Hi friends! I’ve been busy. Life is so sweet. Our friends have been getting married, having very hard times, getting sick, needing help, moving houses, having babies, needing encouragement. This year, I’ve been better at listening to and playing meaningful music, going to yoga classes, and reading books but worse at keeping up with my pie blog and learning Spanish. Everything goes through its cycles.

It’s in the height of California springtime now.

I recently bought a sign from my good friend Emily to hang in our bedroom. It says “Life is hard, God is good.” I want that to be my new answer every time someone asks me how I am.

Since I don’t have very much time tonight, I’ll just start with a small little post.

I saw this new product at Trader Joe’s. (So far, not unusual.)

I thought I’d better test it out and let you all know whether it’s worth buying for yourself. The first thing I noticed was that there is NO corn syrup in the ingredient list. If you’ve made pecan pie before you’ll know that this is truly unusual. I don’t imbibe corn syrup too often in my life, but I will make an exception for pecan and certain other pies, as it’s hard to get the hallmark gooey texture without it. That being said, the best pecan pie I ever had was this one, made with maple syrup…and so I was excited to try another non-corn-syrupy variety.

When I lack the time to refrigerate my crust before rolling it out, I love breaking out this really nice pie crust recipe that uses no butter or shortening, only oil and cold water. This is the crust my mom uses, and we got it from a dear Schooley’s Mountain sister.

The ingredients in the Trader Joe’s jarred filling (cause I know you wanna know what IS in it, not just what isn’t) are cane sugar, water, pecans, brown sugar, bourbon, lemon juice, vanilla extract, cream of tartar, salt and citric acid.

To make the pie filling, you just mix the jarred filling with four eggs and some melted butter. Easy peasy. So far, so good!

So far, still good. Like, really good. The smell at this point=fantastic.

Overall comments: Great flavor. Would buy again. Ease of baking worth every penny. Filling cracked apart more than I would have wanted. You CAN taste the bourbon. Slightly sweet for my tastes-I’m used to the super low sugar content of Ken’s recipes at this point-but definitely not egregiously slow. High quality vanilla ice cream should go on top. 8/10

Optional: Share with super squirrelly, dessert-crazy little girls.