What does one do on a lazy Sunday afternoon when they are halfheartedly organizing the kitchen and come across a 750 g open bag of raisins? I couldn’t even remember why I bought them in the first place. I did open the bag and extracted two raisins from the bag, plopped them in an empty medicine bottle, and unceremoniously handed the specimens over to a friend who claimed to have frozen and lost his testicles at the Legislative grounds when he was there for a walk one -30C evening. I claimed to have found them for him, you see.

Back to the open bag of raisins. I’m not really a fan of eating raisins out of the bag. I like raisins in things. Things like trail mix, Raisin Bran cereal, raisin-oatmeal cookies, savoury couscous, raisin toast, and pie! Yes pie! As luck would have it, a pie would take the least amount of energy in my raisin-in-food cooking and baking repertoire. Remember, the first sentence did declare this to be a lazy Sunday, and as luck would have it, I had a frozen pie crust kicking around in the old deep freezer.

Next up was locating a recipe. More and more I find I am ignoring my shelves of beloved and well-worn cookbooks in favour of the immense selection on the web. Today I selected a recipe from the Sun-Maid raisin people. It’s their raisins afterall, and they should know best what to do with them. One would think. Here’s the link: Sun-Maid Old Fashioned Raisin Pie.

I boiled the raisins, I added sugar and cornstarch and cinnamon and salt and vinegar and butter. Poured the hot goo in the pie shell (which I carefully remove from the store tin and place in a proper pie plate to make it “look” like I made a rustic crust from scratch), brushed the top crust with a bit of milk and a sprinkling of white sugar, placed my treasure in the oven and let it bake for 25 minutes.

The pie results? Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. A scoop of vanilla ice cream, frozen yogurt, or a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream would calm that aspect down nicely. The pie turned out delicious.

I was looking for a Sun-Maid Raisin image for this post, and came across this version by Spicysteweddemon. I prefer Spicystew’s whimsical look…

… to the new official Barbie, teeth capped and whitened version:

It’s 2011 Sun-Maid Raisin people! Who wears bonnets anymore? Especially when doing yoga?