farming

baking pie crust

You read the title, it’s time for Saskatoon Pie!

Yum, yum, yum! Spicy, fruity, sweet but tart, this pie is all of my favourite things. I could eat plain Saskatoons for days, but they are best in pie. I was pretty young when I first started baking, and I must say pies are still my favourite thing to bake. When I turned eleven my grandma sat me down and told me that she was planning to teach me a secret. She said that some grandma’s taught their grandkids how to cook, or how to sew, but she was going to share with me how to bake. Shortly thereafter I was gifted a muffin cookbook, an apron and some measuring cups, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One summer I decided it was high time I learned to make a pie.

I come from a family of pie connoisseurs, and as an avid baker, it seemed like a natural step. If I remember correctly Mom offered to help teach me,  which I adamantly refused. If I was going to bake a pie, I was going to do it entirely myself. (In retrospect this was a very good idea, I tend to be a bit stubborn when it comes to all things kitchen related, and it very well could have been a disaster if this first endeavor was a team effort). Mom handed me a box of Tenderflake and told me to use the instructions on the box for the pie crust, which I still use to this day. I have the recipe memorized, but I reference it every time, just to be safe.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but that first pie was an absolute success and I haven’t looked back! My roommate always says that you either have pie hands or you don’t, and I guess I got pretty lucky in that department! I decided to make use of them yesterday. After a few hours and flour all over my kitchen, it’s never a good pie unless the kitchen floor resembles a grist mill, I was ready to feast!

Saskatoon pie is just so freaking good!

I can always go for a good slice of pie with a cup of coffee. Pop loves it with vanilla ice cream on it, and one of my friends swears it’s better without. Or, if you’re my beau, you come home with some peanut butter ice cream as a topping (not the best combination I will admit, and Pop never fails to tease him about it!).  Peanut butter goes with everything, right?  Not so much. Speaking of different toppings, I’ve also heard it is excellent topped with a think slice of cheddar cheese!

But seriously, I think it’s fantastic every which way, and I hope you do too! Below is your chance to give it a go.  Let us know what you think, if you get a chance to try it!

 


Saskatoon Pie

Prep Time: 25 minutes for filling, 35 minutes for crust

Cook Time: 40 minutes

 

Ingredients:

  • Pie crust – if you are making the crust I just use the recipe on the Tenderflake box, but you can also use store bought crust, I wont judge too harshly 😉 You will need a top and bottom crust.
  • 4 cups frozen Saskatoons (Mom and Pop have the BEST trees for this)
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 3/4  cup sugar
  • 1/8 cup cornstarch
  • 1/8 cup flour
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 3 tablespoons lemon juice

Instructions:

  1. Heat oven to 375°, and place bottom pie crust in pie plate.
  2. In a medium pot simmer Saskatoons over medium heat. Once they have warmed and some liquid has accumulated in the pot, add the butter and sugar. Stir and bring to a gentle boil
  3. Lower the heat and add the cornstarch, flour and cinnamon. Stir until well combined, and then add lemon juice.
  4. Bring the filling to a boil to thicken and remove from heat.
  5. Place inside the pie shell, and add upper crust. Saskatoon pie works wonderfully with a lattice top. You can do basically any top style you like, I find this one the best as it doesn’t bubble out as much.
  6. Bake for 375° for 5 minutes.
  7. Lower the oven temperature to 350°, and bake for the remaining 35 minutes.
  8. Allow to cool, if you can resist it ’til then! Top however you’d like and enjoy! FYI, Peanut Butter ice cream? Not recommended.

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corn field in fall

It’s Autumn. Summer chores are slowing, and will soon reach an end. All the hay has been hauled and stacked. You can literally watch the farm change from one day to the next. Each morning is new and different and exciting. The colours dance from every tree and every shrub. You can’t look down a fence line and see the same thing you saw yesterday. The leaves are a brighter red, the rose hips look richer, the grass and wild grains have become more golden. It’s always new, almost by the glance there’s something there that was not the day before.

