One of the best things about living in the south is that we get to enjoy local fruit and vegetables earlier than most folks in other parts of the country.
Heck, we had fresh strawberries from Plant City this year, while our friends and family in Baltimore were anticipating snow!
As much as we love fresh fruit in little split wood containers, we really love it when you dump nature’s bounty into a pie shell and slide it into the oven to bake for a little under an hour. That, as some people say, is some good eating.
Which is why we’re very excited to announce Friday Pie-Days now through the summer. You know that we provide a tasty dessert every night at happy hour…well, on Friday you can expect to have pie.
These aren’t just any old pies, either. These are the BEST pies! We’re pretty picky about pies, you know. They should be sweet, but not sugary–and they should taste like fruit, not syrup. We don’t care if they have one crust or two, but the crust needs to be flaky on the bottom, and just a little bit softened and wet where it touches the filling. If it does have two crusts, the crusts should be sprinkled with baker’s sugar, so that it glints like a precious stone when you take it out of the oven.
We have some great bakers on our staff. You may know Laverne, and the story of her hundred-dollar pie. It’s a pie full of berries–strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries–and a good dose of rhubarb. We know not everyone loves rhubarb, but we’re guessing it’s because you haven’t had our hundred dollar pie. Sandy makes a good apple galette–especially if she is lucky enough to pick up some apples on a trip home to Pennsylvania (yes, they’ll ship them if you ask them really nicely). She also makes a good lemon sponge, which we expect to be even better than before, because she recently talked a cousin into giving her a copy of her great-grandmother’s recipe. (No more guessing how much lemon juice!)
For the next few months, we’ll be featuring pies from our in-house bakers, as well as pies freshly made by our neighbors at the Palatka Pie Company. We just ordered one of the last blueberry pies that they’ll be making this season–and we are nostalgic for these purple mouthfuls of deliciousness already. Luckily, the bakers have consoled us with the fact that Georgia peaches will soon be ripe–and that should be a really good pie!
In the meantime, we hope you’ll make a reservation to stay with us on Friday night. TGIP!