Never Bashful with Butter

Here’s the berry pie before baking. Note that it is dotted with butter. Yay butter! It adds a real nice velvety texture to the pie filling when its served.

A shot of the top of the pie crust before baking. I used my fondant cutters to cut out the word “pie” as steam vents. hehe..

And now, after baking.

Living out in the country, we had plenty of opportunity to grow wild blackberry bushes. I actually don’t think I know anyone that planted blackberry bushes on purpose, if anything people paid to have them removed because they were EVERYWHERE.

Of course, being a child, this meant more opportunity to pick them, since they pretty much lined the streets where I lived.

We actually had a big blackberry bush that had been growing out of the back of our tool shed theneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.com majority of my childhood. I don’t remember really even thinking about it, except when my mom would complain about the bees. I just remember going out with a big metal bowl or a big plastic bucket, and picking tons of juicy blackberries off the bush, cutting up my hands and arms almost all the way to my shoulders on the thousands of tiny little sharp thorns growing on the vines. It stung, but rarely bled. It wasn’t a big deal or anything, it just came with the territory.

When I was little, my sister and I would go on walks up and down the road together, mostly because we had friends that lived at both ends of the street, and my mom wouldn’t let either of us walk anywhere alone. We lived on a dead end road in the middle of nowhere, and the majority of the people that lived on that road had either lived there since my great grandpa was alive, or were relatives, so it was a pretty safe road in comparison to other places.

Anywho, next to one of our friends houses there was an abandoned trailer. It had been there forever, neither of us knowing who lived there originally, and being children, it was much more fun to pretend that a crazy old witch lived there once upon a time, rather than asking an adult who would have told us the truth, though, oddly enough- it was a crazy old lady that lived there. But, we pretended that the trailer was haunted by the ghost of a crazy old witch. It was overgrown with blackberry bushes, all the windows were missing, and the people who owned the property had started using the rest of the land as storage for these strange slabs of concrete.

Finally, I’m assuming neighbours started complaining about it, because there was a bunch of heavy machinery going down the road, and one day it was just gone. Nothing but a flat slab of concrete that was the foundation. Of course, being children, we immediately adopted this flat slab of concrete as a stage for whatelse but SINGING!! Yep, my sister, myself, and all the neighbour kids would hang out on this giant slab of concrete and sing and dance and act like the strange children that we were.

Like I had said before, the property was loaded up with blackberry bushes. Huge bushes of them, chock full of giant juicy berries. If we caught them early enough in the season, we could pick tons of them without worrying about the bees. Things carried on like this for a while, until that summer when I was 11 years old.

I had a friend that just moved in down the road, a few mailboxes down from the big slab and the blackberry bushes. She went to my school, and we got along well, so we would hang out together a lot. My mom finally OK’d me to walk down the road by myself, and I was totally excited. It was just a little under a mile away from our front yard, down a road full of houses of friends and family, and just past what you might call “the old woods” which connected to the back of the property containing the slab. The woods were pretty scary, and I was specifically told NOT to go into them. Not only were they they private property and within barbed wire fences and signs that said “no tresspassing” but my mom said there was a big creek that ran under the road and down into a big gully that was full of brambles and ferns, so it looked a lot more shallow than it was, so it would be very easy to fall into, and I wouldn’t be able to get back out because it was so steep. She also told me that if I looked closely, I would see the frame of an old house that had started to collapse and fall into the gully.

I totally fell for that story, by the way.

So I started my walk down the road to Candy’s house. I passed the nice people in the red house that had chickens in their front yard, I passed by my neighbour Tom’s house, I kept up my pace, Waiving at the other people that I only knew as the parents of people I either went to school with, or was friends with. My Uncle Jeff was gardening and I had a little chat with him, he had asked me about School. I only remember this conversation because he and his wife had just adopted two toddlers, Chris and Dawn, and everyone in the family was so happy for them. I looked forward to being their future babysitter.

I kept on down the road, finally passing the slab and then I got to where the sun no longer shined on the road, under the shade of the old woods. It was really only about 20 feet of shade, I could see the light at the other end, and the front yard of my friend Candy’s grandparents house. She lived with her grandparents, which seemed cool to me, since I’ve always gotten along with older people. I never had a grandpa, and my grandma is and was… Unique. Anyways..

