Instructions: Starting when I was 10 years old, Mother and I made assembly-line fruit pies by the dozen on the old-time pine kitchen cabinet, its pull-out metal top extended to maximum size. That was the summer I committed to becoming a country girl, the summer I learned that its the fruit trees that decide when we make summer pie, not we.

That was back in the 1950s, decades before anyone thought to hang a word like silicon on our region as a defining label. It was a peaceful, postwar boom time, and Santa Clara Valley was beginning its demise as an agricultural center. But I was just a kid. All I knew was our prune orchard was like everyone elses prune orchard, except it also contained a selection of peach, apple, walnut and pear trees.

That was the summer my mother taught me, just as I would later teach my daughters, the secrets of summer pie: Use ripe fruit, skimp on the sugar and dont fuss over your crust. Sure, pie is only as good as its crust, but pie crust is an amazingly resilient product made of basic kitchen staples that will almost always turn out fine if you just relax.

Once you develop a comfort level with two-crust summer fruit pies, you wont need a recipe. The basic ingredients are always the same - fruit, sugar, thickener, butter - though the quantity of each may vary because of personal preference and the ripeness of the fruit.

On assembly-line day, we allowed ourselves to bake only one pie - the rest went in the freezer. Of course, throughout summer we could make fruit pies just about any time we wanted from the just-picked cherries, apricots, peaches and berries that were so abundant then. Mother left the crust trimmings from those marathon sessions to me, and I looked forward to ending our work with my own sheet of crust cookies sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. She never wanted any, and I refused to share with my little brother because he was outside playing, not inside making pie.

On those 100-degree, bone-dry, breezeless summer days, it was impossible to imagine the next soggy winter. But Mother, a serious, competent homemaker, planned ahead. She knew deafening rain would roar down in a few months time, transforming Black Road into a muddy river only a raft could travel. No doubt she pictured the four of us in front of the popping creek-rock fireplace, smelling a fresh peach pie bubbling in the oven. We liked our pie steaming hot, probably because we couldnt wait for it to cool. What we didnt eat would sit out on the counter for next days breakfast, first come, first served.

Today, pie remains a decadent breakfast food in my kitchen. It also has become our family festivity food. Whether its a graduation, birthday or national holiday, we expect pie. At their wedding, our eldest daughter and her groom served apricot pie to 200 guests because, she reminded me, she hates cake.

Both our daughters insist they hate cake, but it may simply be because theyve never had a home-baked cake. Early on I found most cakes to be tedious, unreliable and seriously lacking in payoff. Cake is take it or leave it. Pie elicits happy groans, signaling, You shouldnt have but since you did I think Ill just go ahead and have a piece.

Baking a pie is easy. Whats the problem, I wonder when friends push a fork through my crust and announce that they cant make pie. For my mother, pie, jam and jelly were what you did with over-ripe fruit, and her attitude became mine.

Just make a top and bottom crust to seal up the fruit and its juice.

As a teenager, I stood for hours at the kitchen sink pitting cherries, cutting cots and peeling peaches, pitting the freestones by cutting them in half or slicing pink flesh off the clings. It didnt take long to figure out that blackberry was the easiest, least complicated fruit pie - no peeling or pitting required. These days I keep a couple plastic bags of berries in the freezer and pour them, still frozen, into the bottom crust, and our family has fresh berry pie year-round.

But to make and eat, apricot is my favorite. That would be the apricot pie that surely has set a neighborhood record in the Fourth of July pie-baking contest. Is there another Naglee Park household that has won three blue ribbons for the same apricot pie, each to a different entrant?

I entered one year on a whim. And won. Soon, my eldest daughter got her blue ribbon in the childrens division. Our youngest daughter, who never saw a contest she wouldnt enter and win, had to wait a few years until she was tall enough to roll out crust on the kitchen table.

When they were old enough, I told them they had to keep a secret. Its the only secret we cop to having, the secret ingredient in our apricot pie. They keep it to this day, and love to torment friends while serving apricot pie.

But the truth is that its simply the way my Mother taught me. Surely there are others who grew up here and learned that the zest of one medium lemon is all an apricot pie needs to make it a winner.

Despite that blue ribbon, Ive had pie failures. Its never the pie that fails, but the crust. It happens when Im thinking about something else, or talking to someone. Next thing I know Ive got a pasty mess in the bowl.

Theres only one thing to do: Throw it out. Its just flour and shortening. I dont try to fix whats broken when it comes to pie crust. Crust should not be a challenge. It should be childs play.

I started our daughters when they were in nursery school, just as my mother started me, with the leftover scraps. They could roll it out and cut it into any shape, sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar and bake their own pie crust cookies.

They took so much pride in their product, I never could get so much as a nibble of those cookies. I still cant. Like mother, like daughter.

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