In addition to French onion soup, I spent a little time in the kitchen last weekend trying to make a strawberry rhubarb pie, which is a family favorite. But I depleted my stash of frozen rhubarb a couple summers ago and I’m not sure I’ll be able to harvest any this year, since we transplanted our rhubarb over the summer and I’m just hoping it’ll come back.

But then one day as I was wandering the aisles of my local grocery store, I happened upon a can of strawberry rhubarb pie filling. I’d never seen such a thing before! Naturally, I had to buy a can to find out what it was like.

I dug a box of pie crust out of my deep freeze and set it on the counter to thaw while I got dinner going. Once the dinner dishes were done, I set out to make my pie, with a little help from Bubbles.

Apparently, though, I should have bought two cans.

We unrolled our pie crust and I placed one in a 9″ pie plate. Then I scraped the pie filling out of the can and into the crust:

Uh…what? That’s nowhere near enough filling!

I looked at the can. It said to use 1-2 cans of pie filling for a 9″ pie. I think what that can should have said was to use 2-3 cans.

But since there are several local grocery stores and I shop at several of them, and since I’ve had this pie filling for a while, I had absolutely no idea which grocery store I bought it at.

So as Bubbles and I sat there and tried to figure out a creative solution to my pie problem, Miss Tadpole emerged from her room with a suggestion of her own. My idea had been to thaw some strawberry rhubarb sauce, mix it with the pie filling, and hope it would be enough, but my sauce wasn’t thawing well and I was worried it would be too runny. She suggested using the other pie crust and making pie bars.

That seemed like a novel idea.

We dug out another pan and she trimmed the remaining pie crust to size. Once she’d fit it in the pan, she started transferring the pie filling while I Googled recipes for crumb topping. Once the crumb topping was finished, we stuck our experimental pie-adjacent dessert in the oven and hoped for the best.

Meanwhile, Miss Tadpole used the original pie crust and some of the rhubarb sauce in an experiment of her own. She used the sauce as a filling and folded the pie crust around it, then garnished it with some pie-crust roses she’d rolled earlier. It ended up being a soggy mess, but it was worth a shot.

As for our pie bars, they were…okay, I guess:

I think a streusel topping might have tasted better. And of course, I still find myself craving strawberry rhubarb pie. Maybe I’ll just have to thaw a jar of strawberry rhubarb jelly and have it on toast. 🙂

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