Pies: Tart and Sweet

Wow. Have I really not posted here since Easter? I knew it had been awhile, and I THINK about posting all the time, but...life gets in the way. Which I guess is how it should be. So much has happened! Noelle has grown into a little girl, no longer a baby. She’s got demands now. She doesn’t sleep in a crib. She’s off to Montessori School next month. She bakes! Well, sort of. I also started a new job in June, Emmett started first grade in September and well, it’s been non-stop changing and growing and fun for the last 6 months (also years). Not enough cooking though. At least not enough new and exciting recipes, but I hope that changes in 2020.

Still, Thanksgiving brought something that I can always get excited about. PIE. I love pie. LOVE IT. As far as I’m concerned, if you cannot get excited about pie - you may not be alive, you may not even be human. Yes. PIE = HUMANITY. I’m prepared to go there.

With this background, you can probably imagine my disappointment when, a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, I made an apple pie using a new pie dough recipe and failed miserably. Despite calling for extra butter the dough was tough and sort of chewy. I was glad that I had the presence of mind to test it before the holidays. Sorry work friends, you poor, poor pie guinea pigs. Next year I will make it right.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was scarred by the bad crust experience and not in the mood to make another apple pie. I decided to make two pies that I hadn’t made before, using my tried and true crust recipe. You can find that here. Writing this now, I see how this too could have led to disaster - which is why everyone tells you not to use new recipes on guests. Touché.

Most of the family prefers fruit pies. Paul, Paddy and I are all partial to tart flavors like cherry or rhubarb. So, when I was thumbing through the book Sister Pie and came upon a beautiful cranberry crumble pie, I knew would be a hit.

I toyed with the idea of only making one pie and doing something chocolate for the kids, but I couldn’t let go of the fact that Thanksgiving is basically the only time all year when we have pumpkin pie. Goodness knows why. Right? I’m going to set a calendar alert for pumpkin pie in March right now. As usual, I felt torn between my love for the creamy custardy texture of a pumpkin pie and the nutty sweetness of a pecan pie - but to be honest, pumpkin always wins, at least until this year. This year, I came across a beautiful hybrid pumpkin-pecan version in the November issue of Bon Appetit. Smooth, silky pumpkin custard on the bottom with a crunchy salty-sweet pecan topping. Problem solved. Turns out you can have it all!

My pie choices solidified, I was finally able to move on and move past my crust failure. I cheated and used premade crust dough that I had frozen so that the day before Thanksgiving all I had to do was roll it out, blind bake and proceed. I’m making that sound so easy now, but let me just say that trying to roll out pie dough while simultaneously “working-from-home” and doing both of these things with Noelle around, well, I think I’ve come up with the next extreme sport. It felt extreme anyway.

But not as extremely sad as not having homemade pie on Thanksgiving. I was thrilled when the pies came out of the oven and our babysitter, who had just arrived, told me that she was amazed by how they looked and smelled. Pie is a labor of love, but always worth it.

Paul, couldn’t wait to try them. I was only able to hold him off until Thanksgiving morning, when he conspicuously dilly dallied until all of the pancakes were gone before giving me a pleading look and arguing that no one will care if a slice is missing. I gave in and he happily dug into a piece of the cranberry crumble pie, a la mode, nevermind that it was 9:00 am.

My assessment was that the pies were very good. I loved the cranberry with vanilla ice cream and the pumpkin-pecan with a huge dollop of fresh whipped cream. I wouldn’t hesitate to make either one again and maybe even make both of them for Thanksgiving next year.

I actually followed the recipes for both of these, minus crust, links and my notes are below.

Cranberry Crumble Pie from Sister Pie

• My pie crust shrunk a bit during the blind bake, I don’t think I distributed my beans (what I use for pie weights) as well as I should have. In the end, it didn’t matter at all because crumble covers a multitude of sins. Whew.

• I didn’t use all of the crumble and cannot wait to top anything with what remains in my fridge.

Pumpkin Pecan Pie from Bon Appetit

• In the magazine they make a rye crust which I think sounds amazing and would love to try - once I’m up to experimenting with new crust recipes.