October 13, 2004

• What to do with
  freezer-burned blueberries:
  (updated with recipe for pinto bean pie — and the recipe for pickle pie in comments)

  
  
  
  I defrosted the freezer yesterday.  The housecleaning started in
  the back of the house and has progressed past the middle now.  I
  skipped Doug’s room because I redecorated it last summer and the mess
  he has made in there since then is his own.  While the fridge was
  turned off and defrosting, I worked on cleaning up my worktable, which
  used to be the dining table for previous residents who did that sort of
  thing.  We eat standing over the sink or sitting with plates on
  our laps.

  Now the work table looks worse than before (it’s always that way at
  early stages, when the things that were stashed in the corners get
  dragged out into the light), and the freezer is frost free.  That
  latter circumstance leaves me with two problems: 

  a) I’d never checked the temp of fridge and freezer, but did so after I
  fired it back up yesterday.  I learned that in order to get the
  freezer below the recommended 0°F, I’d have to get the fridge itself
  below freezing.  It’s supposed to be between freezing and
  40°F.  So it is, now, but I had to compromise.  Fridge is at
  36°, and freezer at 10°.

  b)  I now have some freezer-burned fruit and vegies to deal
  with.  Can’t throw them away.  Mama (my dear deceased
  Scottish mother) wouldn’t approve, and besides, it’s wasteful.  I
  had purchased some bagged frozen fruits and vegetables about a year and
  a half ago at a time when I was only going to town every month or two
  and did not have ready access to fresh produce.   Then
  Greyfox went on his last monumental drink and drug binge and in the
  aftermath of that I’ve had mucho access to supermarkets.

  The bags of vegies, and a bag of sliced peaches and one of blueberries,
  have languished all this time in the rack on the inside of the freezer
  door.  Doug and I both do this:  we open the freezer door and
  peer in to see what’s to eat.  We never look behind us at that
  door rack.  I almost forgot to clear it out yesterday when I was
  unloading the freezer prior to defrosting.

  I love blueberries.  My last sugar binge, in fact, at least half a
  year after I’d started abstaining from refined sugar, was on fresh
  blueberries.  Yesterday, I opened the bag and gave a small dish of
  them a quick thaw cycle in the microwave.  They tasted yummy, but
  had the appearance and mouth feel of soaked raisins.  Mama used to
  soak raisins in hot water for me when I was little and complained about
  having to chew them.  Only in later years have I developed a taste
  for chewy foods.

  Now there was really nothing wrong with that dish of blueberries, but
  ever since I ate them I’ve had blueberry pancakes on my mind. 
  Pancakes are a pleasure I’ve been denying myself ever since I quit
  eating wheat and went on a gluten-free diet a year and a half
  ago.  Today it occurred to me that if I can improvise passable
  muffins with gluten-free flours, I can make pancakes that way, too.

  I have no recipe to share.  I put together a little bit of
  garbanzo and fava flour, about the same amount of sorghum flour, a
  heaping tablespoon of tapioca starch, some nonfat dry milk, a little
  dab of honey, baking powder, tiny bit of xanthan gum to make them stick
  together, salt, an egg, olive oil, water — and stood there at the
  griddle and ate my fill before the last batch was cooked.

  All the time I was flipping flapjacks I was thinking about pickle and
  pinto bean pie.  That’s because of the pie beans.  In my
  housecleaning, I found a heap of aluminum pie weights, a high-tech
  reusable substitute for the beans that bakers used to use to weight
  down unfilled pie crusts so they didn’t bubble and puff as they
  baked.  They had come out of their bag and sifted out the damaged
  back panel of a kitchen drawer and had to be gathered up off the floor
  under the drawers.  Doug washed them last time he did dishes, and
  seeing the pie beans spread out to dry reminded me of pickle and pinto
  bean pie.

  On our Big Field trip eleven years ago, Doug and I visited many
  National Parks and Monuments.  One of the best was Capitol Reef in
  Utah.  There was no ATM anywhere near the park, and so on two
  occasions during our stay we drove to a small town about thirty miles
  away where there was a bank where I could get a cash advance on my
  credit card.  Each way to and from that bank, we passed through
  another small town where a cafe had this sign it its window:  “Try
  our pickle and pinto bean pie.”  We never did.  Restaurant
  meals, except at user-friendly places such as Denny’s, were a rarity on
  that trip.  Besides, really, pickle and pinto bean
  pie!?!  Still, I wonder.  Was it a joke?  Did they
  really serve such a pie?  If so, was it sweet pickles or dill, and
  how did it taste?  I may never know.  It’s not something I’d
  want to try without a recipe.  So many ways to go wrong and only
  one way to get it right.
  

  UPDATE:

  Thanks to SansMerci, who googled the pickle and pinto bean pie, I learned that (a) it’s two different pies. (Yes, that was the cafe, in Bicknell, Utah.) and (b) the recipe for pinto bean pie is:

  Grandma Raven’s Pinto Bean Pie

  • 3 cups Pinto beans, cooked unseasoned and mashed fine
  • 4 Eggs
  • 1-½ cups Sugar
  • ½ cup Milk
  • 2 tbs. Butter
  • ¼ tsp. Salt
  • ½ tsp. Nutmeg
  • ½ tsp. Cinnamon
  • ½ tsp. Allspice
  • Pecan halves

  Mix all the ingredients well. Place in an unbaked pie shell, top with pecan
  halves, and bake in a moderate oven (350°F) until done.

  So, how do we make a pickle pie, eh?

  • 6:20 pm
  • 5 Comments