Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with Hazelnut Crumble Crust and Family History

    One of my church responsibilities that I enjoy the most is overseeing our ward's youth family history consultants.  I see that responsibility as mainly motivational.  The youth have been very quick to pick up on both the use of the family search website and indexing. The plan is to meet with them about once a month, have some brief training/motivational message, let them discuss what they have been doing lately and encourage them set some goals. I want to avoid micromanaging them. We've been counseled to challenge them and then get out of their way and let them do it.  In order to help them look forward to a once a month meeting I've offered to sweeten the deal with homemade pie. The youth all seemed pretty enthused about the pie. So far so good.

    This month's offering, Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with a Hazelnut Crumble Crust, was specifically requested by Julia Proffit. Personally, I am somewhat of a purist where rhubarb pie is concerned. I prefer my rhubarb pie straight up, undiluted by extraneous ingredients such as strawberries.  However, this particular recipe uses three cups of rhubarb to just one cup of strawberries.  Due to the predominance of the rhubarb it could be described more accurately as Rhubarb Strawberry Pie. The taste of the rhubarb is still pretty strong and the strawberries do improve the color of the pie filling.  The particular variety of rhubarb I grow is mostly green with very little red color. I would rather add strawberries than add food coloring.  Our local hardware store was selling rhubarb plants this past spring which were very red. I'm thinking I should consider adding that variety to my rhubarb collection next year.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie with Hazelnut Crumble Crust

      I found this particular strawberry rhubarb pie recipe on line at Simply Recipes.  The recipe is as follows:

3 cups chopped rhubarb stalks
1 cup strawberries, stemmed and sliced.  (I used frozen strawberries from our freezer.)
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons minute tapioca
1/4 teaspoon salt  (I omitted the salt)
In addition to the above ingredients I added a tablespoon of flour to the filling to make sure the pie set up properly. It's nice to be able to serve up a pie that holds together when you slice it and try to put it on someone's plate.

    The hazelnut crumble crust is my own recipe. I simply combine 1 cup of flour with one cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of butter. After it is all mixed together I had a half cup of chopped hazelnuts. I used my favorite pie crust recipe I got several years ago from Emeril LaGasse's website.