Pies and Stripes...

This weekend of The Fourth was kind of a kick-off to pie season around here...

Apparently.

I had a fun bar-b-q to go to on Saturday, and it being a potluck and me being a pie master...I dug out the dough, the fruit, and the extra special pie-love that flies around the kitchen, and got to covering the surfaces of the counters with pie goodness.

Ok.

Most of the goodness went in to the pies...I mean, of course, it was a bit sticky here and there when all was said and done, but well worth it.

I have no clue where my love of making pies comes from, but I find it some of the most satisfying work I do in the kitchen...it's the perfect amount of zen and creativity to keep me bustling around in my apron, totally content and usually dancing to whatever pie making music is happening that day.

This time it was a techno-Latin-Portuguese-Calypso thing...

Yes.

Barefoot in the kitchen...

The perfect stereotype.

Kind of...

As it was, all of that hard work yielded a fresh strawberry pie and an apple pie.

Both were deliciously tart and sweet in all the right ways...

My mother currently has the left over apple, as she thinks I'm the best apple pie maker in the world.  I'm not sure about that, but I hold that compliment quite close in a happy place I have reserved just for pie-type things.  To be fair, this was the woman who taught me how to cook and was a great experimenter of recipes who also told me that often you have to fudge a bit here and there when making certain things to get them right to your tastes...which is exactly what I do when I'm making most things...Loosely follow a recipe until I get it down, and then all bets are off.

My mother also happens to have apple treas that are just laden with fruit waiting to ripen as we speak...in which case, there will probably be a whole lot of other pies happening around these parts very soon...

But until then, I'm taking requests...