Blueberries III: the baking

Continuing with the 12 pounds of blueberries we acquired. What better to do during the height of summer than heat up the house with baking? (Spoiler: Do some canning. Tomorrow's post.)

And yet they're not the absolute gnarliest-looking muffins I've ever made.

One of the best recipes ever published was Amy Dacyczyn's "Universal Muffin Recipe" from The Tightwad Gazette. Any standard American cookbook will give you what you need for a particular type of muffin; Dacyczyn offered a formula for hacking 12 individual quickbreads from whatever flours and fruit you happen to have on hand. My love for The Tightwad Gazette is another post entirely, though. Today we are baking.

Pop quiz: Is this a cobbler or a pandowdy?

Pop quiz: Is this a cobbler or a pandowdy?

In the two-tone Pyrex dish is a blueberry cobbler. Cobbler is a deep-dish fruit stew, with no bottom crust, on top of which you drop sweet biscuit dough. In the Corelle dish is a blueberry pandowdy, like a deep-dish blueberry pie but again with no bottom crust. Strictly speaking, you push the pastry crust topping into the filling to make a glorious mess and let it soak up the oozing filling. I left my crust alone, so that the pandowdy was more like a deep-dish pie with no bottom crust, or a cobbler with a pastry top rather than a biscuit top.

American fruit dessert semantics.

I confess that I salvaged the crust on the pandowdy there from some scraps of pie dough that had been languishing in the freezer for a few months, to save a few pennies.

I would post recipes but they're easy enough to google or find in the Joy of Cooking that you should have on hand. In short: Toss a couple of cups of blueberries with flour; add sugar; top with biscuit or pastry dough; bake at 350 or 375 (depending on what type of vessel you're using, how deep it is, how cold the ingredients are, etc.) for 45 minutes or until done. Eat for dessert and breakfast.