Sweet Canada Day Strawberry Pie

It's Canada day and I thought I'd celebrate by trying a new strawberry pie experiment. This time I made an almond pastry crust which I filled with strawberries, and yes, dark chocolate chips!

Pastry:

1 cup of cold butter
200g of ground almonds
1 2/3 cup all purpose flour
4 tbsps granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp pure almond extract
4-5 tbsps ice water

Filling:

2 pints of strawberries (preferably local)
4 tbsps granulated sugar
1 organic orange worth of zest
sprinkling of good quality dark chocolate chips

Preheat the over to 400 f. Toast the almonds on a baking tray until they are just beggining to brown, no longer. When you can smell them, they're done. Whisk together the dry ingredients and cut in the butter with a pastry cutter. Add the extract and tbsps of water until the dough forms a ball easily when kneaded. Chill.

Hull strawberries and cut any large ones into bite size pieces. Toss into a bowl with the sugar and zest.

Roll out the dough. This dough is a little difficult to work with since the almonds make it a bit crumbly, if it cracks it can easily be pressed together in the pie plate. Add the berries in two amounts, sprinkling a the dark chocolate chips over each addition. It's easy to go overboard with this part, but if you practice restraint you'll have tangy strawberry bites with a bit of chocolate which is nice. The crust tastes like a cross between pie crust and almond shortbreads, it's very rich.

mmm, strawberries and chocolate!