Strawberry Balsamic Mini Pies

 

Tonight I made Strawberry Balsamic Mini Pies. I had some pie crust in the fridge that I needed to use, and my roommate Brian recently bought some fruit for the Model Home. At first I thought I'd try to make some apple pie pops, but when I cut up our two apples, they looked like that Berenstain Bears illustration where the perfect apple is all rotted inside (but the gnarly apple is perfectly white inside). I'm trying to find a picture of it online but it's basically impossible to find one. It looks like it's from The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers. Ok, I just found a bootleg youtube:

 This apple looks gross on the outside but is perfectly harmless on the inside.

This apple looks regular - attractive even - on the outside but is FOUL on the inside. This is what my apples were like.

So I looked around for more recipes. Banana pie? Orange pie? Gross, both fruits decidedly antithetical to tasty piemaking (unless you add cream, which I didn't have). I found some sweet potato recipes, but with this sudden nice weather, I didn't want to lug us all the way back to autumn. Then Brian was like "BECKY! We have strawberries!" And so it goes.

I looked up a few strawberry pie recipes and found this one from ThePioneerWoman.com. I wanted to add balsamic vinegar to it because once my aunt made strawberries with balsamic, and the vinegar ended up making the strawberries taste strawberrier! So I added a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and tasted it, then added another splash. The end result didn't taste like balsamic at all. But slightly strawberrier.

 

This was also my first time making a lattice top for a pie. Ridiculously easy.  I will draw an instructional illustration soon. Not to be pedantic, just to go pie-deep for the sake of a blog post about pies. Nuts, my brother was right. I am a hipster. OH GOD.

Here are some glamour shots of the mini pies:

I have a plan for redemption. It is pie-related. It might reverse my hipster blurts. It is PIESTORM:

courtesy of my roommate Colin