Pie Camp Day 1

Create your own Pie Camp with friends.  You can do it over a day or two.  Pick a few recipes, get together and bake.  Then take a break and do it again.  Now you’re ready to enter a pie.  The contest doesn’t have to be about competition.  It can be an excuse to get together and catch up with friends over dough and filling.  Use the upcoming KCRW Pie contest to focus your time.  Then forget about your Type A tendencies and just have fun.

My Pie Camp experience was epic.  I finally found myself in a situation where I could feast on as much pie as I wanted.  I finally achieved maximum fullness, visually, artistically, manually and stomach-ly FULL  My pie colleague (now sister-in-pie) Barbara Swell, author of the gem The Lost Art of Pie Making Made Easy invited me to co-teach the weeklong workshop with her at the John C. Campbell Folk School.  I had no idea what to expect.  This is what happened.  Ten lovely “students” bonded with two teachers over six days of pie teaching, learning and sharing, of techniques, flavor combinations, family lore and regional differences. Each student had a goal they wanted to achieve.  There was constant energetic patter of folks getting to know one another over the course of a week as hands were busy making dough, rolling dough, filling dough and rescuing each others efforts.  The experience confirmed for me the notion that pie is a narrative wisdom not a recipe. More thoughts on that here.  But don’t panic, you get to the narrative wisdom by making a ton of recipes.

Enter!