I paused for a moment, looking around nervously. My imagination got the best of me during those first few steps. I went from “happy I’m on my way to my friends house” to “Oh my gosh the crazy witch is going to kill me”.

I managed to create this story in my head, about there being a house under all the ferns and weeds. Sure, there was a creek down there too, but it was much smaller than my mom let on. The house was old and rickety, there were big giant bugs down there, but the lady that lived in the house didn’t mind, she just used them for her magic spells, or for magic potions.

I tried not to think about the little story I had brewing in my head as I walked forward, willing myself to run, finding my legs much heavier than they were a moment prior. I thought about how the witch must have a secret passageway up through the brambles and bushes and ferns, probably a ladder. She fed on the  children that walked slow or felt the need to explore the old woods. Maybe she knew that the kids would want to explore the collapsed house frame, or she would lure them in with the shiny things that could be seen in the distance.

Wait. shiny things?

The rest happened very VERY fast. Just as I thought about the old witch and luring the children, a flickering bright light caught my eye. It looked like a reflection. I turned my head to the right, squinting to see what it is, intent on staying where I was and not being caught by the witch. Then I heard a rustling of bushes on the right side of me. The woods were on both sides of me, though the left side was far less scary than the right. But something was moving in the bushes, and it was freaking me out. When I turned to the left to inspect, my sister and two of her friends jumped out of the bushes on the right side and started pummeling me with blackberries.  It was another one of her friends in the bush on the left side of me, and when I turned back and saw my sister throwing blackberries, she started throwing berries too.

I was more startled than hurt, but I was screaming bloody murder as I proceeded to run as fast as I could to my friends house. I got there, and her grandpa must have heard me screaming, because he was on his way down the driveway with a shotgun. HA! He didn’t think it was very funny, he actually yelled at me for kicking up his gravel (which, when you think about it, is exactly the sort of stereotypical old man thing to say in that situation)

He walked me up the rest of the driveway, laughing as I told him what happened. He asked me why I was so scared of the woods in the first place, and I told him what my mom said, about the collapsed house and the creek in the gully, and how it was so steep that I’d fall in and never get out.

He kept laughing, and when we got to the front door, he told Candy and I that we were going berry picking in the woods.

The rest of the afternoon, we walked through the woods, picking berries. And when we finally got to the spot where the “gully was” he calmly used his walking stick to hold back the brush so that I could see that there was infact, NO gully, and only a tiny little trickle of a stream barely worth calling a creek. He looked over at me, popped a berry into his mouth and said “there’s nothing to be afraid of in the woods, other than possibly your imagination.”

I’ve remembered that forever. Its something I’ve used to get myself through some strange situations, like being left alone 4 miles into the Mt. St. Helens ape caves with a broken ankle and no flashlight, waiting for my friends to come back with help, or a few years later, when my cousins and I went for a hike through the other side of the old woods, when they all decided to play an impromptu game of hide and seek, without letting me in on it. There’s nothing to be afraid of, other than possibly your imagination.

I always think of that line when I’m scared, and I always think of this story when I’m picking blackberries.

I’ve gone back down to the old woods since then, last summer, actually. They’re much less intimidating now. I don’t know if its because they are smaller, or if they just SEEM smaller. People have been buying up the land out there like crazy, since it really is like living in the country, only a few miles from the freeway, and it makes me sad to think that people moving out there for that reason actually precipitates change, and makes it less of a reason to live there. There are more houses on my parents street than there were even a year ago. I could stand at the end of my parents driveway when I was a child, and see nothing but cows and  grass. Now I see three houses.  Its sad.

But, I always will have my memories.

For now, back to the pie…

Mmm.. pie…

The filling is mostly blackberry, a little raspberry, a few strawberries and some marionberries.

Mmm… I can’t wait until it cools, its going to taste SO good. berry pie is my favouritest.

Today’s mixed berry pie was made with mostly fresh fruit, though I did add some frozen marionberries that we picked last season, since they’re a more late summer fruit. I’ll be eating this pie in a few hours, after its refridgerated a bit, with a big heaping spoonful of whipped cream. I love blackberry pie, and since this one is made with mostly blackberries.. its nearly as good as one made solidly from them.

