Mulberry and Rhubarb Pie

Last night I waited up to meet my egg fairy, well everyone else might know him as my cousin Mike! He and his wife, Chris, raise free-range laying hens and there is nothing like farm fresh eggs! The best part is he delivers right to your refrigerator! LOL As we are in the middle of Mulberry season I was processing mulberries when he arrived. We then got to talking, as Millers often do, about picking mulberries. I told him how I picked them the hard way the first round... you know the painstaking way of one ripe berry at a time. 

I had to laugh because a couple of days later I went to my brother's and picked more with Sara. She taught me how to use old sheets and shake the tree. We lined the ground under the tree with old sheets and then grabbed the branches above them and shook them until the ripe mulberries stopped raining down on us! In a matter of minutes you are left with sheets covered with ripe mulberries and then all you have to do is grab the corners of the sheets and pour them into your buckets. So simple and fast! 

The truly funny part of that is that it was my mom who told her how to do it that way. I guess she remembered Auntie and Grandma Spratt picking them that way, but somehow she neglected to tell me about it. :) Mike then laughed and said that he could remember picking mulberries when he was younger with his parents. He told me that they used rope or something like that to loop around the tree so that you could shake the living daylights out of it. LOL He said that he even remembered his dad using the tractor to shake the tree! I guess it worked great and there wasn't a ripe berry left on the tree when they were done! LOL Kind of makes me think of the old cowboy motto only modernized by replacing the horse with a tractor... if you can't do it from the seat of your tractor then it's not worth doing!

-Jennifer Figgins
daughter of Jesse Figgins and Mary Bryan

Mulberry and Rhubarb Pie

Ingredients:
2 cups mulberries with green stems removed
1 cup chopped rhubarb
2 tsp lemon zest
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/8 tsp salt
2 tsp butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
unbaked double-crust pastry for pie

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. 

Combine mulberries and rhubarb with salt, sugar, flour and lemon zest.

Pour the filling into the lined pan.

Distribute the filling, heaping them toward the center.

Brush rim of the pastry with a little milk. 

Cover with the remaining piece of pastry. 

Gently press the edge with thumb tips. 

Cut off excess, holding the knife at a slight angle. 

Flute the edge with your fingertips, then brush the top with milk and sprinkle with sugar.

Cut a 1/2 inch steam hole or design in the top crust. 

Bake for 10 minutes at 450 degrees, then reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake for 30-35 minutes or until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbly.