How to Grill a Pie

When I took the pictures for this post, I didn't know if the title would be How to Grill a Pie or How Not to Grill a Pie.  As you can tell, there's a happy ending to today's blog post!

There has been a giant bag of rhubarb burning a hole in my freezer for about a month now.  I've been dying for an excuse to make a rhubarb pie, the most delicious dessert on the planet.  With temperatures over 105 for the last several weeks and the air conditioner laboring to keep the house under 80, I haven't turned on the oven, dishwasher or dryer since the heat wave started.  And yet, there was the rhubarb.  And it was our turn to host dinner club.  And nothing is better than rhubarb pie.  Maybe the flavor of rhubarb would compensate for our guests having to blot sweat from their faces all during dinner.

Heat-dispersing platform for baking a pie in the grill.

I called Mom to remind me about the perfect ratio of sugar to rhubarb, and she suggested opening a window to vent the kitchen if I must make the pie.  Then I got to thinking about our grill.  It's really just an outdoor gas oven, right?  If I could figure out how to cook the pie out there, the house would still be cool for dinner.  So this time I called Dad, and he thought it would work, but I should put a heat-deflector under the pie dish with some air between the heat-deflector and the pie to allow air and heat to circulate.  The above picture shows my system for evening out the heat from the burners, with the metal grill for elevating the pie off the cast iron pan.  I think any baking sheet would work in place of the cast iron pan for a heat-deflector. 

Pie with edge protector for protecting the crust edge from burning.

To the left of the pan, you see a crucial element for the success of grilling a pie: an oven thermometer.   I preheated the grill to 400 degrees, the temperature required by my pie recipe.  My grill doesn't have any sort of temperature gauge besides purely decorative 'low' and 'high' markings, but after some playing, I discovered that keeping both burners on low would keep the temperature somewhere between 375 and 450 - close enough! 

Success!  One rhubarb pie baked in the grill.

The pie was supposed to bake for 50 minutes.  I checked it every 15 minutes or so, and ended up letting it cook for about an hour and 15 minutes.  It cooked perfectly - no burnt crust and no grill taste - just delicious, tart, heavenly rhubarb.

Some tips:

• Clean the grill really well before you start, especially if your grill is full of meat fat that might burn and smoke your pie with carcinogenic meat fat smoke.
• Use metal pans so they don't crack from uneven heat.
• Elevate your pie dish off of the pan underneath it - this is a must.  I also cooked cornbread in the grill, and I made the first batch straight on the pan and burned the bottom.
• Put foil under the pie to catch any juice dripping out of it - you don't want smoke from burning sugar to flavor your pie.
• Check frequently until you trust your temperature, but just barely crack open the grill to keep the heat inside.
• Maybe try some cornbread or something easy first to learn the process before you use expensive and time-consuming ingredients.

What's with all the grass spiders?

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It's the strangest summer.  Everything has looked like August since the middle of June.  The leaves are starting to yellow and fall, the current weeds are ones you see in August and September, and the yellow jackets are out, even though I usually only see those in September.
 
One thing that really stands out is all the grass spiders' funnel-shaped webs that seem to have popped up everywhere.  They seem to blanket the hillsides at Radnor Lake, but they are also all over the place in the less-traveled parts of our yard.  They look like sheets of spider web with a funnel in one corner.

Grass spider web.

Since I only remember seeing them in late August and September, I assumed that was their active season.  It turns out that they are active all summer, but the dry dust gets caught in their webs, making them visible.  We are seeing them now because we've only had a quarter inch of rain since the end of May, and everything is really dusty.  Grass spiders are not taking over the world - they've been here all along.

White patches are grass spider webs.

Grass spiders are neat spiders.  They build their sheet web with a little hidey-spout to sit in.  They often dangle some web threads over the sheet too.  Any insect that stumbles onto the sheet or flies into the threads and drops is doomed.  The web isn't sticky, so the insects aren't trapped; rather the web spider is shockingly fast and races out from the funnel as soon as it feels a victim on the sheet.  You can observe this phenomenon yourself if you catch an insect and drop it on a grass spider web. Grass spiders kill their prey with venom, like most spiders do.  They don't bite people, and the venom is harmless to us if they are forced to bite you (if you pick one). 

Grass spider web with funnel in the middle.

Grass spiders are beneficial organisms.  They eat pest insects and help me with pest control in the vegetable garden.  I'm glad to have them in the yard.  They tend to stay put on their webs, so I don't find them in our house very often.  Male grass spiders do go a-wanderin' when it's time to find a mate.  They must have a defined mating season, because it seems one night every spring I walk into my kitchen (near the back door that isn't sealed very tightly), turn on the light, and there are two or three male grass spiders searching for love on the kitchen floor.  Here's a link to see what grass spiders look like (they are only about an inch across, but the picture makes them look gigantic).