The Homemaking Hobby: American Pie (Healthier Version)

I think I must have been inspired by all the cute pies on pinterest, because last weekend when my husband and I were browsing Sur La Table, I decided that I was going to make a pie. To hold me to my pie-making, we bought a pie pan so I HAD to do it.

I searched for recipes all week, learned how to make good crust, and tried to find a good filling recipe. I decided to take a little bit of what I learned from several different sources, wing it, and do my own thing - and it actually came out good!

The first thing we wanted to do was use whole wheat flour, we also didn't want to use any refined sugar. Thirdly, no pie-filling in a can junk - there are so many fruits in season right now that there is no reason to not use beautiful fresh berries. I also wanted to make one of those cute American flag pies, but all the recipes I found for it required using aluminum foil to divide the blue and red. We try to not use aluminum foil, so I had to come up with an alternative solution.

Whole Wheat Pie Crust:

2.5 cups white whole wheat flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 sticks salted butter, cut into small chunks
1/4 cup ice water
1/8 cup vodka (ours was from the freezer so really cold)

1. Mix the flower, salt, and butter by pulsing a few times in blender.
2. Add the water and vodka, pulse until you press together a few pieces and a dough consistency forms
3. Place dough in a bowl, mix with hands and flatten into 2 disks
4. Place dough into plastic bags and let sit in freezer for about an hour
5. Roll out your dough, place into pie pan. Let sit in fridge for 15 minutes before adding your filling.

American Pie:

Whole wheat pie crust (above)
3 cups strawberries
1 cup blueberries
1/4 cup cornstarch
a few tablespoons of agave (or preferred sweetener) to taste
melted butter for topping

1. Place berries into separate bowls
2. Divide cornstarch into the two bowls
3. Add agave to each fruit bowl and mix, let sit for 10 minutes
4. With the extra dough, roll out, use a pizza cutter to cut several strips, and a star shaped cookie cutter (or you know, just a knife like me) and cut out a few stars
5. Take a strip of dough and line 1/4 of pie with it (photo below) to make a dough wall, add some blueberries (to the top of the dough line)
6. Add strawberries, starting at the dough wall and working out (to keep the dough wall standing)
7. Fill in the rest of the blueberries
8. Add first stripe starting right below the blueberry line
9. Add the stripes below to the bottom of the pie
10. Add a vertical stripe to the right to line the blueberry area
11. Add small stripes from blueberry area to the right of the pie
12. Add stars over blueberries
13. Brush with melted butter
14. Bake at 350 for 1 hour