Saturday, November 26, 2011

Flour, sugar, fruit and love.

When my Aunt Dianne asked me if I would bring a couple pies to our annual Thanksgiving get together this year, of course I said yes. I was told store bought would be just fine...but I quickly decided otherwise. This was my opportunity to make homemade pies...my first pies ever. How I got by this long without having made a pie before I am not sure. But I was excited to see what I could do. Step #1? allrecipes.com. I love this site because it has reviews followed by lots of good suggestions. I settled on two fruit pies: Peach-a-Berry Pie and Three Berry Pie. Then came the decision that would really determine how much time I wanted to put into these pies...store-bought crust or homemade? Homemade. I went with  Ruth's Grandma's Pie Crust. I made the dough the night before and refrigerated it overnight. Then Thanksgiving morning...while listening to the Thanksgiving Day Parade from the kitchen, I created my first pies.

While making the pies, I used a couple kitchen gadgets I had never used before. The stainless steel scraper thingy and the pastry cutter. The scraper was a gift from family that I'm sure Nate has utilized, but I hadn't yet. It worked great for scraping pie crust off the counter. The pastry cutter was a garage sale find from a few years ago. I had no idea what it was when I bought it, I just liked it's age and the red handle that would match my kitchen. Since then it has lived in a kitchen drawer. It worked perfectly. I imagine it will get more use with time and look forward to adding to it's patina.

Rolling out the crust and getting it into the pan and on top of the pie in one piece was the hardest part (the filling was easy). It seemed that the dough was a little dry, but then again, I really had no idea what I was doing. For the peach raspberry pie, I just laid on a classic top, but it looked so boring! So, I added polka dots. Polka dots make everything better. Then for the triple berry pie, I made a lattice top. I realized part way through it may have been a bit ambitious,  but I did it and it turned out! Overall, once I had the pies assembled, I was just hoping they would look better after baking!

No cat hair was added to the recipe. 
I stopped Filibuster before he could get any closer.

Luckily, they looked better and much less amateur after coming out of the oven. Thank you heat. The family liked them...which was the goal...so mission accomplished!

Did I really just make an entire blog post about pie? Yup, I did. Totally worthy of a post in my book and I recommend you make a pie if you have never done so. Super satisfying.

2 comments:

  1. The pies look great! I like allrecipes.com too. (And joyofbaking.com!) Hope you had a good time with family, celebrating Thanksgiving. Wish we could have been there. We're having a small Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. And today we're going to celebrate Jacob's birthday with some kids from his day care class. He's very excited. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good for you! The pie looks awesome. Love your photos, too.
    PS Those cats just love to "help", don't they?

    ReplyDelete