Back in the Saddle

Ah! A new year and a new attempt to maintain a blog. Let's see if we get past May this time...

We're off to a good start, with two pies at once (and our first savory "pie"). Friends of ours at church recently had their first child and we volunteered to bring them dinner during the first week their daughter was home. This couple was the grateful recipient of a number of our pies last year (including the disastrous Grimace Pie), so I figured we'd take them a "pie" supper as a little wink-wink chuckle.

Welcoming Committee

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a brief PSA on hospitality and neighborliness:

This is what you get when you move into my neighborhood.

Apple Crumb Pie - still warm!

We recently had a single mom and her son move in across the way from us, so I thought, "What better way to introduce ourselves than to take her a pie?" I had two bags of apple pie filling (homemade, of course!) in the freezer from the fall and a spare refrigerated crust to be used - why not?

This bag of filling was part-Spy, part-Macintosh, with the sugar and spice according to Pillsbury's Perfect Apple Pie recipe. Seeing as I only had one crust, I looked through Ken Haedrich's Pie to find a crumb topping. The oatmeal crumb (page 200) looked good: 1 cup flour, ¹⁄₂ cup rolled oats, ²⁄₃ cup brown sugar, a bit of salt, and cinnamon. I think the recipe calls for ¹⁄₂ teaspoon of cinnamon; I just shook some in and added ground cloves. Combine with pastry cutter until crumb-y.

The crust and apples cooked for 30 minutes at 400°, then I turned the oven down to 350° and spread the topping over the parbaked filling. As warned in the recipe, this makes a lot of crumb topping; I saved about a cup in the freezer for a future apple crisp. Back in the oven for 25 minutes, et voila!

I hope it tastes as good as it smells. That's the rough part about giving pies away - I don't get to taste them! At least I've still got another bag of filling in the freezer, right?

P.S. - I tagged this as a pantry pie, not because I always have apples around (I've gotten to where I can't stand apples out of season), but because I had frozen pie filling that I made up in the fall sitting in my freezer. I didn't have to make any special plans or shopping trips to throw this together. Just something to think about - if you like a particular pie for which the season is brief, prepare your own filling for long-term storage. Fresh apple pie in March!

Next time - Let's Go Blue(berries)!

Spies are for Pies

So I got a bit ahead of myself. The week before Christmas, faced with a sack of Northern Spy apples moldering in the corner of my kitchen, I decided to go ahead and make that apple pie I've been psyching myself up for since September. I know it was before my grand pie project began, but if I couldn't pull off a basic apple pie, what business do I have making 65 pies?

Full confession - I didn't do anything fancy. I didn't even make my own crust - a store-bought refrigerated crust worked just fine (and tasted great too). And the recipe? "Perfect Apple Pie" cribbed off the side of the crust box.

So, in to the oven: one double-crust, straight-ahead apple pie. And three-quarters of an hour later, the angels rejoiced. Or maybe that's just what always happens in late December when you pull homemade baked goods from the oven.

Seriously, though, this was one of the best apple pies I can recall. And I made it myself (sort of)! </giddy> I don't know if was just the variety of apple or what, but this was a really good pie. This was what I imagine when I imagine basic apple pie. It will be interesting to try the same recipe with a different apple and see what we get. But that's a pie for another day...

Postscript: These photos are actually from New Year's Eve. I made up the exact same pie, but expanded into the crust slits you see here and the fluted edge. Two things to note:

1. The refrigerated pie crusts have a distinctive 'ripple' at the tighter end of where they were rolled up in the box. I wonder if a little meeting with Mr. Rolling Pin before laying on the crust might remedy this?

2. My crust leaked again. Both times I've made this pie in the last two weeks, it's escaped out the side. (And that, boys and girls, is why I put a cookie sheet on the next rack under the oven rack holding the pie.) Again, my hunch is that a bit of work on the refrigerated crust with a rolling pin would give me a little more play in the crusts - without it, one side always seems a bit short. But it's the tasting that counts, right? We'll just chalk it up to "too much apple-y goodness to stay in one pie shell".