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.
On Maui apples are fairly regularly awful. Nine months of the year they are by and large mealy from age or frost damaged from improper storage.
ReplyDeleteThe only exception are the obscenely expensive organic apples sold in 2lbs mesh sacks. These are only awful for about six months of the year. I assume their lower water content makes them more resistant to both mealiness and freezing.