Summer Apple Raspberry Pie

I love berries, from the exotic lingon to the oft-despised rasp, the flashy strawberry to the humble blue: I want them all. With berry season in full-swing I have been buying pints and quarts every time I enter a store, then gobbling them by the handful like the candy they are. It's been three years since I've had fresh berries, considering they weren't available in Uganda (not the right climate) and while blueberries and blackberries were occasionally imported to Kuwait, Seth and I looked at the price of a pint and decided to go on a trip to England, instead. But here in Texas I have fresh berries grown right in the states. Not since LA I have tasted anything so sweet.

Grapefruit Granita

I find it difficult to blog while watching Top Chef but if I keep putting this off it just won't happen. Some good news: Seth and I have finally finished trekking around the States collecting all of our stuff! Last week we flew to San Diego to pick up my car - and see my fabulous friend, Kerry - where I managed to pick up a Showgirls tattoo and eat the best pizza of my life at a winery in Escondido. Oh, the wine was also pretty tasty, but seriously: pizza, hot damn.

However, this is not my attempt at recreating that delicious pie but my attempt to use more of those damn grapefruit stubbornly sitting outside. Over a week ago I made grapefruit curd (with whipped cream stirred in, making it seem more like chiffon than curd) and, of course, the candied peels, and while I have been hoping to use the fruit in some savory dish I ended up making a grapefruit granita thanks to the suggestion of my sister and the super-easy recipe that shouted to me from Amanda Hesser's The Essential New York Times Cookbook.

Candied Grapefruit Peels

Some time ago I read Smitten Kitchen's post about candied grapefruit peels, in particular how they ended up a complete disaster: SK's recipe didn't specify "completely remove pith" - actually, the recipe (below) states specifically to retain the pith; nasty -so she didn't and as a result her peels were inedibly bitter. I was sad, because the pictures were so beautiful that it was difficult to believe the product didn't match the advertisement, and because I was tempted to try the recipe but was worried the problem had to be something other than pith. I wasn't willing to waste grapefruit just to experiment on some damn candy.

However, now that I am trying to create everything from breakfast to dinner to cocktail time with the 50-pound sack of grapefruit sitting on my sister-in-law's porch, I am no longer concerned with wasting fruit as anything I do with the things will at least serve the purpose of removing them from the porch. My time for candied grapefruit peels had come.