Last Saturday, as everyone was bracing themselves for a blizzard, I went into major productivity mode in my kitchen. One of my projects was pumpkin pie. The motivation? I wanted pie for breakfast. If you’ve been reading for a while, you already know how I feel about pie. There are breakfasts that are great— pancakes (with beaten egg whites folded in), challah strata, oatmeal— but pie feels decadent. As I’ve mentioned before, I use red kuri squash for baking pumpkin anything/everything. Pie is no exception. Upon discovering I was out, I called my mother to see if she had a can of sweetened condensed milk I could have. She said yes, so while I was picking that up from her house I also got a small pie dish so I could bake one for her, too. 

Here is my mother’s pumpkin pie filling recipe. It’s amazing. 

Liquify the following in a blender, doing it in two batches if need be: 

2 large eggs

2 c. cooked + mashed pumpkin

3/4 c. brown sugar

1 1/2 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. ginger

1/4 t. cloves

1/4 t. nutmeg

1 (14 oz) can sweetened condensed milk

(This being me I obviously added extra cinnamon and ginger. And because I was filling one 9” pie plate plus another smaller one, I also used more squash and an extra egg. At other times I’ve baked this pie using maple syrup in place of brown sugar. This is the best sort of recipe: reliable, flexible, and forgiving.)

Pour filling into your prepped pie crust and bake at 350ºF for ≈50-60 minutes. 

There are many food preferences that I can deal with without any grumbling or judgements, but I just do not understand people who don’t like Pie. During a drive from the Thousand Islands region back to Brooklyn a couple years ago, I delivered a diatribe that lasted for probably twenty minutes about Pie. It may have featured my belief that baking a cake is all well and good, but if you want to tell someone you love them, you make Pie. Even if the situation isn’t as extreme as that, Pie is still more meaningful. Pie is sincere, heartfelt, comforting, unpretentious, and delicious. Pie is the best dessert treatment for most seasonal fruit. Pie makes people happy. My father called my mother the Pie Queen, possibly his highest compliment. This is a man who never gave false praise, especially when it came to food. 

Today marks six months since my father died. It is cold and rainy and my driveway is still not usable. I’ve spent hours listening to Ray Charles and then switched to Richard Thompson, all while wearing my apron and doing the one thing that is most likely to make me feel better: baking. 

These apples may not be the prettiest and most perfect, but they are fresh and real, grown without anything strange ever done to them: I picked them at my mother’s house. And when I was done picking apples, I walked behind the barn and harvested elderberries. 

The apples and elderberries together made an amazing color— the berries started to stain the apple slices almost immediately, and this intensified after I added the sugar and stirred up the filling. Because this filling is a mix of apples and berries, I used a combination of cornstarch and tapioca granules as thickeners. The only other ingredients in the filling are the juice of one lemon and some cinnamon. 

This is not an I Love You Pie, it is a Thank You Pie. Yesterday morning a friend went to Whole Foods in Boston with a list, then drove to Vermont and delivered groceries to me. He was coming up anyway, but his grocery shopping for me was a huge help. He even bought parrot food for my mother. Beginning to restock my fridge after having to throw out so much food because of losing power for days feels great. I once again have dairy, which means I can make some gelato base and begin to build up my inventory.

So here I am, in the woods, on a cold, rainy, and sad day. But I have pie. It’s a start. 

Some people prefer pie to cake, and that’s fine. That leaves you with two options for their birthday: a pie-like cake, or a straight up pie. Yesterday I took the latter route. This pumpkin pie was for my friend Pat’s birthday. And because I used a nice big deep pie plate, it took 1 1/2 recipes of my filling. Which worked out quite well— I have the smaller one in my fridge, allowing me to eat pie for breakfast all week. Pie for breakfast is my favorite.

David is great. He is adorably awkward, very smart, always well-dressed, and has excellent manners. He likes to read, drinks a lot of tea, and drives a bright yellow vespa. David also likes to bake. So last night, I gave him a lesson in pie. Rhubarb pie.

Midday, David said he was going to make a rhubarb pie in the evening. For the first time ever. Just before 8pm, after waking up from his post-work nap, he admitted that he lacked the following items: rhubarb, flour, sugar, butter. I packed a bag of flour, sugar, butter, pie pastry, tapioca granules, picked a dozen stalks of rhubarb at my mother’s house, and headed out. 

While I cannot actually vouch for how delicious the finished pie is since it was still cooling when I went home, I can say that David learned some good things last night: how to properly roll out pie pastry into an even circle, the importance of tapioca in fruit pies, crimping the edge of the crust, to wait until ones pie filling is boiling in the center before taking it out of the oven, and more. In return, David and his brother Pat taught me that Say Anything… is now not only one of my favorite movies (and made before either of them were born) but also a band.