Simplest Triple-berry Pie

Whoever got us thinking that dessert had to be bad for you clearly never met the combination of coconut pie crust and this simplest triple-berry pie! With honey, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and that coconut pie crust, I wouldn’t advise eating the entire thing in a single sitting, but I’m relatively certain that there are worse things that you could do to yourself. So, you \Normally I would spend a bunch of time here writing about how a pie works and such, but I’m only going to give one tip here. Start with great berries. It’s not a new tip and it’s not a fancy tip, but it may be the single most important tip for anything you cook. Great tasting ingredients usually will yield great tasting food.

Of course, sometimes things don’t work out no matter what you do. I was cooking for a birthday dinner this past week, and even though the roast grapes were fantastic, and the double mint chocolate chunk ice cream sumptuous, the burgers were some of the worst burgers that I had ever cooked. After the birthday dinner, I made another batch of burgers. How did they turn out? They were right up to my usual standard. Why was the one batch terrible and the other delicious? No idea. Sometimes, every now and then, for reasons you just can’t grasp at the time, your food just turns out like junk, even if you’re doing it the exact same way that you’ve done it a hundred times before.

But those failures are very rare. So why share about them? Because I want you all to know that it’s ok to make mistakes in the kitchen. As a society, we’ve created so much fear of failure that we never try anything. Which means that we never get good at anything. So cook confidently and fail confidently. It’s ok to fail boldly and confidently, learning as you go along. But if you approach cooking like a mouse, without giving it everything that you have just because you’re afraid to make a mistake, you’ll never get where you want to be.

Approach life confidently and approach your kitchen confidently (though please be appropriately cautious with dangerous kitchen tools/appliances/etc.). Learn what you need to learn and fail the right way — with gusto. Now go make pie!