It smells amazing in my apartment right now! Specifically the kitchen (which is also the dining room and entrance to the bathroom…) As you all know, Thanksgiving was this past Thursday. As teachers in a land that doesn’t really celebrate Thanksgiving, naturally we had to work. However, since I teach at a homeschool, we did our own Thanksgiving celebration with our 8 boys. (The girls were both gone for the week.) I was on pie duty.
My favorite pie to make is apple pie. It probably the easiest one to make and it goes over pretty well with the crowds. A few weeks ago, I practiced by making a pie for my Chinese class. This past week I made two pies for the homeschool celebration. I’m on pie duty for our FOC celebration. I just finished making two pies…one apple, one orange-pecan pie with a chocolate “drizzle”.
I don’t know if you know how to make pie crust, but it is relatively easy. My pie crust recipe goes like this:
2 Cups Flour
1 tsp. salt
1 Cup butter (yes, that says 1 Cup–I didn’t say my recipe was healthy)
1/2 Cup water
In my mind, the most important “ingredient” is the tool you use to “cut” the butter. Known as a “pastry blender”, it is very useful for this task and makes pie-crust-making much easier. I was cutting my butter into my flour when–SNAP!–the pastry blender broke. The screw came off of one side of it and the whole thing snapped open. Well, I was a little sad about that. For one, I had to go back to using a fork. Two, I have to get a new pastry blender. Making crust with shortening is a little easier but I think the butter recipe tastes better.
The crust still turned out great (better actually) and the pie is just asking to be eaten!
I even criss-crossed the strips on top. 🙂 This was the first time I've done that!
The other pie was another “problem”… The crust for the orange-pecan pie has grated orange peel in it. (Oh, it smelled amazing!) It is a bit difficult to grate an orange peel when you don’t have a grater. I ended up using a knife and it worked okay…it just took a lot longer. The other difficult thing about this pie is that it has pecans in it…I know…it’s in the name…I’m aware. I didn’t realize just how difficult it would be to find pecans. I found a 5.5 oz. can at a large grocery store (with a sizable import section) that cost 108元! That’s about $17. There was no way I was going to pay that much for such a small amount of nuts. I kept looking. I found a bag of pecans still in the shell for much cheaper. The problem is that they were still in the shell. Does anyone know how hard it is to get pecans out of their shell?!? It’s horrible. It hurts to type right now because of it. 🙂
Pecan pie is basically pecans (which are already sweet) and multiple types of sugar. Add to that a chocolate drizzle and an orange sauce and you have a recipe for diabetes. The pecan pie got a little bit well done but I think it will be okay. The chocolate “drizzle” never did get drizzly on the stovetop so it’s more of a chocolate “frosting”…which is a little weird on pecan pie. We’ll see which pie gets eaten first. (My guess is apple.) I’ll be making another apple pie when I return to my apartment tonight after a friend’s birthday party.
A little side note about extra pie crust: Sometimes there’s a little bit leftover when you roll it out, etc., etc… I want to share with you my mini-muffin-sized-apple pies. 🙂 They were equally delicious.
They're just so cute!
I let you know which pie is the favorite! Happy Thanksgiving!
