Welcome! We’re really gearing up for the Crawford County Fair in the Atlantic community. Fallowfield United Methodist Church volunteers picked just shy of 50 pounds of blueberries on July 18. These will be baked into blueberry pies and summer harvest pies. Summer harvest is a blend of peaches, cherries, and blueberries.
We plan on picking another 100 pounds in the near future.
I serve on Fallowfield’s pie committee, and it’s my job to order and pick up what we call the bulk order. This included 75 pounds of cook-type vanilla pudding mix, 40 pounds of brown sugar, 30 pounds of raisins, 30 pounds of salt, 1 pound of cream of tartar, and around 30 pounds of coconut.
Lugging those bags and boxes into the church always strikes me as funny. Under what other circumstances would I buy 30 pounds of raisins or 75 pounds of pudding? It’s a little absurd. But we’ll use most or all of these ingredients by around 9 a.m. on August 25.
If you stop by the church you’ll see ladies and a few gentlemen with bags under their eyes happily stacking mixing bowls and sweeping up flour after the final pie bake of the year. And you’ll smell the intoxicating aroma of baking pies, too.
I bought the bulk order at West County Line Salvage just outside Atlantic on West County Line Road. They sell bulk ingredients, such as demerara, whole wheat flour, dried herbs and spices, and such. They also sell expired canned and boxed foods.
You never know what you’ll find there, so every trip is an adventure. The owners have an article taped on the wall that informs readers that the expiration date on most foods doesn’t necessarily indicate it’s unsafe to eat it once it’s past the date. Now, don’t apply this theory to milk or spinach, or you’ll be sorry.
Volunteer bakers made and froze 203 apple and Dutch apple pies on July 23. We’ll make pies on July 30, August 6, and August 13, starting at 5 p.m. We freeze and bake these the week of the Crawford County Fair.
We typically make Dutch apple, apple, strawberry-rhubarb, rhubarb, peach, and summer harvest pies ahead of time.
Frozen pies comprise the first oven load of the day for all three pie bakes during fair week. So that’s 30 pies we’ve already made for each bake, reducing the number of pies we have to make fresh to between 60 and 90 per bake. It still amazes me that God has supplied the hands and the customers for this mission project for 62 years.
If you want to help, just show up with your apron at Fallowfield United Methodist Church, 3993 Leach Road, Atlantic, on one of the dates above.
We’ll still be making the same variety of pies as we have for the past several years: apple, Dutch apple, peach, blueberry, blackberry, elderberry, cherry, coconut cream, lemon meringue, raisin, summer harvest, and elderberry.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, we’re completely out of elderberries this year. We usually have several gallon bags of elderberries from the previous year in our church’s freezer. Not this year. We’ll rely on donations and whatever we can find. We may not have elderberry pie except on senior citizen days. Sorry. So make sure you get to the fair Monday or Tuesday if you want a piece.
I should add that elderberries are wild berries that birds enjoy. I don’t mean to complain about not having enough. God feeds the birds, just as he supplies our food. Jesus said in Luke 12:24, “’Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!’” (NIV)
So while our lives are much more valuable in God’s sight than birds’ lives, He still provides elderberries for them.
I hope I’ll keep this in mind if a customer orders elderberry pie and has his heart broken when we’re sold out. There’s always blackberry as a consolation prize.
Have a wonderful week. Blessings!