Yellows, oranges, reds, browns and left-over greens sprinkled in. And if all that colour wasn’t enough, take a deep gulp of that air. You’ll never breathe anything like it any other time of year. It’s cool and quiet and crisp and full of scents from every grass every leaf, every pond, and every field. You will feel full to the brim just breathing all this in. There is no other time of year when your senses become so heightened and aware of everything that surrounds you as they do now.

This is autumn, and I can’t imagine a soul who wouldn’t fall in love with her.

Even better, it’s the start of the visiting season. It’s that time of year when the gentler days allow you to take that oft-delayed visit. It’s tough to do in the summer, but not so now. There’s no need to worry about rain or drought or pasture fences or water supplies or, or, or. It’s the season that has the two best holidays. You get to celebrate with an oven roasted stuffed turkey on one holiday and have the bejesus scared out of you on the other. Honestly, you can’t beat Thanksgiving AND Halloween! I love when it’s not too cold out, there’s no place to be, and no chores for me to tackle.

All you need to do, is take your time and use it to have coffee with a neighbour, enjoy some time with your family and find someone to scare the daylights out of!

Start with the visiting. Twyla and I have a number of ‘must sees’ on our list and beginning this weekend we will get on the phone, make some calls and try to figure out whom we get to see first. I confess, Twyla is much more of a social butterfly than I am, so she’ll be making most of these arrangements.

 

Of course we won’t be off to anyone’s house this weekend for coffee.

We can’t. We already have plans to attend the Spooktacular at Fort Edmonton. It promises to be a lot of fun. We’ve done this before and so know a little of what to expect. I can’t wait for it all to begin! We promise to tell you all about it and include pictures of our costumes when we get back home.

Come to think of, you could say that this weekend we will be combining a little of our visiting time with a little of our spine-tingling entertainment since there is a group of six of us going together. Fort Edmonton is beautiful all year round, and is the absolute best in autumn. And best of all, we’ll be costumed up!

On a side note, I also have some scary stuff planned soon. After all it is Halloween.

Someone has to get good and spooked, don’t you think? Now I’m not going to name names but we have one particular neighbour that is deathly afraid of Ouija boards. Who knows why? It’s not logical. We have a decorative Ouija couch throw pillow. You can literally chase her with it. I’m guessing she thinks if it touches her skin she’ll have a curse placed upon her. Maybe, something that changes her into a black crow with one wing, and a broken beak and that continually flies into the same pain of glass for all eternity. That’s just a guess folks…I don’t actually know anything about curses.  😉

So anyway, this autumn I was able to find a very old wooden chipped and worn Ouija board at a pawnshop. It’s seen some crazy hard miles from it’s planchette, just judging from the missing letter paint.  Much of the surface and finish has been scraped completely off.  Well I bought that Ouija board and have it tucked safe and sound somewhere inside her house.  When it’s dark and cold and windy and spooky and when the time is just right she’s going to ‘stumble’ onto that old antique. I’m hoping I have the good fortune of having my phone ready to record it when it happens. Something tells me that video will be worth loading onto the blog!

Happy Halloween everyone!

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locks on somerset bridge

Times are changing here on the farm.

Not all that long ago we never owned a lock,  nothing was ever protected that way. We just didn’t feel the need. Vehicle keys were left in the ignitions, and doors were always free to be opened by whomever came to visit. Shop doors and fuel storage were never secured. Nothing was battened down and no one ever gave it a second thought. I wish I could say all that is still the way it is today. But even in Mayberry things changed. And so they have in our small neck of the woods as well.

Influenced by the outside world, the time has come for us to install a home alarm system.

The system itself arrived in one small box in the mail, and with the help of the on-call security support, Twyla and I had the system up and running in a single afternoon. As a final step of the installation process, I screwed the notification of the alarm system to the gate post so all guests could easily see what we had installed. That was several weeks back.

We are pleased with the alarm system we chose. It has worked very well during our tests, both planned and not. Most tests tend to fall into the unplanned category.  Take for example an unexpected visit one day from Margret, our neighbour to the west.

