I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I made an apple pie, and it turned out perfectly!! This was a big step for me. I had a Thanksgiving Pie flop three years ago-it was my first Thanksgiving with the Anderson family and I was asked to bring a pie. I decided to modify a pear blackberry tart recipe from the Salt Lake Magazine and ended up with pear blackberry soup under a thin shell of “Perfect Crust” mix from Williams-Sonoma that ended up being less than perfect. After that I decided that I was uninterested in pie-making, and even went so far as to claim that “I don’t really like pie, anyway!” Well, truth be told: I like pie, though I think I will probably always be a little picky about which I chose to eat. Also, I am good at crust from scratch, which I have always thought to be the hardest part.

Bada bing, bada boom, flour, sugar, salt, pulse, pulse, butter, pulse, pulse, ice water, pulse, pulse, pulse, onto the counter, wrap, into the fridge, sugar, cinnamon, corn starch, nutmeg, stir, stir, apples, lime juice, stir, stir, cook dinner (time lapse: forty minutes) out of the fridge, roll, roll, press into plate, pour, scrape, pile, roll, roll, top it off, fold, slit, brush with milk, sprinkle sugar, into the oven, sit down to dinner (time lapse: forty minutes), open the oven door and the room fills with cinnamony sweet apple aroma and…
…out comes my first apple pie.
The keys to my success? My great-grandmother’s darling hand-embroidered apron, two sticks of butter, Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, a Cuisinart Mini Chopper and a really pretty pie plate.