In-Laws in Town Apple Pie

My husband's parents came to visit for Spring Break this year. Among seeing the famous DC cherry blossoms and visiting a wide array of museums, we managed to find time to celebrate Stepmom Viv's birthday with the above apple pie. It was tasty, but I'll let you in on a little secret: I forgot to add the flour to the filling. The flour serves as the thickener, so the pie didn't end up with any of that "goopy gloppy" goodness that you'd expect. The filling was more like applesauce than syrup. It was good in its own way, and no one else said anything about it, but it almost tasted healthy. When you're ingesting that many calories, the last thing you want is for it to taste healthy. Suffice to say, I was a bit disappointed. It's amazing the toll a toddler can take on one's cognitive ability to process recipes. For more on that, see the next post. The recipe for the apple pie in this post (complete with thickening agents) can be found here. The only change is that I used brown rice syrup instead of molasses in this one.

Current Pie Tally: 74

Last BBQ Pumpkin and Apple Pies

I made these two pies for our first bbq at the neighbors' house. If the weather turns more unfavorable to outdoor soirees as it's supposed to, it also happened to be the last bbq they'll throw until Spring. What better way to send everyone home to hole up for winter than with bellies full of pie. Pumpkin Pie recipe can be found here and here's the Apple Pie recipe:

Apple Pie
top and bottom pie crusts
about 8 pie apples (Cortlands this time), peeled, cored, & sliced
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. freshly squeezed orange juice
3 T. flour
1 T. molasses
1 t. Penzey's apple pie spice

Mix bottom six ingredients in an extra large bowl. Fold in the apples. Pour into pie dish lined with bottom crust. Roll out top crust. Trim and fold edges, crimp, and seal. Cut a vent for the steam. Bake at 450 F for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 F and bake for 35-40 minutes more. Pie is done when goo bubbles in the center under the steam vent, the crust looks dry and golden brown, and the apples are tender when pierced with a fork (through the steam vent). Let cool and enjoy!

Current Pie Tally: 65

Matt's Birthday Pie

Cherry-Apple Pie
top and bottom pie crust
4-6 granny smith apples, peeled, cored and cut into chunks
about 1 lb. cherries, pitted and sliced in half
1 c. sugar
4 T. arrowroot starch
1 t. fresh lemon juice
1 t. vanilla
dash of cinnamon

Mix together filling ingredients in a large bowl until well-mixed. Preheat oven to 425F. Roll out bottom pie crust and place in pie dish. Trim edges. Pour filling in. Roll out top pie crust. Place over filled pie dish, crimp and seal. Bake at 425F for 15 min, then reduce heat to 350F and bake for 40-50 min more, until filling starts to splash out onto the crust. Cool and enjoy!

Current Pie Tally: 53

Pre-Holiday Warm Up with Apple

Apologies for the lack of posting. There will be a flurry of pie posting excitement this week to make up for it - starting with this apple delight. We had no junk food in the house and a bag of apples in the fridge, so I threw this together using my standby apple pie recipe. I used packaged Tropicana orange juice for the fruit juice in this one and unsulphured blackstrap molasses. Freshly squeezed lemon, orange, etc. juice makes for a slightly more flavorful pie and the potent molasses really imparted a pleasant sharpness this time.

As a side note, I think it was a bad year for apples in Wisconsin this year. The only ones I've been happy to eat fresh so far are Russets. All of the Macouns and Cortlands I've purchased have been mealy and watery tasting, but they make decent pies and baby applesauce.

Current Pie Tally: 35

Six Pies in a Day

It's over, so we can laugh about it now. Six pies in a day doesn't seem like such a bad idea when you've got plenty of sleep under your belt. But when it's 11pm, and the rest of your family has already been asleep for an hour as the apple pie crusts are falling apart beneath your fingertips, the novelty wears off. I got it all done, perhaps against my better judgement, and the pies all came out well - though the bottom apple crusts were definitely ugly. Hobo patch jobs abounded. Luckily the tops came out fine, so I could keep up appearances.

