Summer - Strawberry-Rhubarb pie

Only as spring turns to summer -- the rhubarb stalks grow tall and it's time for a strawberry rhubarb pie. I was given rhubarb a couple days ago and here is my celebration of late spring -- shared with family this afternoon, all but baby Finn enjoyed it. Even the dog and cat got tiny tastes. Above are the basic ingredients, nothing complex, nothing fancy. The pie shell gets filled with chopped rhubarb and cut strawberries. These berries from the store were gigantic, the one on top of the pies is not the largest -- the largest ones I cut into eighths! I cut the rhubarb into one inch pieces and the strawberries as I said. Dumped a little over a cup of sugar over them -- this was for two pies, added a couple of tablespoons of corn starch to thicken the juice [could have used another tablespoon -- but we ate it warm and corn starch thickens as the juice cools]. Dumped it all in the pie shells, added the lattice on the top. Some juice had accumulated in the bowl of fruit so i drizzled it over the lattice which helped it become a nice brown.

I baked it at 375 for about 40 minutes and was sure to spread aluminum foil on the cookie sheet the pies sat on in order to catch overflowing juice and not mess up the oven. The results are here -- we added vanilla ice cream! Yum! Summer is a comin' in, loudly shout Hurray! [to grossly misquote Ezra Pound]

P.S. We decided rhubarb must actually be a vegetable since it doesn't seem to be a fruit. Now I'm going to Google it and see if we were right.