making pie

It’s time to make pie.

Actually, for a good life, make time every day to make pie. Spend half an hour mixing the cold butter pieces and various flours with a pinch of salt, dribbling in ice-cold water, letting it rest, rolling it out, and patting it, gently, into a pie pan. This time of  year? There’s always something ripe and ready to fill a pie. (This one was a blueberry-lemon-thyme pie for Danny, on Father’s Day.) Let it bake. When you can smell the blueberries and thyme mingling, then gently insisting that you eat them now, check the pie. When that crust is golden brown and flaky, the purple juices spilling onto the parchment paper on the baking sheet — if you remembered to put the pie on it before you slid it into the oven — pull it out of the oven. Give a little sigh. You’ve just made a pie.

You don’t have to eat pie every day. I suppose you probably shouldn’t. But if we all took the time to make a pie, every day, and walk over to our neighbors’ house with a warm pie just out of the oven? Can you imagine how much better we’d all know each other? How happy we could make each other?

At the very least, you can make a pie this week, in time for Pie Party 2012.

Some of you might remember that we did this last year. A conversation among bakers and people crazy about pie on Twitter led to a baking-together date, which led to a Facebook page, which led to over 1000 people making pie and posting about it on the same day.

How can we not do it again?

If you want to play along, all you have to do is make a pie. Any kind of pie. Cherry pie with a butter crust. Vegan chocolate pie. Apricot-nectarine pie with a leaf lard crust. Sweet pie. Savory pie. Gluten or not. Any kind of pie.

And then, post your photo or blog post about the pie on the Pie Party 2012 Facebook page. Or, you can leave a record of your pie in the comments section of the post I will be publishing early Wednesday morning. We want to see your pies. We want to hear your stories about pie.

Why are we doing this? It’s pie.

Making pie is a way of slowing down. It’s a way of protesting our overly convenient, overly rushed society. Most people buy pies. Making a pie means you are here, trying.

And there’s nothing to fear. I just taught a pie-making class at the Book Larder in Seattle. Most of the good folks in that class were scared of making pie when we began. I’m pretty sure they all left confident about their attempts by the end.

Maybe it’s a metaphor. If you can calm down and let go of your fears, put your love into your hands as you crimp the crust, and just be here long enough to make a pie? Maybe you can do that in the rest of your life too.

Or maybe it’s just pie. Because pie is a very good thing.

So join us, won’t you? If you need a good gluten-free crust, here’s our favorite recipe.

We can’t wait to see your pies on Wednesday.