Dinner with the Profs. deVilliers last Friday, which is always very nice, and especially so since they insisted on sending me home with a collection of herbs from their garden as well as several stalks of rhubarb. I'd never eaten rhubarb before, let alone cooked with it, and my Mennonite cookbook proved uncharacteristically unhelpful. The internet, however, yielded a staggering array of recipes, and so it was with one of these that I baked my first, slightly peculiar, rhubarb pie.

[What have I been reading? What has happened to my syntax? Good heavens!]

The oddness of the pie was due to several things. One, someone put whole wheat flour in the white flour bin and I didn't notice until it was too late, which is not the way to make a light and flaky pie crust; two, the pie consisted of a layer of goopy eggy rhubarb substance topped with a thick layer of sugary sludge- um, better than it sounds though, really- and three, that rhubarb pie, in my opinion, is a strange concept. The pie was actually rather tasty, however, the moral being that all pie, by virtue of its pieness, is pretty much all right with me.

I had enough pastry dough leftover to make a whole additional pie, which I did this afternoon. I didn't know what to put in it, but we have numerous jars of peach-apricot preserves up on the top shelf in the kitchen, so I figured why not. I glopped a jar of preserves into the pie shell. Looking at it, it struck me there was probably a reason you don't often hear of people filling pies with jam, and that this pie would be appallingly sweet and gooey. Going through the kitchen with an eye to remedying this problem, I found a number of apples in the crisper. Well, better I should have found them sooner, but it wasn't too late. I plopped the apples down amidst the jam and tossed the concoction in the oven.

Haven't tried it yet, but I posed it for a couple pictures. It's the Schillaci in me, I guess.