Of course, we needed to test the alarm to make sure all was in working order.

For no particular reason, one morning before I walked out to the barn to work, I activated the alarm for the house. I didn’t lock the door. The barn is 50 yards due west of the house, straight out the front door.

While working in the barn the dogs let out a few barks. It’s funny how you come to understand the different tones your dog uses when it barks. This tone was very familiar. It simply said “Hey, it’s just our neighbours coming up the driveway, no worries”. Recognizing this bark I didn’t leave the barn but I did look through the doors up at the house for confirmation.

When I glanced up, I saw Margret pulling up the driveway.

With her truck shifted to park and engine shut off, Margret and her two young daughters climbed out of the truck. At this point in my morning I had long forgotten about the alarm that was set earlier in the day. I half worked, and half watched as they walked from the truck to the front door. It wasn’t until Margret opened the front door and the alarm system squawked to her it was active that I remembered. Oh Crap! Margret had opened our door countless times, but never to this unwelcome announcement. This was a new sound for her and it sparked a reaction I hadn’t expected. Startled, she spun on her heels and ran out the front door as quickly as she could ‘uching’ her girls as she retreated, “Run! Run! GO!”, she ordered!

Laughing I dropped what I was doing and started to trot to the house. Running is not easy to do when you’re belly laughing.

Unfortunately when you trigger the alarm you have a short 45 seconds to enter the code and shut it down.

If you fail, a live operator comes on to let you know that “The authorities have been dispatched.” Margret didn’t know the code to get them to ‘stand down’. That would be foolish. And as slow as I was, I failed to make it in time.

I reached the door as the operator asked Margret to “Identify herself”. The operator had no way of knowing Margret had high-tailed it back to her truck and was safe inside with her two accomplices.  Once in the house and speaking with the operator, I fished around until I had our security code in my fist. I verbally relayed the code to the operator and the alarm system buzzers fell silent. With tension dialed down, things began to return to normal.

Despite the unpleasant surprise, Margret was impressed with our security system.

So much so, that when she returned home she convinced Seamus they ought to install one as well. The system they chose was slightly different from ours. They did not do a self-install as we had.  Instead an alarm ‘specialist’ arrived with all the necessary equipment to set it up for them. The installation went flawlessly, for the most part. During the final step of the install the specialist was on his cell phone asking for one last piece of information to finish the job.

“All set” he declared, “I just need the werbol password.”

“I’m sorry”, came back the operator, “I am hearing most of what you’re asking, I just can’t make out that last part.”

“The password” the installer repeated, “I need the werbol password.”

“Again”, returned the operator, “I’m not quite making out that last little bit, can you repeat?”

This exchange went back and forth a number of times on speaker phone. The installer was becoming increasingly frustrated with each new try. As a last-ditch attempt to get the information he needed, he handed his phone to Margret.

Shocked at being thrust the phone, Margret exchanged quizzical glances with Seamus.  He shrugged his shoulders. She shrugged. Then, moving the phone a little closer she simply stated, “You know, the WERBOL password.”

Awkward silence followed, a few surprised glances were tossed back and forth, perhaps a little laughter by the operator?  It was hard to tell.

“Verbal” stepped in Seamus, “They need the VERBAL password”.

Now, in Margret’s defense, there are a lot of acronyms and odd sounding nomenclature in her work and IT in general.

Security system jargon would definitely fall within that realm. However, another thing to consider, is that this installer had a very thick accent, and spoke English as a second language. So when Margret had heard “werbol”, most everyone else in earshot heard “verbal”.  As you can imagine this mispronunciation of the word, which matched his mispronunciation perfectly, surprised him and everyone else.

With his phone returned and the “werbol” password now entered, and the security system installation was complete.  It wasn’t long and all the necessary paperwork was sufficiently shuffled. Soon the installer was all packed and on his way down the road to his next ‘venue’.

Back at Margret’s? Oh yes, a bit of laughter ensued, for sure.

And as I mentioned, “The times they are a changin’.”

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