Your Grandmother must have loved you! Every year, I buy a few boxes of gooseberries and get friends to help with topping and tailing them so that I can cook them up and freeze them for use in the depths of winter. Every year, I tell myself, never again. It is such a boring job! But I do like the taste of gooseberries.
Around Christmas last year, a friend offered me some MORE gooseberries - from her freezer. It turns out that she had simply frozen them whole. It was a very easy job to snip off the ends with a pair of scissors, cover them in sugar and put them in the pie case. Mixed with some of my stewed gooseberries, they tasted really good as long as you avoided the charred base! Next time I won't be lazy - I will put a rack in higher up and will use my thick lodge skillet to shield the pie bottom. Oh yes, and I will check on the pie after ten minutes, not twenty!