pan or line with muffin liners.

In large bowl, mix butter until creamy. Add sugar and beat until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each. Beat in vanilla, baking powder and salt.

Mix mashed berries into batter.

With spoon or rubber spatula, fold in half of the flour, then half of the milk into batter; then flour, then milk again. (I use the lowest speed on my Kitchen Aid mixer for this step sometimes.)

Fold in remaining blueberries.

Spoon into muffin cups and sprinkle topping onto each muffin.

Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until golden brown and springy to touch.

Try to let cool for at least 30 minutes before removing from pan.

September Blueberry Bliss

So, this post could have easily been titled "August Blueberry Bliss" or "Summer Blueberry Bliss," but alas, I didn't get my act together til now. But, it is still blueberry season, if the tail end, so there is still time to indulge yourself with these lovely blueberry bars.

As I've mentioned previously, I love blueberries and have made it a summer priority to pick berries so that I always have a supply in the freezer for winter blueberry treats. Emily and I went blueberry picking last week, along with Tommy, now 7. While we were picking, we reminisced about some of our earlier blueberry journeys with Tommy, including the year he was two plus, when he really, really, really wanted to knock the bucket of blueberries over with his stick and was only persuaded not to by force of parental will and repeated exclamations of how unhappy everyone would be if he did. And then there was the year he was three, when his little brother Jamie was a tiny baby. Em was stressed out about leaving Jamie, and Tommy was in no mood for blueberries and had to be set up amidst the blueberry bushes with his blanket and book. And he still didn't like it.

This year, overall, was much calmer. Tommy brought a Tin-Tin book to read, in case he got bored, and though he was mildly irritated by the bugs, he rallied and instigated a blueberry picking contest in which the loser (who picked less) would bake blueberry muffins for the winner. I won, by a very small margin, but I have not demanded my prize (yet).

Most of those berries are in the freezer now, but I saved just enough to make just one more batch of these blueberry breakfast bars. This is a recipe I discovered the weekend that Alex, in a fit of blueberry enthusiasm, took advantage of the 15 pints for $30 deal at the farmers market. Once he had the blueberries home, he was a bit overwhelmed by his blueberry bounty and gave me 3 pints to bake with. My usual blueberry treats include my beloved peach-blueberry crumble and my new standby, blueberry buttermilk cake. But I wanted something that used a lot of blueberries all at once, and I liked the idea of bars. I contemplated Smitten Kitchen's Blueberry Crumb Bars, but I wanted something that was more crumble-like. And then I stumbled on these Blueberry Breakfast Bars from Farmgirl Fare.

Their set-up is simple--a crumble bottom, a berry middle and a streusel topping. They are easy to make, adaptable, not terribly bad for you and totally delicious. I made a few changes to Farmgirl Fare's otherwise excellent recipe. I cut the amount of butter down rather significantly (from 2 sticks and 2 tbsps. to just over a stick) and added some lemon zest in with the berries. I also experimented with swapping out some of the white flour with whole wheat pastry flour (this works fine) and cutting down a bit on the sugar in the berries. (This had mixed results. The less sweet bars were still delicious, but I think they were better with a bit more sugar. Still, I think you can fiddle with the amount. Given the brown sugar in the crumble layer and in the topping, they will be somewhat sweet no matter what.) In most of my batches, I added walnuts to the top layer, which I'd definitely recommend.

What I love about this recipe, besides its sheer deliciousness, is that the bars travel well and keep well and stay delicious, if slightly smushed, for days. They're great plain or with ice cream, for breakfast, tea or dessert. (And on one fine night, Alex and I skipped dinner entirely and just ate blueberry bars with homemade peach ice cream. Yum.) The recipe also makes a generous batch, although the first time I made them, they were such a revelation that three of us managed to polish off half a pan in one sitting . . . and after a good dinner. They're that good. After three batches of the plain blueberry bars in a rather short span of time, I branched out and made the peach-blueberry version. I included her recipe variation below, but if you want more detail, Farmgirl Susan talks about it here.

