Fruit Jumble Pie

Ok, I’m still way behind…this weekend was not so much about catching up as I thought.  Oh well.  I have been telling Dori I would post pictures of this pie I made for over a week now, so here it is!

I started with a recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, which I love because it has just about anything you can think of with lots of basic info to help you get started.  I usually use it to get a sense for how long something should be cooked or what kinds of flavors go into some type of traditional sauce or something along those lines and then go from there.  For this pie, I was looking for a way to use up a giant pile of fresh fruit that was too ripe for us to eat straight up and that I didn’t want to go bad.  BH&G had a recipe for a Harvest Fruit Tart that used apples and a bunch of dried fruits that you reconstituted in some apple juice before mixing with nuts and baking in a tart with a lattice top. 

I used my fresh fruit, used the apple juice to make a gooey gooey sauce, and was too lazy to even attempt lattice-work. 

Fruit Jumble Pie

• 4 apples, peeled, cored and chopped
• 3 peaches, peeled and chopped
• 4 plums, peeled and chopped
• About 1 cup strawberries, chopped
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup apple juice
• 1 cup rough chopped walnuts
• 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 2 pie crusts (I used whole foods frozen crusts already in tins.  To make the top, I let one defrost and took it out of the tin)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine chopped fruit and apple juice in saucepan over medium-high heat and cook until it gets thick and syrupy.
3. While it cooks, mix nuts, brown sugar, flour and nutmeg in a large bowl.
4. Add the fruit mixture to the bowl and mix until everything is combined.  This will look really beautifully gooey and sticky and amazing.
5. Fill the pie shell.  I had WAY too much filling and fit in as much of the fruit as I could.  You’ll see below this was a tiny bit disastrous.
6. Top with top crust in a fancy lattice or whatever way you see fit.  I used one of my valentine’s cookie cutters to make crimp-edged hearts (8 of them! one for each slice of pie!) that went around the edge.  This was mostly successful. 
7. Brush top pie crust with a bit of milk and sprinkle with granulated sugar.
8. Bake for about 45 minutes.  You want the crust to be brown and the filling inside to be nice and bubbly.  If the middle of the filling isn’t bubbling, your pie will probably not thicken up nicely as it cools, so make sure you get to the bubbly filling stage!
9. Remove from the oven….mine had a little bit of an overflow and one of the hearts slide off the pie and onto the baking sheet (always bake your pies on a baking sheet!) so I had to rearrange that after cooking.
10. Cool on a wire rack.  My book says fruit pies can stay out overnight or for up to 24 hours.  I left it on the counter overnight and then covered it and tossed it in the fridge the next morning.

I ate a slice one day after work, straight from the fridge by itself.  It was alright…a bit too tart for me.  From that point on we heated up slices and served with vanilla ice cream…HEAVEN!  I love warm pie crust and fruit filling with cool vanilla ice cream.  Really really satisfying.  I’m not sure I liked the walnuts in the pie….sometimes I liked them better than others, but Matt really enjoyed them every time we ate the pie.  It only took us a week to get through the whole thing and now I’m sad that it’s gone 🙁

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Leftovers, Matthew, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.