When I was a kid in the 1960’s my grandparents had fruit growing on their small property in Hornell NY; pears and rhubarb being the most memorable, and I once enjoyed a slice of pear-rhubarb pie there. I’ve tried, but cannot get rhubarb plants to thrive in North Carolina, and good produce outlets only have it seasonally. I’m using cans of quality strawberry-rhubarb preserves here. The basic HowTo is in an image at the end of the video.
And what I’m about to do here is make a strawberry rhubarb pie. And I’m over here next to where I’m going to be doing some trimming and cutting and stuff, taking pictures of things such as ingredients. Whoops. Better get that can of hot dog chili out of there. That might slip. There we go. And um I got the crust out of the fridge earlier so that it’ll, you know, warm up enough that you can get it off the paper and not crack it all all the pieces and stuff. There’s my buddy Kevin wondering if I’m going to come to the local weekly music jam in Reedsville. Let’s see what he says. We’d love to see you. I figure you might want to get your mind off complex and complicated thoughts. If not, I understand. Either way, we’ll be thinking about you. And I’m just type music heals. And I already told my wife that nothing else leaps up. I will absolutely um be going to that. Here’s a picture of the device that I usually record my audio and porch videos using. It’s the second Zoom Q2 HD unit that I’ve owned over the years. And um they’re great. They’re great for digital dinosaurs like me that don’t read instruction manuals much. I go to the glossery or the table of contents and find the thing I want to know. And then that’s it. And then I go from from there into intuitively learning how to use a thing by using it. And the Q2 HD’s been pretty good. It’s good at live music shows if you can find a good spot to put it. And you need to be pretty far away in order to get a whole stage full of people, 20 ft or so. And uh if it’s a noisy room, that can sometimes give you audio of lower quality as far as the music’s concerned. Um, but for doing stuff in the house, it’s great. Small groups in a room, great. At school, it used to be a great way that I could come up with small tutorial things quite easily, uh, by recording a demonstration of me doing it at home and then taking that recording to school and being able to play it for several classes, you know, and that they could refer to. So anyways, that’s the device that I use to record video and audio most of the time. And sometimes when I don’t have it, I resort to using the digital audio recorder in that phone that just said hello to us again. Uh, and the camera which can do video, but that’s a crapshoot, too. So anyways, I’m going to open up the pie crusts. I’m thinking that this because Tina went ahead and got two cans of the rhubarb pie filling and we already had some fresh strawberries in the freezer. I took those strawberries out a little while ago so that they would be easier to slice. And what I’m thinking I might do with them. I’m sitting here taking a look at the baking instructions. Two crust pie 425 until golden brown. If you want to bake a lower shell, it’s 11 to 13 minutes in a glass pan. 9 to 11 in an aluminum pan. I’m going to be using glass. Okay. the one crust pie. They suggest getting the crust in there and baking it for the same amount of time. But if you want to do a filled pie, they say don’t bake the crust. And of course, the top crust is going to get wonderful, especially if you paint some butter on it. Or maybe some whipped egg. And then they tell you about pre-baking a filled pie crust using baking paper and uh filling it up with pie weights, which are sort of like small ceramic stones that completely occupy the inside of that pan so that it keeps the crust from deforming and curving in when you pre-bake it. But we we don’t have those kinds of stones. And so I’m just going to do a filled pie today without baking the crust. I’m going to make sure that I put a little bit of flour and uh light cornmeal down in there underneath the bottom crust so that it’ll so slices will come out easier. And um I’ll take some pictures at various points along the continuum here and probably continue commenting on them later. But in order to avoid dead time silence uh with no pictures moving, I’m going to hit the pause button for now. So here we are. We got our two cans here. Yep. I’m the guy who even scrapes the excess off the lid. I don’t think of it as OCD. I just think of it as more filling. And so these go in. I decided to use this 9 in square pan rather arbitrarily, but I was looking at the two cans here and thinking that’s a pretty fair amount of fruit going in there. And um it might be wise to use something that’s just a little bit deeper. Of course, this is going to make us unable to cut triangular slices of pie. But in this house where apple crisp and various kinds of cobblers have been being made for years, uh we and there the oven’s up to 425. That’s what I put it on because our oven cooks cooler than it says by 10 to 20°. So anyways, um we don’t judge a baked good by the shape of the slice in this house. No, I’m not going to lick around the rim of the can, but I will grab this blob right here. Come on now. All right. Okay, so check that out. Lovely. Okay, next step. I’m not going to do anything stupid like shake a bunch of weird spices in there, you know. No. Mm- This is not apple pie. I’ve got these strawberries here, which I’m going to turn off the camera and slice up. I’m also going to grab the other pie crust and put it on top. I’ll be back. All right, y’all. This sucker is assembled. We’re all preheated. I’m going to hit my kitchen timer for 20 minutes and chuck this right on in like that. Beautiful. More win.