And not that my handsome Kalu and sunflowers have anything to do with blueberry bars, but I couldn't resist. I decided that he liked lolling around next to the sunflowers because they complimented his eyes.

Blueberry Breakfast Bars
Adapted from Farmgirl Fare

Bottom Layer
2 cups old-fashioned oats
3/4 cup all-purpose flour (Can substitute 1/4 cup whole wheat (pastry) flour for 1/4 cup white)
3/4 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

5-6 Tablespoons butter, melted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Top Layer
1/2 cup all-purpose flour (can replace some white flour with ww pastry flour if desired)
1/2 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/2 stick (4 tbsp.) butter
approx. 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional) or more to taste (If you don't use the walnuts, you might want to up the amount of flour, up to 1 cup total.) 

Middle Layer
3-1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries (I usually upped this to 2 full pints.)
1/2 to 1 teaspoon pure almond extract
1/2 - 3/4 cup granulated sugar (depending on sweetness of fruit and your own taste)
3 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg (1/4 tsp. if freshly ground)
Zest of one lemon

For the Bottom Layer:
Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Grease a 9" x 13" pan. (I put a piece of parchment in the pan and lightly sprayed that with cooking spray.) In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Stir in the melted butter and vanilla until thoroughly combined. (With the smaller amount of butter, you'll need to spend a bit more time on the mixing part to get everything combined.) Press this mixture evenly into the bottom of the pan with your fingers. (You can also use the bottom of a stainless steel measuring cup to help make the crust flat and even--Farmgirl Susan recommended this, and I concur.)

For the Top Layer:
Place the flour, brown sugar, and butter in a small bowl and use a fork, pastry blender, or your fingers to combine until the mixture resembles large crumbs (some pea-sized clumps are okay). You can also use a food processor or mini-chopper, pulsing briefly to combine everything. Set aside.

For the Middle Layer:
Place the blueberries in the bowl you mixed the Bottom Layer in and toss them with the rest of the ingredients. Pour them evenly over the Bottom Layer in the pan. (If the sugar/flour doesn't stick, you can sprinkle them over the blueberries once they're in the pan, but I didn't have any problem with this.)

Sprinkle the Top Layer evenly over the blueberry mixture. Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees F and bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is golden, and the edges are starting to brown. Let cool in pan on a wire rack. Store in a cool place or refrigerate. Bars may also be frozen.

Just Peachy Blueberry Breakfast Bars:
Substitute 3 cups of small peach chunks (about 2 peaches, no need to peel them) and 2 cups of fresh or frozen blueberries for the 3-1/2 cups of blueberries. (It also works vice-versa, with 2 cups of peaches and 3 of blueberries.) Toss the sugar and flour directly with the fruit before spreading it over the bottom layer. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then lower the oven to 350 degrees and bake until topping looks "dry" but edges aren't too brown, about 30 to 40 minutes.

Blueberry Buttermilk Cake (aka another plain cake)

I have to admit it--I'm a blueberry hoarder. Every summer, I make sure that I go blueberry picking at least once (and usually twice), and even though I might make muffins or crumble right then, I make sure that I have several large ziplock bags full of frozen berries in my freezer shortly thereafter. And I find myself somewhat reluctant to use them in the first cooler months--I start to envision a blueberry-less February, and I don't want to do that to myself. (I know, of course, that blueberries are available in the frozen foods department of any grocery store, but I'm always more attached to the berries I've picked myself--they're tangible proof that it was summer once and therefore must be again.) By late winter and early spring, though, I'm a bit more profligate with the berries, and by this time of year, I'll bake with them weekly--blueberry season, after all, is actually in sight, if still several months away. And it's even more heartening this year to see that there are berries developing on the biggest of my three baby blueberry bushes. (I'm thinking I might put a couple more in, if I can figure out where--who needs all that lawn, anyway?)

I was thinking about making blueberry muffins today, but I wasn't in the mood for either of my usual blueberry muffin recipes. And I'd seen this recipe up on Smitten Kitchen last week, as raspberry buttermilk cake, and had noted it as something I might want to make eventually, but I didn't think too much about it. But today, I was flipping through the June issue of Gourmet and saw the recipe again, and this time, something stuck--probably it was when I realized that this would be an excellent cake with blueberries as well as raspberries.