This pie, besides being super easy, is actually from my grandmother’s “recipe”. I grew up enjoying it every summer. In my opinion, its best served warm with a heaping helping of fresh sweet cream.

On to the recipe!
For the pie crust-

2 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup ) COLD butter
a few tablespoons of ice water

Just like with the other pie crusts, start by mixing together the flour and sugar. Then press the cold butter into the flour using a process called “rubbing” where you pinch the flour and butter together, and using a “snapping” motion, “rub the butter into a dough. Be careful that you do not over develop the gluten, or you’ll have hard and chewy pie crust as opposed to soft and flakey.

You’ll know you’re done mixing the butter into the flour and sugar when the mixture resembles cous cous, or a fine grain. You dont want the pieces too big, or too small. Add the water by the tablespoon, gathering the dough together as you add the water, stopping when the dough has completely stuck together, before it gets sticky or tacky. If the dough is too soft, press a little flour into it.

Roll the pie crust out thinly and lay gently into a pie tin. Fill and bake as directed below-
For the berry filling-

3 cups blackberries
2 cups quartered strawberries
1 cup blueberries
1 cup raspberries
1 cup marionberries
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons brown sugar (if the berries aren’t totally ripe, increase the sugar by another two tablespoons)
3 tablespoons butter, cut into tiny pieces

mix together the berries, cornstarch and sugar until the berries are completely covered in sugar, and the cornstarch has started to dissolve.

Spoon the berry mixture into the prepared (unbaked) pie crust. Dot with the pieces of butter and cover with the second crust, sealing and crimping the edges. If you want decorative holes in the top of the pie, use cookie cutters before you lay it over top the pie filling. If you want a more rustic look, use a knife to cut slits in the crust after you’ve crimped the edges. Cover the entire pie top with tin foil and cut a few holes in the foil to allow steam to escape. Place the pie into a casserole dish and bake at 350 for 20 minutes, remove the foil and then bake again at 400 for another 20, or until the top and edges are browned.

allow to cool before serving.

Enjoy! This pie is a little more saucy than some other fruit pies but the sauce is the best part. Serve with either whipped cream or ice cream, and you’ll REALLY enjoy the sauciness.

-A.

I’ve never made chicken pot pie before today. I never really had a reason to, since I’ve never really liked it, and I’d much rather have chicken noodle soup (which is surprisingly similar) but my husband REALLY likes chicken pot pie.

So I made a pair of chicken pot pies. Each one is a bit bigger than a single serving, but he’s a growing boy. *smile*

(only one shot with meat visible under the cut, and its not very gratuitous either.)

Thats the chicken broth mixture having boiled out of the  top of the pie. I over stuffed them a tad, but for the most part, the innards remained contained.

It smelled delicious, just like buttermilk biscuits and chicken noodle soup. Probably because the chicken filling is remarkably similar to chicken noodle soup, only minus the noodles and with a more creamy soup base from the added flour and cream.

Its funny, this is the FIRST time I’ve used this particular bakeware. My mom bought us this gigantic set of vintage blue cornflower Corelle bakeware. I mean HUGE collection. I’ve got cookie sheets, pots, pans, mini dishes, quiche pans, pie tins, tall, short, round, square, oval. I’ve even got a matching carafe, and a matching coffee pot. Not to mention that each and every pan has a glass lid, and a removeable handle.

I’m a little frustrated with this dish collection, as I said, we never use it. I figure we’ll keep it until we move, and if we have a big enough kitchen, we’ll keep it, otherwise I might have to find it a home via Ebay. I love the notion, its just a much larger collection than we can handle.

I might keep these little mini pans though, they’re perfect for little pies like this. hehe..

Thats right! While I was making this pie filling, I discovered that it would be so easy to make it without dairy or meat products (the only non vegan parts of the recipe) and it would taste JUST as good.

So here goes with the recipe, I’ll list the vegan options next to the actual ingredients I used.

For the pie crust-

1/2 cup trans fat free shortening
2 cups flour
1/3 cup cold water

Rub together the shortening and the flour until you’ve got what looks like coarse ground oats. Add the cold water and gather the mixture into a ball. flatten the ball and cut it into four equal pieces. Coat each piece in flour.

