This post is dedicated to my mom. On September 21st, of 2012 (International Day of Peace) it will be one year that she has been gone. I've been doing crazy things the last few days. I think I miss her more than even I realize. She's been on my mind and in my heart non stop. I just can't stop thinking about her. And in all this reminiscing, well, it just increases all those emotions inside me that give way to the feelings of being quite lost without her. And just thinking about how much I miss her has caused me to go back in time and visit all those things she did that I loved. It is as if I've been trying to live my life with a little piece of her all over again.
For instance, my mom collected owls. I went to town the other day and bought a porcelain owl, as if it would bring her back. A couple of nights ago, I scrubbed grease out of a pair of my son's best work pants using butter, my mom's tried and true recipe, and I was so grateful her white tornado ways live on in me. My mom could clean anything and make it new again. The other day I did the ultimate, I went to Smith & Edwards and I bought a pair of cowboy boots from her dear friend Evan. It was Deserey's birthday and suddenly I had a giant desire to buy her an honest to goodness, down to earth, western as John Wayne and the cowboys, authentic, Tony Lama, horse hide kickin', cowboy boots ---- in honor of my mother, her grandma. After all, it was my mother who bought Des her first pair of bright red shiny cowboy boots. Deserey was only four years old. I can still see Des sitting on her lap wearing her new boots. As I stood there in Smith & Edwards I could see my mother in her red apron, lugging boots to her customers that always came to her for their needs. My mother had a loyal following. I could see the boots she herself always wore, my mother had good taste in boots!
Standing there in the boot department and Smut & Uglies, I could see her smile and I could hear her laugh, and most important, I could feel her spirit everywhere. My heart just had a solid ache in it and I couldn't hardly see all the new boots all lined out on boxes and in rows, for all the water in my eyes. It was like being in Smith & Edwards was the sweetest overdose of my mom being right there with me all over again. I just wanted to sit down in a chair and spend the night with her, she was everywhere in that store. And the beauty of her life lit up everything in sight. Smith & Edwards is sort of a a shabby old war surplus store, but my mom worked there for so long, to me it has quite a different feel about it. My mom was an icon at Smith & Edwards, Bert Smith will tell you that. She worked there until she was 82. My mom was a tough lady. She could out work ten men! I love her so much. I miss her even more. She was the ultimate example of what it means to know how to work!
After soaking in all of my mom's spirit, I spent a long time there in the boot department meandering. I finally found a pair of boots for Des. They were beautiful. 169 dollars worth of gorgeous! My mom led me to them. She knew I'd pay that price. Well like I said, they were Tony Lamas. I'm sure she had them all picked out for me, I know she knew I was coming.
Yesterday Kaedell ask me for my mom's peach cobbler pie recipe. I dug it out and went over and showed her how to make it. I knew my mom was just beaming from ear to ear. It felt so good to bake that pie, I got in the car today and went up to Willard and bought some peaches. Today I'm going to visit my mom again in spirit. We're making pie together, her pie.
This pie is one of the best pies you'll ever eat. It is a classic, and it is a pie no one makes. I have never seen a single soul make this pie. No one but my mother!
I'm going to warn you right now. It isn't easy. It's a frustrating pie. But it's worth all the frustration. I decided the trick is to not care. Just throw it together.
It's official title is "Mid-Winter Peach pie." Although my mom always called it her Peach Cobbler. There is a reason for the Mid-Winter title. It is because in my mother's era it was made with bottled peaches. Women in the forties canned. If you were a woman born and raised in North Ogden, you wrote the book on canning. Oh, you can make it with fresh peaches, but the recipe was designed to make in the middle of winter with those yummy bottled peaches you put up in the fall. I'm here to tell you, your lips will never leave the fork. You'll eat the pie in one night. It is so delicious! It's my families most favorite thing to eat. That and my mom's fudge.
Let me give you one important note here ***NEVER EVER MAKE THIS PIE WITH CANNED PEACHES YOU BUY IN THE STORE ----I REPEAT.......NEVER! You will waste all your time and it will taste horrible.
