Did you have organic pie on pi day** last week? I made big organic pie plans around the day. In fact, I decided to make an entire meal out of pies — from scratch!

I started by looking up organic pie recipes, and settled on the Organic Tofu Vegetarian Pot Pie** for my main course. This easily-modifiable recipe even let me switch up the veggies, so I could use whatever local produce was available at the farmers’ market!

Then I found my dessert recipe at Sprig: A sweet Brown Sugar Apple Pie.** “Buying from an organic orchard reduces health risks from chemicals, builds healthy soil, and helps small growers,” the post said. And since my farmers’ market’s got apple vendors, I was all set!

But once I started really reading the recipes, my pi day started getting very complicated. First of all, I couldn’t decide which pie crust recipe I should use. Sure, both recipes above came with crust-making instructions — but from reading about crusts in general, I discovered that not all crusts are created equal. After stressing out for a while and combing through way too many crust recipes, I settled on the Organic Pie Crust** by Cara at Day After An Inconvenient Truth** — mainly because hers sounded like a time-tested favorite recipe.

Unfortunately, I then I realized I was missing basic kitchen tools — like a pastry blender and food processor. I didn’t realize making a couple pies would require the purchase and mastery of new gadgets….

While deliberating whether or not I could make the crust without a pastry blender, I procrastinated further by reading The Fine Art of Organic Pie Making** by Julie Reid at Green Living Ideas — my rationalization being that my pie-making venture would benefit from a macro view of organic pies in general. Julie’s article was indeed quite comprehensive, pointing out that making pies from scratch would let me use simple ingredients — thereby letting me avoid weird preservatives or other strange stuff in pre-made pies.

But “from scratch” clearly means different things to different people. When I read this part — “You can also buy fat from which you can render your own lard” — I got so overwhelmed that I pretty much gave up on my pi day pie project.

Luckily, Julie went on — to say that buying organic pies is another good option. So I decided to take a little shopping trip to my local Whole Foods — and to take a pie-making class sometime before pi day 2010. Hopefully by that time I’ll have acquired a pastry blender and food processor –

Photo by methyl_lives**

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