Cleaning Out the Freezer, Getting Over My Fear of Pie Crust, and some Landscaping...

Sorry, no recipe for you today. If you are on Facebook check out the Pie Party happening or Twitter (#pieparty). There are 1,200 people around the world making pie together. A virtual pie party. I wanted to play along, but I have this crazy fear of pie crust. I have my Grandmother to blame. You see, she made the most amazing pie crust and I grew up hearing my Aunt Mary and my Mom talk about how difficult it is to make. You see they have me so scared that I have never even tried to make it on my own.  All of my other pie recipes on this site are made with pie crust from the little red box in the refrigerator section in the grocery store. I know, what kind of food blogger can't make pie crust? Well, today I decided I was going to take the first step in learning to make pie crust. The reason I am not sharing the recipe here  is because I hardly think that one pie crust qualifies me to teach others how to do it. I do hope that it might inspire others with the same fear. The crust recipe I chose was a bit challenging. The dough was really sticky. No, it wasn't the dough with the vodka in it. I could have used some vodka during this process however. I ended up rolling the dough between two sheets of waxed paper, but then it stuck to the paper! So, I then put it in the freezer. Then it was too cold and cracked trying to get it into the pie plate. In the end I still managed to pull something out of the oven that resembled pie. Hooray!
You may have seen that I posted something on Twitter yesterday about making a Buttermilk pie, well it turns out I didn't have enough butter to make it. I really didn't want to run into town on my last day of vacation. So, I decided to clean out the freezer of the berries I had left from last summer. It will be time to start putting berries up for this winter soon. I needed to make space anyway. It is mostly blueberries and a few raspberries. Turns out I had a whole quart of blueberries hiding in the back of my freezer.

In other news, my landscaper has returned. You see, every year since we have lived here we have had a certain landscaper show up anywhere from February to May to tidy up the rose bushes and trees in our yard. We don't mind too much as she works for free. We were a little upset when she trimmed one of our $40 apple trees down to the snow line last year. But, you get what you pay for. Things are looking a little ragged around here as she had not yet shown up. It turns out that the reason she was so far behind schedule is that she had two apprentices to train this year.

Sorry about the blurry photos, but as long as I live in Alaska I will never get used to seeing these huge creatures in my yard...