Instead wait for a snowy winter night. Crack out those bottled peaches. Drain them and make the pie. Your family will think of you in heavenly celestial baking realms! And they will beg you to make it over and over again!
Here's my little helper. Doodle Bug, Grandma and great grandma love you sweet little girl!
Make this pie with home canned peaches or fresh. Here is the how to. You should read over this a few times. It will help you hopefully. Any questions, call me up!
Ingredients
1 cup Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Salt
2 heaping, heaping Tbsp Sugar (do not be stingy on the Sugar!)
1/2 cup real honest to goodness BUTTER .... SOFTENED!
1 Egg
1 Tbsp Milk
Fresh or Home Bottled Peaches
It is helpful if you make the pie dough on a Bethany pastry board. The kind featured here on this blog with a cloth covering. I never make pie without my Bethany board. If not you may want to roll it out on a soft white type flour sack of thin cotton taped to your counter top. This pie dough is very delicate and extremely hard to work with. Once you learn the trick though, of how to handle it, it's a piece of cake. No pun intended.
Blend together in a bowl the wet ingredients..... Butter, Milk, Egg, Salt, and Sugar. In a separate bowl whisk the Flour and Baking Powder together. After whisking those two ingredients together add them to the wet ingredients and beat together into dough.
At this point the dough is sticky and gooey. Almost looks like a thick cake batter than dough. Flour your hands and scoop all the dough into your floured hands. Keep turning it over and over in your hands adding more flour until you can safely work with the dough. You must use lots of flour on your pastry board so the dough will not stick. This is a very gentle process. This dough tares easily and is touchy, just keep working with it until you can roll it all out without it sticking to bad. I like to wrap mine in some saran wrap and let it sit in the fridge for 30 min while I handle the peaches. It helps a little.
Roll the dough into a huge circle so that the crust will hang over your 9" pie plate nearly two or more inches. Carefully fold it in half and place in your pie dish and then unfold it so it fills the pie dish. Tonight I just was tired of messing with it. It kept taring on me so I rolled it out on my pastry board and then I flipped the entire board upside down dumping the big round circle in my pie dish. That worked pretty dang good.
Now drain your peaches if they are bottled, otherwise, slice your fresh peaches into the crust so that the peaches are a little bit heaping like. Be generous. Fresh peaches cook down. If using bottled peaches it will take approx. two bottles drained. Maybe one and a half depending on how you fill your bottles. I like lots of peaches. I don't skimp.
***IMPORTANT: If using fresh peaches you need to mix a heaping 3/4 cup of sugar and a couple of tsps. of cinnamon. Tonight I also added a little ultra set. Three TBS. to be exact. I mixed it into my sugar and cinnamon mixture. Normally I don't do this with fresh. Tonight I just decided to try it. Once you get your peaches sliced in the pie plate sprinkle the cinnamon sugar mixture all over the peaches. Fresh peaches also produce more juice. Fresh peaches are tart and this dish is good more sweet.
Now remember. If you are using bottled peaches that you've canned with sugar then you only need to sprinkle maybe 1/4 cup sugar and cinnamon over the peaches. Bottled peaches with sugar are wonderful for this pie. My favorite!
Fresh or bottled once you have the peaches ready to go in the pie, you take the crust and fold it up over the peaches. Any torn pieces just lay them on top of the pie. This is one thing I love about this pie. The top doesn't have to be fancy. Once you fold all of the crust over, again sprinkle heavy with cinnamon and sugar. DON'T BE STINGY ON THE SUGAR!
Now the last thing I do is I take a long strip of tin foil. Long enough you can wrap it around the outside of the pie plate. I cut the tin foil in half length wise, so the foil is half as wide. I wrap it around the pie dish so that the foil comes up and guards the edge of the pie from getting burned. I curve the foil over the pie a little. When I'm all done it sort of looks like a jiffy pop pie, if you get what I mean.
