Summer is here and that means one thing:  slow cooked, rich and hearty stew!  Kidding.  Yeah we all know summer is a time to eat a little lighter what with the warmer weather and increasing abundance of fresh summer vegetables.  Also as newbies to the whole CSA (community supported agrigculture) movement we get a weekly supply of vegetables some of which are familiar and some kind of new.  Our first week we got three different heads of lettuce and ended up eating big main course salads four nights in a row.  Here’s one of them.

Salad with three different lettuces, grape tomatoes, onions and feta cheese. It think I made a simple dressing of olive oil, wine vinegar, salt, pepper and dijon mustard.

And then last week we got rubarb which I’ve never actually cooked.  In fact, I know of only one thing that calls for rubarb and that’s strawberry rubarb pie.  So, lacking originality and inspiration that’s what I made.  I made my own crust (2 and 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 2 sticks of butter, 1 and 1/2 tbspns of sugar, 1 tspn of salt and about 6 tbspns  of ice cold water).  For the filling I loosely followed this recipe.  And here’s the pie fresh out of the oven:

I was pretty pyched to see how well this pie held up through the baking. Nothing overflowed or oozed out the side or over the top.

Oh snap! I guess a combination of the filling still being hot and not using enough thickening agent (I used 1/3 cup of corn starch - more than the recommended 1/4 cup), the filling just kind of came spilling out. I was pissed. But at least it was delicious. Next time though, I'd use less sugar. It was a bit sweet for my taste. Maybe one cup of sugar instead of the 1 and 1/3 cup called for in the recipe.

I figured by tilting the pie, the contents would be forced back into the crust. It kind of worked.