I ended up making four pumpkin pies, and two apple. If I had to do it again, I'd probably make pecan pie instead of apple. Granted the apple allowed me to mix up the filling and freeze the pies a day ahead of time, but the one crust and one-pot filling of the pecan would have been far less labor intensive. Maybe next year. The apple recipe I used is the same one as usual, with two modifications. I used a combination of lemon juice and orange juice for the fruit juice ingredient, and I added 1 t. of Penzey's apple pie spice instead of measuring out each of the different spices. I think the Penzey's mix lacks clove though, and I did miss the clove. I jazzed up the pumpkin recipe with the addition of the Penzey's pumpkin pie spice mix as well. I added 1/2 t. for each pie. The cooking time for the pumpkin was also extended since I baked the four pies all at once. It probably took 45 - 55 minutes for each pie, depending on which rack they were on and what kind of a dish they were in. Oh, and I did have enough filling from three batches of the filling to fill a fourth pie.

If you are curious about what I got done ahead of time, here is the breakdown of the schedule:
Wednesday - cook fresh pie pumpkin, puree, and put in fridge
Thursday - peel and cut apples and prepare apple pie filling and put in fridge
Friday - roll out all crusts, pre-bake pumpkin pie crusts, fill and freeze apple pies
Saturday - prepare pumpkin filling, fill pumpkin pies, and bake all pies

Feedback on the pies was all positive, with more comments being about the pumpkin. My two favorites were: "Do you take orders?" and "It's the fresh cream that really makes it." I will definitely be making quite a few more of these throughout the fall and holiday season.

Current Pie Tally: 33

A Challenge on the Horizon

My husband volunteered me to make half a dozen pies for a conference he is hosting the first weekend of October. Luckily, the pumpkin plant in our garden this year was very productive. I'll probably make 4 pumpkin and 2 of either apple or pecan, for those who don't care for pumpkin. I got to buy a bunch of new pie plates for this. I'm excited! Stay tuned.

Current Pie Tally = 26

The First Step

At the Easter dinner my husband and I attended yesterday, the hostess officially challenged me to blog about my journey on the Path of 1,000 Pies. So here I am. Easter seems like an appropriate time for such an undertaking. New birth. New beginnings. A call to serve...pie.

I brought two apple pies to Easter dinner and received rave reviews: "I can tell you're an experienced hand at making that crust" (Uncle Bob) and "Those pies you brought were delicious! Thank you for bringing them" (Marcia, the hostess).

Partly, making the pies was an exercise in the humane demise of some less-than-great apples I picked up at the Dane County Farmer's Market last weekend. Yes, I know that it is not currently apple season, but they were locally grown and stored in a fancy-sounding humidity-and-temperature-controlled environment. So I bought them. Lots of them, probably about 20, thinking I would eat some fresh and make a pie with the rest.

After choking a couple down, I decided to make two pies instead of just one. They weren't awful; they just weren't the Macouns I know and love. They had more of a McIntosh consistency (quite soft) and the flavor was watered down and rather bland. I recently received a birthday card that read, "Birthday cake is just about the happiest outcome flour can hope for." Pie was the happiest outcome for these apples.

Current pie tally for 2009 and 2010: 13 pies (15 if you count two pumpkin ones that my husband made the filling for)

Easter Apple Pie Filling Recipe (we'll get into crust later); makes one 9-inch pie:
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/8 c. lemon juice
1/8 c. apricot/pear juice
3 T. all-purpose flour
1 T. molasses
1/4 t. nutmeg
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. ginger
1/8 t. allspice
8-10 peeled & cored Macoun apples, sliced about 1/3" thick

In a large non-metal bowl, stir together the sugars, juices, flour, molasses, and spices. Fold in the apples. Pour the mixture into your pie shell, including all the juicy goo at the bottom of the bowl. Roll out your remaining crust and place over the filled bottom shell. Trim and crimp edges and slit or cut a hole in the middle to allow steam to vent. Bake at 450F for 15 min., then reduce heat to 350F and bake for 35 min. more. Allow to cool and serve warm.