Bake as follows.
Fresh peaches, you will need to bake at 375 for at least 45 to 55 min. Maybe an hour depending on how ripe they are. Until the crust is a light golden brown.
Bottled peaches, you will need to bake at 375 for 35 to 40 min.
I take the foil off when the pie looks like its almost done. Just to finish browning the edge a little.
Crust should look like a very light golden brown. And one more note. If you make this pie fresh, it is a leaky pie. I put some tin foil in the bottom of my oven to catch the drips. :)
Happy eating. You are going to LOVE this pie, if you can have the patience to learn how to make it well. My mother was the master!
(I love you mom! Thanks for giving me the greatest gift, my life! And for teaching me all sorts of things to make it beautiful!!!)
Here is a fun story about my mother and canning I wrote a few years before my mom died:
Canning
Now here’s a good story for you. Twas the year two thousand and two, and my daughters and I decided to put up peaches. I want to say right up front; I’ve never been a great fan of canning. It’s a love, slash, hate relationship, I love the finished product ---hate the work. That year we did 70 quarts, an impressive amount doncha' think? After the entire project was finished, they looked so nice sitting on the shelf in my pantry.
Lets discuss canning for a moment. Canning could be compared to a religion; maybe a cult, or possibly maybe even akin to joining a political party. I know I'm a cynical person, but have you ever stood with a group of women in their seventies and listened to them talk about canning. It sounds like a fierce electoral debate two weeks before a national election.
Take for instance just the type of jar one chooses to can with. Should you pick Kerr or Ball? I listened to my mother in the beginning and started buying Kerr jars. Then my friend who cans everything from fruit to meat said I was making an enormous mistake and Ball jars were far superior to Kerr.
My friend's suggestions sent me to the store to have a look. Ball has one thing up on Kerr, they make a jar that's pleasing to look at. I decided to buy some. Not because I thought they were any better, but because they had the prettiest fruit pattern on the outside. It was beveled right into the glass. Wow, if I’m going to have to can, then I would at least like my jars to look decorative sitting there on a shelf in my cold, uninviting, dark, cob-webby fruit room! Lol.
My mother found out I was buying Ball jars and had a catastrophic fit. It was as if I had crossed party lines. I didn’t think she was going to ever speak to me again. To this day I still have to sit out a few Kerr lids on my kitchen counter when I’m canning, just in case she drops by.
My friend, the canning queen, she might buy Ball jars but she uses Kerr lids. What is that all about? After detecting this, I decided to ask her how come she had abandoned her alliance to Ball. She said, “Oh, I just hate to confess this, but Kerr lids seal better. The look on her face was as if the Republican in her had discovered something good about a Democrat----- it was the most depressed look I had ever seen.
In the canning world, I have decided to align myself with the non-partisan group; at this point I really don’t care about the debate between Kerr and Ball anymore. I just want to get the fruit in the bottle and on the shelf so I can get the h@** out of the kitchen!
This was my frame of mind when I decided to can 70 quarts of peaches with my daughters back in 2002, “Let’s just hurry up and be done with it!” I kept saying to my girls.
Just before we began the whole canning ordeal that day, I distinctly remember calling my mother for my usual run down on how to accomplish the mundane feet. The phone rang and rang but no one answered. I nearly died. She wasn’t home. Now what was I to do? It was a deeply embedded religious cardinal rule not to begin canning without first consulting the Pope of canning (my mother). I was stricken with panic! Sheesh, I've never canned anything before without first speaking with my mother about it. I've been canning for years and still I have to call my mother for instructions!
Well, I figured out the sugar amount, two thirds cup. I at least remembered that much. Now, I just needed to know how long to process them. Here is where I made my fatal mistake ---- I called the extension service, thirty minutes they told me. Wow, I thought that sounded like a really long time to process peaches. Who am I however to argue with the Utah State Extension Service?