Roll each separate ball out thinly, two of the sheets need to go into 2 cup pie pans or mini casserole dishes. leave the extra dough over the edges. Fill with pie filling, allowing it to heap in the center. Cover with a second sheet, roll the edges together and tuck them into the top of the pie. Cut several steam vents in the top of the pie. Bake as directed below.

for the filling-

3 tablespoons butter (Earth Balance margarine)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon mrs dash original salt free seasoning mix (you can use italian seasoning if you prefer)
2 tablespoons milk (soymilk)
2 cups rough chopped baby carrots
1 cup peas
1 cup rough chopped celery
1/2 cup corn
1/2 cup lima beans
1/2 cup chopped green beans
3 cups shredded prebaked chicken pieces (3 cups portobella mushrooms, cut into 1 inch pieces)
2 cups chicken broth (Vegetable broth- It smells SO MUCH better, you can find it canned or make it yourself, but I’ve always used canned)

Make sure you have all of the ingredients at the ready.
First melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has fully melted and starts bubbling, add the flour and all of the seasonings. Stir vigorously until the mixture has thickened and is fully mixed. Add the milk and the broth. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally. When the mixture starts to boil, shut off the heat and add the rest of the ingredients, stirring until they’ve all been coated by the mixture. Spoon into prepared (unbaked) pie crusts. Cover with second pie crust and roll together the edges, tucking them into the top of the pie. brush the top of the pie with milk (or soy milk) and cover with foil. Place the pie tins on a casserole dish and bake 30- 40 minutes at 450, Remove the foil for the last few minutes of baking, to allow the crust to fully brown.

Serve hot! They’re delicious.

-A.

 I’m fairly certain there is only one person other than me that reads my blog that remembers the great cherry massacre of 2005.
I spent an entire day washing and pitting cherries, then I made a series of cherry pies, only I used flour as a thickening agent instead of corn starch, so I had runny pies. The crust was awesome, just.. the inside of the pie was like liquid.

I’ve learned my lesson now.

I was a little sad to find that there were no cherries at any of the three grocery stores I went to last night. I ended up buying canned cherries, packed in water. I ate a few of them and they tasted pretty good.

Its not so important to have fancy cherries for a pie, but I would have liked to have fresh ones. You better believe I’ll be making more when the stores finally start having them.

I don’t have any photos of the inside of the cherry tartlettes because I’m taking them over to my brother in law’s house as a thank you for fixing my car. (its not fixed yet, but that’s why we’re going over there, so I figure payment on delivery is only fair.)

Ok ok, so they’re not cherry pies, they’re tartlettes. basically, they’re smaller versions of an actual pie, so they’re cuter, and they’re more mobile.

Also, you can get away with pretending you’re a giant and that you’re really eating a full sized pie. (and you won’t feel like a whale for eating an entire tartlette, where as, you might if you ate an entire pie.)

As for the crust, I used the recipe that I posted for the last pie, Banana cream (ignore the baking part of the directions, though.)-

it made three perfect little tartlettes with criss cross crust, as opposed to one single pie shell. I also rolled the dough out a bit thinner, considering they’re not as deep, so there is more crust to filling ratio than a normal pie anyways, so I tried to counteract that with the thinner crust (it worked)

So click here (or scroll down) for that recipe.

As for the Cherry filling, here’s my recipe-

2 cans (2lbs) red pie cherries NOT in heavy syrup. You can use fresh cherries, but if you can’t find them, I’m here to say canned cherries STILL taste good, at least in this recipe.
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch

Strain the cherries, and add the sugar and corn starch. Stir them around a bit, then spoon them, using a slotted spoon, evenly amongst the three tartlette shells. Of the reserved liquid from the sugar and corn starch, put two tablespoons of it into the tartlettes with the cherries.

For the tartlette dough, you should have it pressed into the tartlette shells, then spooned the cherries into the shell, which is yet unbaked.

With the extra dough, you can either roll out and cut out a few inch wide strips and lay them overtop of the cherry filling in a criss cross pattern, or leave them open, if you’re not a crust lover. Just make sure that no matter what, you leave enough room for fruit filling boil over, which is unavoidable with fruit pies.

Place the tartlette shells in their pans on a large sheet pan with sides, or a large casserole dish. Bake for about 30 minutes at 350 , or until the top crusts have browned as in the photo. Its important to bake them ontop of another pan, because the cherry filling with most certainly boil over and its SO HARD to clean it off the bottom of the oven.