This cake is easy, easy, easy, and it's also nice in that it's not that bad for you. It has a half stick of butter and a single egg in the whole cake. You could even, maybe, call it a somewhat virtuous cake (unless, of course, you feel compelled to eat half of it at one sitting.). And it's definitely delicious. It's not quite a one bowl cake, but it's 2 bowls, only one of which really gets dirty, and one measuring cup for the buttermilk. I was generous with the blueberries on top, and I put some lemon zest in the batter, since I'm a big fan of the lemon/blueberry combo (Exhibit A). It took all of 15 minutes (if that) to put together, and it was out of the oven and cool enough to eat in less than an hour.

As for the serving size, I want to quote Laurie Colwin, who wrote this in her chapter on "How to Make Gingerbread" in her wonderful book of food essays, Home Cooking:

"This little three-layer cake will feed six delicate, well-mannered people with small appetites who are on diets and have just had a large meal, or four fairly well-mannered people who are not terribly hungry. Two absolute pigs can devour it in one sitting--half for you and half for me--with a glass of milk and a cup of coffee and leave not a crumb for anyone else."

I won't say that that's what Alex and I did this afternoon. But I will say that there is perhaps a third of the cake left, and I know already that it's lovely with tea, so I won't guarantee it lasting past tomorrow.

Blueberry Buttermilk Cake
Adapted from Gourmet, June 2009

The original recipe called for raspberries, and I obviously used blueberries. Any type of berry seems like it would suffice. I'm also contemplating how this might work with rhubarb instead of berries. It feels like a generally flexible recipe, so I'll bet lots of variations could work.

Makes one thin 9-inch cake--see note on number of servings above.

1 cup all-purpose flour (I used 1/3 whole wheat pastry flour)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, divided
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (optional)
1 large egg
1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk
1 cup fresh berries (I used 1 1/2 cups frozen blueberries.)

Preheat oven to 400°F with rack in middle. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and set aside. In a larger bowl, beat butter and 2/3 cup sugar with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about two minutes, then beat in vanilla and zest, if using. Add egg and beat well.

At low speed, mix in flour mixture in three batches, alternating with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour, and mixing until just combined.Spoon batter into cake pan, smoothing top. Scatter berries evenly over top and sprinkle with remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar.

Bake until cake is golden and a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and cool to warm, 10 to 15 minutes more. Invert onto a plate.

(Deb and many of her commenters said their cakes baked in 20 minutes. Mine did not. At 25 minutes, the middle was still a bit jiggly, so I left it in for 5 more minutes, and it was perfect.)

Stormy night crumble

I haven't gone blueberry picking yet this summer. It's always on my summer to-do list, but somehow it hasn't happened yet, maybe because of our continued monsoon climate. But last Saturday at the farmer's market, I bought 2 pints, thinking I would make some nice blueberry dessert.

Somehow, I managed not to just eat all the blueberries, sitting so temptingly in my fridge, and today, I used the fabulous Food Blog Search and scrolled through pages and pages of delicious blueberry-related recipes--cakes and pies and tarts and muffins. Did I decide to make any of them? Well, no. I did mark a bunch of recipes for later, but instead, for tonight, I returned to my very old standard, blueberry-peach crumble.

1989 was the summer of crumble. I had just graduated from college and was housesitting for the summer with a bunch of friends, and we made crumble nearly every night. Sometimes, we would make it til 10 p.m. or so, feeling very restrained, and then we'd give in and make a late night crumble, just because we could.

