Wikimedia Commons photo

Disclosure: This is almost a recipe for cherry-berry pie filling

Wikimedia Commons photo
Not MY cherry-berry pie because I forgot to take a photo of mine before it got gobbled up. This photo is by Evan-Amos and is in the public domaine.

Here’s another disclosure for you.  I love to cook but I hate taking pictures of food and I hate writing detailed recipes with measurements. Cooking is the way I relax when I’m not writing or taking care of my persnickety health. My blog started to turn cooking into work and I didn’t like that so I was going to stop blogging about food. But my food posts get the most attention.
Do you have any suggestions for what I should do about this conundrum? 
Here’s my last fess-up for the day: I’ve been pretending to be a different kind of cook from the one I really am. This has not been an intentional misleading of my blog-friends, it just happened, the way it happens that someone thinks you love football because you asked someone you assume loves football whether the Packers won. (And then it turns out neither of you loves football and that mutual disclosure, that you’re  both out of step with mainstream culture, makes you closer).
I’ve been blogging my recipes as if I measure ingredients because I’ve convinced myself that’s what you would like.
So honestly, here’s how I made the pie filling (but this is only almost a recipe. It’s actually a portrait of the way I cook so you can get to know the real me, because it’s only only fair that I be real if I’m asking you to be real).

  1. I took all the cherries I had in the refrigerator (1/2 of a container of fresh cherries) and pitted them (yes, I got cherry juice all over my fingers and all over the cupboard, but boy, were they ever good cherries!)
  2. put them in a sauce pan with less sugar than cherries and brought it to a boil. Gave it a couple of stirs.
  3. Then I cooled it slightly; pureed half the mixture with my Braun hand-held whizzer-chopper.
  4. Added all the blueberries I had in the refrigerator (again, about 1/2 of a container) and could tell by eyeballing it that I still didn’t have enough fruit to fill a pie shell,
  5. so I grabbed some frozen strawberries from the freezer (maybe 6 or 7 larger ones) and quartered them.
  6. Added to the whole mixture slightly less sugar than the combined volume of blue-and-strawberries (I wanted it on the tarty-fruity side and not sugary-sweet) and a drizzle of raspberry syrup because I had some in the pantry and the way I see it, when you’re doing the berry thing, more berry has to be better.
  7. Sprinkled in 2 tablespoons of tapioca (measured by what the package said about cherry pie, and I couldn’t help reading it because I read everything and thought, “why not?”) tossed it and let it stand at room temperature (so the tapioca would gel–I’ve learned from experience you can’t rely on tapioca to gel if you don’t let it stand at room temperature before throwing it in the oven) while I rolled out the pie crust. Filled it, crimped it too carefully so it would be picture-perfect, (it was, but did I take a picture? No, I forgot to take a picture!)
  8. Baked it at 400 for 40 minutes.

I think you could make a good pie filling from this almost-a-recipe.
But what would you like from a food blog recipe? From any blog? Why do you read blogs? I dare you to be a little bit honest.

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