The Reindeer Keeper

When you think about it, the possibility of something so sweet mixed with something so tart tasting so very good seems impossible. But it happens most every year about this time when I make strawberry-rhubarb pies using my grandmother's recipe. I don't know how it happens but the unlikely combination of the two makes for one very delicious experience. I live in northern New York where fresh rhubarb abounds. From a friend's amazing rhubarb patch to Amish stands stocked with just picked rhubarb for sale, the rhubarb I use is the freshest available. The strawberries are just as fresh, picked from Amish strawberry patches, and sold at those roadside stands. After you've cleaned and sliced those two main ingredients, all you have to do is add a little flour, some sugar and a "sprinkle of salt" as my grandmother would say, and you are ready to add your ingredients to the bottom pie crust in your pie plate; then cover them with the top pie crust and bake at 350 degre...

Quite possibly one of the best things about this time of the year is that it is time for homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie! It amazes me how you can take total opposites-one so bitter and one so sweet, wrap them up in some pie dough, add some sugar, and out from the oven a short time later comes a most heavenly tasting, gooey, piping-hot blend that has, at times, forced me to sit down with a fork and just keep eating pieces one right after another. This pie even works for those who might not like strawberries or those who might not like rhubarb because for some reason by mixing them together one enhances the other. Gone is the bitterness of the rhubarb. Instead the rhubarb seems to add just a bit more flavor to the strawberries making the wait for the pie to bake a bit hard to take! My mother had a strawberry patch that ran along the side of our home in her rock garden out in the country. The problem with a strawberry patch is that many times most of the strawberries never make it in...