There's something very comforting about making something you've made a zillion times before. I think of my various kitchens, I think of all the various people I've eaten crumble with over the years. I made a crumble for my first date with Alex in 2001. We knew each other casually but not well, and he'd invited me over for dinner. It was August, crumble season, and I offered to bring dessert. It was not the most successful dinner as dinners went, which has nothing to do with his cooking and everything to do with my pickiness. He knew I was a vegetarian and had made me this lovely Japanese meal, with soup with soba noodles and tofu with a dipping sauce and daikon. The soup was in lovely little bowls, and there were blue glasses. The problem is that I am a vegetarian who hates tofu, and I don't like daikon much either. (I did like the soba noodles, at least.) But clearly, he'd gone to all this effort to make this lovely meal, and I felt terrible, especially because it would have been easy to say that I didn't like tofu ahead of time. But I'd brought the crumble for dessert, and it turned out that peaches and blueberries were his favorite combination, and we ate it, and things worked themselves out after that.

So, on this rainy August afternoon that morphed into a stormy August evening, I went down to the kitchen and went through my very familiar routine--blanching peaches, rinsing blueberries, melting butter, measuring flour and sugar and oats. I like that it's such a casual and forgiving recipe and that you'd have to do something really dramatically bad to it for it not to taste good. My peaches weren't perfectly ripe, for example, but I knew that the time in the oven would take care of that. (A month or so ago, I made this breakfast apricot crisp from Smitten Kitchen, and the only apricots I could find were from Trader Joe's. Some were too ripe and some weren't ripe enough, and the rest were mealy. Really, not a stellar batch of apricots. But after some time in the oven, they'd broken down into this sticky, jammy, apricot mush that was quite delicious.)

I usually like to put walnuts in the topping, but meal moths have been wreaking havoc in my cabinets, and the only suitable nuts the moths hadn't gotten into were slivered almonds, so I threw some of those in instead. I also put some lemon zest in, which I usually don't do. But a few years ago on my birthday, we went out for a fancy dinner. Most of the dinner wasn't that memorable, but the dessert--something with lemon and blueberries--was fabulous. We'd restrainedly only ordered one to share. Strangely, while we were eating, the waiter appeared and asked if we knew the name of King Lear's third daughter. There was Cordelia, of course, and there was Regan . . . "Goneril," I said, former English major that I am. "Goneril, of course, thanks," he said and went back to the kitchen. We both stared after him, but we weren't quick enough because really, in exchange for my literary knowledge, we both thought we deserved another dessert. By the time he came out again, the moment had passed. Alas, that restaurant is now closed, so we can't even go back and see if it's still on the menu.

Anyway, this recipe is wonderfully flexible and adaptable. I took the basic proportions from Molly Katzen's recipe for Summer Fruit Crumble in Still Life with Menu and adapted it from there. (Crumble isn't crumble to me without oatmeal in the topping, and her original only has flour.)

Alex came over this evening, and we ate the first ratatouille of the season (another farmer's market/garden amalgamation) with cous cous and bread. And then, of course, there was the crumble, predictably and reliably delicious. The stains on my tablecloth at both of our places are testament to its soupy goodness.

Even though I can't believe it's already August and I'm wanting to slow time down and stretch things out just a little bit, there are things that August is certainly good for, and one of them is that summer fruit is abundant, and you can make crumble every single night if you want to.

Summer Fruit Crumble
Adapted from Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu

3-4 cups sliced fresh peaches, apricots, or plums, or a combination
(I usually use 5-6 peaches)

2-3 cups berries
(I use 1 1/2 pints blueberries.)

1/2 cup, plus 1 tbsp. white flour

1 cup rolled oats

2 tbsp. granulated sugar

3 tbsp. brown sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4-1/3 cup nuts (chopped walnuts or sliced almonds)

4 tbsp. (1/2 stick) melted butter

zest of one lemon (optional)

1) Preheat oven to 375

2) Combine fruit in a bowl. Toss with 1 tbsp. flour and the granulated sugar.
Transfer to a medium size baking pan (8 or 9 inches square, or a small rectangle)

3) Combine oats, 1/2 cup flour, brown sugar, salt, nuts and melted butter. Distribute over the pan of fruit and pat into place

4) Bake at 375 for 30 minutes or until the top is lightly browned and the fruit bubbly. Let cool at least 10-15 minutes, then serve hot, warm or at room temperature.