Spiked Persimmon Pie

There are many things to look forward to in the fall – gorgeous colors, lazy rainy* afternoons, that hey-you’re-suddenly-older day (a.k.a. my birthday), and – yes – persimmons. My parents have 2 giant persimmon trees, and our family practices annual collective ritual, starting with predictive analysis of the trees’ flowering patterns in the spring, followed by vigilant ongoing inspections, and culminating in the late-October panic (spurred on largely by my mom) of collecting buckets upon over-flowing buckets of fruit, only to further sctrutinize the harvest’s quality and volume and strategize for the year to follow.

Right now, the persimmons are just orange enough that my dad is ready to test their ripeness. And since accurate testing requires statistical significance, we got a full bag of reasonably ripe persimmons over the weekend.

Wait a wait… Have I really never baked a persimmon pie? Hm. A travesty with an easy fix in my current situation, I thought. So withough further consideration, I pealed several persimmons and sliced them whole on my handy slicer thingy – a technical term, I believe. Then I tossed the slices in a bit of lemon juice, brandy and brown sugar and layered them all in my grandmother’s quick cookie-like pie crust.

It was too much pie and too pretty not to share (or boast?..), topped with toasted almonds, powdered sugar and all. So the lovely persimmons – sliced, spiked, and pie-ed – boomeranged right back to my parents’ the following day. Hey, maybe it was their plan all along?!

*In California, precipitation is often promised, highly anticipated, and rarely delivered.