After all 70 jars of peaches were done cooking and all lined up on my counter top, my mother decided to drop in ( oh sure now she shows up.) She started in with her regular pleasantries of how nice the peaches looked and then she began her party interrogation. Thankfully I was able to answer each question correctly until she popped out with the last one. I knew I was in for it when I saw her furrowed brow take a downward shape along with her piercing gaze.
Suddenly sweat formed in the palm of my hands and I knew the last question was going to be brutal. Then she hit me with it. Quietly she spoke, “How long did you process them?”
When she ask me this question I carefully thought about what the extension service had told me. Surely it was a safe answer, so I replied, “thirty minutes.” I was feeling pretty smug on having gotten such viable information from what I considered to be a top-notch professional source without even consulting my mother. Wow, wasn’t’ she going to be impressed –--wouldn't I look smart!
“Thirty minutes” she gasped, I thought she was going to pass out. I should have seen it coming. After all, she is my mother. It didn't take her two seconds to vehemently launch into her platform speech about, "What in the world was I thinking," and how "No one who knows anything about canning cooks peaches that long."
“Well they look nice don’t you think?” I ask this question hoping she would see how annoying it was to get a lecture after all the hard work I had gone to. It was no use, she just went on and on about how my peaches were going to taste like mush and turn brown in a week.
Today is September 24, 2008. Today I emptied 64 quarts of peaches down the disposal. Today I cried! I hate it when I have to admit my mother is right. What is it about confessing to my mother she has any knowledge superior to my own? Part of me would rather cut off my left leg and feed it to a shark than to have to tell my mother she's right, but she was right. Half of all my peaches turned brown and the other half that still looked somewhat decent were so mushy I couldn’t stand to eat them. I couldn't admit the truth for years. Those peaches just sat on my shelf reminding me my mother really is the ultimate canning consultant!
The only thing worse than canning peaches is dumping all of your hard work down the drain, but I did, every last peach. And I have another secret I'll take to my grave. I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother the peaches weren’t “Early Alberta’s”. That would have meant another lecture and me admitting it was true, Early Alberta's truly taste better.
My mother was born and bred in North Ogden, Utah. When it comes to peaches, any woman born around the 1920’s in North Ogden Utah was taught to bottle “Early Alberta’s” and they were also taught to process them absolutely no longer than 20 minutes. And if you didn’t use two thirds cup of sugar you were a buffoon! This has been the political canning agenda of these women for years. I was at least glad I got the sugar amount right. Did I tell you my mother comes from a family of ten? She is related to half of North Ogden. So if you check this information out and find it incorrect then you are talking to the wrong half!
I learned my lesson absolutely the hardest way possible and tomorrow I’m going to the fruit stand to see if there is even a remote possibility that “Early Alberta’s” are still in existence. Before I begin the whole process I’ll phone my mother for bits and pieces of her ancient wisdom. When I get in the kitchen and begin the methods of making beautiful fruit, I’m going to take my sweet time. I am going to put on my plaid apron and look domestic. I think I’ll even play a little “Connie Francis” music, maybe listen to the song “Where The Boys Are.” And I’ll roll my hair gently around my face, I want look the part, I want to look like I just stepped out of the fifty’s. I want to look just like my mother did when she was young and oh so domestic. She was always beautiful in the kitchen!
It’s funny but I remember as a little girl sitting on a stool in my mother’s kitchen watching her fill jar after jar with brightly colored golden peaches. Every once in a while she’d slip a sliver into my mouth. To this day there is not a jar of peaches opened that could possibly taste better than my mother’s.
I learned today canning is an art and my mother was a master of it. Come December I’m going to reap the rewards of my labor. In December I’ll pull a bottle of those yummy peaches off the shelf and make myself a mid-winter pie. It’s my mother’s recipe – it’s to die for. Come December I’ll share it with you. Maybe canning is not so bad. Maybe it's like anything else in life - it's your attitude when you're doing it that makes all the difference. I say cheers to canning! More importantly, I saw cheers to my mother!
