Small blue marbles in a pie

Like I foresaw here, I did indeed meet a sweet blueberry pie after my little walk in the forest!

I'm not much of a baker. I like cooking, but baking has never really caught my interest. However, with the perfect amount of blueberries sitting on my kitchen counter, I had no choice but to make a blueberry pie. As we will see  later in this post - blueberry pie can never go wrong, even when the baker isn't really up to the task.

I love the look of blueberries. They shine like small marbles. 

I looked up pie crust recipes. They all contain butter, flour and water and it all has to be ice cold. Ain't nobody go time for that, so I decided on just mixing a cup of flour and 100 g (ca. 4 ounces) butter and threw it in the freezer for half an hour. I don't know what the water is for, but I suspect adding some of it might make the dough easier to work with. It is possible it could have improved the end result.

This is my dough. I think it looks good. 

The blueberry pies I've had before, has usually been just blueberries and a layer of pie crust also on top. For some reason I thought vanilla custard sounded good together with the blueberry pie, so I decided on adding that as a layer in the pie itself. I used this recipe, but decided to use a little over 1 cup of heavy cream and skip the milk since I wanted the custard to be really thick.

The brown sugar actually worked well with the custard. 

I think it was at this point I did my major mistake. I was beforehand a little worried about the amount of liquid in the filling of the pie (hence the skipping of milk in the custard), but this should also have made me realize that pre-baking the crust could be a good idea. Which I of course didn't do.

Dough, vanilla custard and blueberries. The dough should have been pre-baked before this. 

After 50 minutes in the oven, the crust seemed baked and the blueberries were cooked, but I could see through my glass cake pan that the crust at the bottom was not going to be crusty.

It looks like a mess, but at least a hot and delicious one. 

The blueberry pie with the vanilla custard was awesome, but very messy. I'm willing to give it a second try, but the pre-bake the crust before putting the vanilla custard and the blueberries in. An alternative is of course to make the blueberry pie and the vanilla custard separately, but what would the fun be in that?

Have you had any good ideas in the kitchen that in the end didn't turn out that great?

Not just a walk in the park

Even though I can already feel the fall in the air, it doesn't mean that it is getting cold and dark here up north quite yet. Yesterday turned up with blue skies and temperatures around 20C (70F), so I grabbed my camera and a small plastic bucket and went for the hills.

In Norway we have the freedom to roam, which means that we are allowed to access any uncultivated land on the countryside. This access also includes wild berry and mushroom foraging.

Hazelnuts that are not yet ripe, lingonberries that will be ready to be picked in a few days,
and tasty blueberries I brought with me home. 

I live in a neighborhood with several large apartment buildings mixed in between villas, duplexes and quadruplexes. And just behind this neighborhood there are large hills covered with forests.

A small creek just behind one of the large apartment buildings in my neighborhood. 

It has been a very dry summer, and one thing was completely missing in the forest: Mushrooms! At this time of years they are usually all over the place, but I didn't see a single one of them.

Instead of mushrooms I found this bench in a very unlikely location;
a spot where the sun never shines, and with no view.
What a sad place to put a bench! 

Even though several thousand people live close to this forest, the only other person I met was an old man on his daily hike.

I love how he walked in his steady pace, resting his arms on his back.
I might walk faster than him for a short while, but I'm convinced he would have
outlasted me and could have continued in that pace from here to eternity. 

The highlight of my walk was when I took a tiny, little path off of the main path and suddenly had this view in front of me.

Far down there you can see my house. 

When I got home my hands looked like this:

Blueberry hands! 

If I were to predict the future by reading my palms, I would say that I will soon meet a sweet blueberry pie!