After you finish baking them, you should let them cool at least to room temperature before eating. They’re better cold, in my opinion, but some people like warm cherry pie with ice cream.

However you like it, I hope you enjoy these tartlettes!

-A.

Well, its Tuesday, and its about time I start posting pies, since it is pie week.

This morning I woke up bright and early and started working on pies. The first one, I made for my husband who stayed home from work today. His favourite pie on the planet is banana cream.

So here it is!

banana cream pies are relatively simple to make, considering all they are is pudding, bananas, a little whipped cream and piie crust.

I made a buttery “shortbread” type dough for the pie crust, and layered slices of banana with some vanilla pudding that I whipped up from scratch, adding a little yellow food colouring and banana extract, ’cause thats how my honey likes it! *giggle*.

On top theres a giant dollneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comop of vanilla whipped cream that I made fresh, adding a little bit of the vanilla pudding to it for a little weight.

I’ve actually nearly got the pudding filling recipe memorized, thats how often I make it.

Anywho, on with the recipe.

For the pie crust-

1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled
2 teaspoons of sugar
3 Tablespoons ice water

In a large bowl, stir together the flour and sugar until evenly distributed. Drop the butter pieces into the bowl and cover them with the dry mixture. Using your fingers, press the flour mixture into the butter pieces, dropping them back into the dry mixture and pressing them again. Repeat this process (called rubbing) until you’ve got what looks like rough ground oats. Add the water, and gather the dough bits together, being careful not to knead the dough (so the gluten does not have a chance to be developed)

Refrigerate the dough about an hour, then roll it out thinly on a floured board with a floured rolling pin. Roll the dough up onto the pin and lay it down into the pie tin carefully, trimming the edgeswith a spoon, for a scalloped edge, or leaving an inch or so hang down to be rolled under for a more rustic look. I rolled out some extra dough and used a small round cookie cutter to make a bunch of rounds, and overlapped them on the rim, adhering them with a pastry brush dipped in water.

Use a fork to “dock” the dough once its ready to be baked, or fill the pie shell with pie weights so it doesnt bubble up while baking. Bake for about 15 minutes at 350, or until the entire pie crust is golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool fully before filling.
For the pudding-

2 cups milk
1/2 cup white sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon banana extract
a few drops of yellow food colouring
1 tablespoon butter
Directions:

In medium saucepan over medium heat, heat milk until bubbles form at edges. In a bowl, combine sugar, cornstarch and salt. Pour into hot milk, a little at a time, stirring to dissolve. Continue to cook and stir until mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a metal spoon. Do not boil. Remove from heat, stir in the extracts, food colouring and butter. Refrigerate in the bowl for about 20 minutes before spooning it into the (cooled) baked pie crust. Layer with slices of ripe banana. Cover with freshly whipped cream and a few more banana slices.

Voila!

Banana cream pie.

-A.

 Last month when I made the Sheeps cake, for the Threadless cake contest thing, after I announced that I won, The cake photos for the top five Threadless cakes found their way onto the TV. Fuse TV to be exact, by way of “The Sauce”, one of their daily programs where the hosts talk about music, gaming, entertainment and fun stuff like that between music videos.

I’d been in contact with one of the people that works for the station, *ahem*awavewithwords *ahem* Who was so kind to even mention my cake to the people in charge of putting stuff on the air in the first place. Anywho, afterwards she suggested that maybe I could make a cake for “The Sauce” and I thought that sounded like a great idea.

So after weeks of planning, a week of sculpting little fondant thinggamajneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comiggers, an weekend of hoping the heat would go away long enough to be able to actually make the cake (heat and fondant do not go together very well) and one solid day of assemblage, I would like to present-

My Thank you cake for The Sauce!

Its a single layer white chocolate and coconut cake with a thin layer of vanilla buttercream under the fondant. I’d actually baked two layers, but we decided that in shipping they might shake loose, and for a more stable cake, we just made it a single layer.

