A Weekend of Pie Making

A Weekend of Pie Making

Last week my sister pie maker, Catherine Gewertz, came to visit me at Pie Cottage. I was introduced to Curvy Mama Pies—that’s the name of her independent pie business in Bethesda, MD—when she contacted me a few years back about what it would take to have me come to the DC area to teach a workshop or two. Simple enough…a kitchen with roll out space for four pie makers, a reliable oven that would fit all of them in, and a place to lay my head. She had them all and that started our pie sisterhood. I’ve been to her east coast home several times to teach, meet up to judge a pie competition in another state, and now she has made the pilgrimage (as some call it) to Pie Cottage for a weekend of pie making. We had a blast rolling together but that doesn’t even come close to what it is like to share a love for the craft with another who doesn’t think it odd at all to talk pie from the moment she steps into the pie mobile when I picked her up at SeaTac, to the moment I dropped her off for her to begin the next leg of her journey. When we get together we talk pie pretty much non-stop.

In our days together we also picked, pitted and froze sour cherries, made pies, shared tips and tricks, and capped it off with a pie social of a few of my pie loving friends. We even did a few Facebook live sessions, too… five of them when we counted them up! In a blink of an eye, our days together were over. As Catherine was heading on to her next stop, I was back in the kitchen rolling out another dough and filling it with some of the sour cherries we had picked. I baked up the pie (recipe here) and then did a little pie-by as a thank you to the caretaker of the trees to ensure that I will have another year of picking rights!

Next, Gretapie and I headed down the Hood Canal to make another pie with friends I had bumped into when we were waiting for the same flight earlier this spring. We hadn’t seen each other for years and when we did, we immediately put a date on the calendar to get together at their beach cabin in Lilliwaup. (I just love that name!) They had some spot prawns they had harvested right out in front of their little beach shack and we set to work seeing what we might create with them…and the outcome? A seafood pot pie which we christened the Lilliwaup Spot Prawn Pie! It was mighty fine and better than any of us could have dreamed. Stay tuned as I will be sharing it with you in the future so you can enjoy it too.