Irish Pies

"How American", an Irish friend told Siobhan, when she told her of our Saturday pie making plans. And American it is, but this one had an Irish twist - rhubarb! It seems counter intuitive to put the sour vegetable in a pie. But here's the secret: loads and loads of sugar. We scoured the internet, and by this I mean we chose the first entry in google when you search "rhubarb pie recipe". This one here. It was incredibly straight forward. We learned a lot about rhubarb. For instance, did you know the leaves are toxic? We carefully washed our hands after trimming them. We also learned there is field-grown rhubarb which will be pink and light green stalks, and then there was the hot house rhubarb which will be bright pink/red all the way through. We had the field-grown kind. This is why our rhubarb pie was not the lovely red color we had expected. But it tasted nice all the same.

Even though it was pretty delicious, we were disappointed in the color of our pie. So on Sunday we decided to use the rest of our rhubarb to make rhubarb and strawberry pie. Again we used Google entry number 1 found here. And wouldn't you know it, adding strawberries made it downright fantastic as well as a lovely red color. So we ended up with slightly too much pie, but it was a lot of fun making our Irish pies.

Recipes:

Rhubarb Pie from allrecipes.com

Ingredients

• 4 cups chopped rhubarb
• 1 1/3 cups white sugar
• 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
2. Combine sugar and flour. Sprinkle 1/4 of it over pastry in pie plate. Heap rhubarb over this mixture. Sprinkle with remaining sugar and flour. Dot with small pieces of butter. Cover with top crust.
3. Place pie on lowest rack in oven. Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), and continue baking for 40 to 45 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

Rhubarb and Strawberry Pie from allrecipes.com

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 pound fresh rhubarb, chopped
• 2 pints fresh strawberries
• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tablespoons white sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, mix flour and sugar. Add strawberries and chopped rhubarb. Toss with sugar and flour and let stand for 30 minutes.
3. Pour filling into pie crust. Dot top with butter, and cover with top crust. Seal edges of top and bottom crust with water.
4. Apply yolk to top of pie, using a pastry brush. Sprinkle with sugar. Cut small holes in top to let steam escape.
5. Bake at 400 degrees F (200 degrees C), for 35 to 40 minutes, or until bubbly and brown. Cool on rack.