I used the Sauce TV logo from their website as inspiration-

Along with the logo- If you look closely, you’ll see an Ipod, Game controller, and under the logo there is a tennis shoe. I tried to mimic the sort of outer space feel with the dark blue on the cake, and made a shimmery swirl to mimic the kind of smoky haze. Then there are the dots, because I don’t have the patience to cut out tiny little asterisks. I added a cell phone and on the back there is a little record I also added the Fuse logo to the front, ’cause I had a little bit of extra space in the fron. I had originally made a big speaker to put on there, that looks like the big speaker in the background of the cake, but I didn’t have enough room for it in the back so I just left it off.

Ignore the yellow cutting board that I took the photos on, and ignore the tools and tubs in the background of a couple of those photos. I took them in my kitchen, and I tried to correct the florescent light, but its 3am, so deal with it. *smile*

One of the things about this cake is that it had to be made pretty compact so it can be sent across the country to New York.

In a few minutes I’ll be packing it up, and putting it on icepack, and around 8am it will start its way through the shipping process. It should arrive at the station by the next morning, and I hope my packing job will allow it to stay in one piece. If it doesn’t I these are the only surviving photos of it. I took them to prove that at one time, it looked pretty darn good, or at least as good as I could get it.

So there you go. I made another cake. Probably the last one until the next person asks me to make one, or until my birthday in September, whichever comes first.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to bed for a few hours and then wake up to make some pies for Pie week! woo!

-A.

Its summer here in the great northwest, and as such… I’ll be eating a lot of frozen treats between now and the end of August.  So why not photograph them and rate them? Who knows, maybe it’ll help out some poor soul searching for the perfect popsicle.

While I’m not quite sure what you’d call these, they do happen to fall under the popsicle category, since they are essentially a frozen something or other on a stick.

The packaging claims that they are ice bars which would lead me to think of something clear, water based, and similar to the florescent red/orange/purple standard frozen ices that you’d find in your local grocers freezer.

HOWEVER… These have skim milk listed in the ingredients, so I knew I’d be looking at something a bit more ice creamish than ice pop-ish. Either way, frozen milk or not, I was gonna devour these as soon as possible. Heat is one thing, but if my hair alone was an indication, the humidity was very high today as well.

But back toneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.com the ice pops…

I started with the banana one first. I figured I’d play it safe, since I do enjoy a good banana flavoured popsicle.  After opening the package, I saw that the item inside was much closer to ice cream than an ice pop, but figured it to be grainy, given the ice crystals that had begun to form on the outer layer of the pop.

…I could not have been more wrong on both fronts. This did not taste anything like a banana flavoured popsicle. This was actually banana flavoured. As in, it actually tasted like a banana, not like banana candy. It was delicious. The texture was creamy and perfect, not grainy or smushy. It was like nothing I’d ever eaten before.

Next I tried the melon flavour. I honestly thought I’d be saving the best for last, since I love love love strawvberries. This melon flavoured one threw me for a loop. At first, I didn’t know what to think. I thought it’d taste like some strange sort of melon, but it tasted more like cantalope than any other melon I’ve tried. it was a crisp, clear and clean flavour that’s hard to explain. It felt like maybe this would be a good flavour after a meal, to cleanse my palette.

You know, its photos like this that my mom always laughs at. She points at the teeth marks and says “I paid for those teeth” like I was trying to sell orthodontic appliances with my photos.

As for the strawberry pop, I was actually a little disapointed. It tasted like strawberry, but it just didn’t pack a punch like the other two pops did… It was good, but.. not as good as the others.

All in all, I’d have to say the melon flavour was my favourite, with the banana a close second. The strawberry pop I didn’t even finish. I put it in the freezer for later, if that tells you anything.

So on my quest to find the perfect popsicle, I’d have to give Melona a 3 out of 5. They can thank the melon flavour for that, since the strawberry one isn’t winning them any favours in my house.

-A.

What’s your favourite popsicle?

Thats right folks, Next week, all week, Pie pie pie. Its that time of year again, summer in the Northwest.

Be prepared for Sweet pies, savoury pies, cold pies, hot pies, large and small pies, tips, tricks and things to do with those extra pieces of pastry.

Heck, if you run a food blog or if you’re a foodie, JOIN IN! snag this graphic to post along with your pie entry-

(Don’t forget to label your post something about pie season) and leave me a link in the comments! .

-A.

P.S. for the love of pie, click here.Or here. Or.. Well, just click here and admit you love Weebl and Bob as much as I do! *smile*