Apple Pie

There's a period of the year where apples are uniformly fantastic. This is followed by a period where apples are unevenly fantastic. I feel that there's no reason to eat mediocre fruit, so these sub-par apples kick around the kitchen, growing wrinklier and sadder, until C throws some of them into the green waste. At this point, I'm overcome by food wasting guilt; I fish them out and make a pie.

Important pie tips: use all of the weird apples you own. It may seem like too many apples, and the pie absurd in proportion, but apples shrink, and piling the pie high (stealth Clinton reference) gives you the classic "Warner Brothers" pie form. This means that when breaking the pie dough in half, allocate slightly more dough for the top crust.

Make some pie dough. (There's a more traditional- and slightly better- recipe in the comments.) Peel and core sevenish apples and slice them up. Pile them into a pie pan lined with dough. Sprinkle with the juice of one lemon, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tsp corn starch, and 1/4 cup raisins. (You may be anti-raisin, in which case they can be safely omitted.) Cover the pie with the dough for the upper crust and seal the edges. Cut vents- either slashes with a knife or pretty shapes with a cookie cutter. Bake in a 375 degree oven for 40 minutes- or until golden brown.

Eat.

Pie Dough

One of the biggest surprises college held for me was young ladies who did not care a fig about their pastry technique. I was as bamboozled as my brother is by my husband's complete lack of interest in shooting things and throwing himself down precipices. I mean, yes, feminism rah rah rah, but someone must make the pies.

Fortunately, the lovely people at Cook's illustrated have a foolproof pie dough, without any worries about cracking or toughness. It does shrink a bit, so make sure there's a generous half inch margin around the rim of the pie. Makes two crusts.

Process 1 and 1/2 cups flour with 20 tablespoons shortening or butter or a combination of the two- I haven't been able to taste a significant difference, but I loath shortening with great passion. It seems to cover everything with a fine oily scum- I feel like I'm in New Orleans. Not after the oil spill, just in general. Add also a pinch of salt and a dash of sugar. The ingredients will form a paste; forbidden in traditional pastry making because unmixed butter is thought to cause flakiness. It is in fact caused by flour mixed with water, surrounded by hot fat, causing tiny crispy crackers to form within the crust. Thus, when one adds an additional one cup flour, one wants to avoid processing it in completely. Add 1/4 cup cold water and 1/4 cup vodka (gluten can't form in a non polar liquid, so toughness is mitigated) and pulse until there's a delightfully manageable dough. Chill it in two discs for about an hour, and then roll it out between sheets of saran wrap before removing the top sheet and flopping it into the pie dish. (Then remove the other sheet, etc, etc.) Remember to leave generous margins around the edge- scalloping is a good choice here- and bake it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. (You may want to weigh the dough with beans in tin foil or pie weights for the first 15 minutes.) Fill with filling and bake at 300 degrees for eternity.

Why yes, filling will have to either be a custard (pumpkin) or already cooked before being added. I suppose you could skip the blind baking, fill it to overflowing with apples or apricots and a half cup of sugar, and then cover it with the other half. Bake that at 350 degrees until pretty. After fussing with the absurdly complicated pumpkin pie recipe all morning, I really wish I'd done that instead.

Savory Pumpkin Pie

This is not vegan. It does not contain pumpkin. It is not technically a pie.

Now that your expectations are low, allow me to state that I served this dish to my avowed carnivore parents as part of a plant-based dinner, and they ate it up and did not complain about the lack of giant carbon hoofprints on the table. It's a vegetarian meal you can serve to Midwesterners.

Bacon's a vegetable, right?

My mother states that this first bit is unnecessarily finicky and without benefit. I'm willing to accept that it's coincidence that every squash I've roasted turned out to be delicious while those cooked near liquids turned into insipid yellow things, so leave this out if you're pressed for time. And hate rainbows. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Cut a winter squash in half and scrape out the seeds. Brush with oil, if you're fancy. Bake for 30 minutes- 1 hour, until the squash is soft. (I used a Delicata, but acorn, Hubbard, or even a pumpkin would also work. If you're leaving out the pre-roasting, use the frozen bagged kind, since you're clearly in some sort of rush. Also because the amount of effort it takes to peel a raw acorn squash is greater than the amount of effort it takes to abandon your standards.)

Obtain a pie crust. There will be no veiled snark if you obtain one from a store, with money. Once your skill with pastry making is great enough so that it's not a huge pain, you will make pie at all times and have moderately elevated cholesterol at an unusually young age. (Quick recipe: 10 parts flour, 5 parts shortening, pinch of salt, one part cold water, one part vodka. Mix half the flour with the shortening, then blitz in the other half (and the salt). Add the liquids, chill briefly, and then smash the Play-doh like substance with a rolling pin until it resembles a crust. It's sticky, so do this on saran wrap. Oh, and use about 20 tbs of flour for one crust.)

Dice an onion. Saute in oil, or perhaps the rendered fat of a solitary strip of bacon. Crumble said bacon into tiny bits.

Peel the squash. Cut into bite sized chunks. Place within crust. Dot with onion and possible bacon.

Make a roux with 1 tbs. white flour and 1 tsp. oil. (Look, the shortening's already out, and we can't pretend this recipe is healthy, so...) Add about 1/2 cup vegetable broth or milk. Stir vigorously, until there are no more lumps. Add 1/4 cup grated jack cheese and 1/2 tsp thyme. (I'll bet it would be entirely edible with just a white sauce, no cheese. However, I was aiming for something my father would eat.) Pour the sauce over the squash. There won't be quite enough, and you will feel virtuous about not being decadent.

If your pie crust is very generous around the edges, fold it in for a nice tart appearance. Otherwise, fine. It is actually a pie. Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.