Back in the day—even way before my day—bakers made hand pies with savory meat or vegetable fillings or with sweet jammy fruit fillings.

The whole purpose of a hand pie is to allow someone to shovel food into his or her mouth while walking or painting fences or ploughing fields.

Such a great idea.

I can picture Tom Sawyer eating a hand pie while he whitewashes that fence.

According to Google, they likely originated in 19th century England as a convenient lunch for Cornish tin miners.

I also think a hand pie is useful when reading or writing or playing cards with your kids or even while building blanket forts.

I made a super simple hand pie recipe that I tweaked from a www.tasteofthesouthmagazine.com recipe.

I could see making hand pies with jam or chopped fruit or even peanut butter and jelly.

Why not just make a sandwich, you ask?

Because, hello!, warm pastry!

My only tip on this is to make sure, sure, sure that you’ve crimped and pressed the edges of the pie together, so your filling doesn’t oooooooze all over the baking pan.

BLUEBERRY HAND PIES RECIPE

Yield: 12 Pies

Ingredients

1 sheet thawed Puff pastry dough (from the frozen dessert aisle of the grocery store)
1 cup fresh blueberries
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/8 tsp salt
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 tbsp coarse or regular sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Set aside.

2. On a lightly floured surface, unfold pastry dough and roll into a 13-15-inch square. Press down on that rolling pin. This makes for a pretty thin dough. I put waxed paper under my dough and sprinkled the paper with flour and they came up pretty easily.

3. Using a 3-inch round cutter, cut 24 rounds from the dough. Reroll the scraps as needed.

4. Place six rounds on each baking pan.

5. In a bowl, toss and stir blueberries, sugar, flour, lemon juice, salt, and cinnamon.

6. Place 1 heaping spoonful of blueberry mixture in the center of one of the dough rounds.

7. Brush edges with the lightly beaten egg. Top with another dough round.

8. Here’s the super important part! Using your fingers, press the two pieces together. Then crimp them with a fork. Make sure those edges are sealed! Repeat procedure with remaining dough rounds.

9. Slice a couple of small vents in top of each hand pie before putting in the oven. (Oh, second tip: I didn’t do that, which is why mine puffed up like they did.)

10. Brush tops of hand pies with more egg and then sprinkle with the coarse sugar.

11. Bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Let cool slightly on a wire rack before serving.

Now all you have to do is take your hand pie, go get a book or a game, maybe some lemonade, and your favorite people, and enjoy.

Here are a couple of my new favorite things that you might like, too:

1) Sarah Addison Allen is an author I’ve just discovered through her most charming young adult/adult book called First Frost. It’s an enchanting mix of magic and realism, and the second in a series of two novels. The first in the series is Garden Spells, which I have not read yet, but it’s on my TBR list.

2) Trying new coffees is a real treat for me, and I enjoyed Mayorga Coffee’s whole bean Café Cubano Roast—it’s organic, which is great for me because I drink sooooo much coffee—with “hints of vanilla and sweet, syrupy smokiness, and a smooth, and bold finish with low acidity.”

Mmmmmm.

Yes, please, to all of the above.

~gail

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