So, I got a little crazy yesterday and made an apple die. It’s been several years since I baked anything, let alone a pie. But, my buddy Eric made a pie last week when I was visiting and I thought if he can do it, so can I. And really, how hard is it to make a pie? Not very hard at all, as it turns out. If you start with ready-made pie crusts you can put together a nice apple pie in about 30 minutes, with most of that time spent dicing apples.
My Mom had a box of ready-made pie crusts in the fridge so I grabbed one of them, put it in the pie pan, trimmed the edges, and proceeded to dice apples while the oven warmed up. I decided not to peel the apples—out of laziness more than anything else—and by the time I got seven of them diced the stick of butter was melted and mixed with the sugars (white and brown), flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Throw the diced apples in the bowl with the butter/sugar mix, turn everything over a few times, and you’ve got some pie filling.
Once the filling was in the pie pan my the problem was how to cover it. I wanted to leave one of the two crusts in the box for my Mom to use for pumpkin pie. So, after doing a poor job of trimming the edge of the pie, I had a small ball of crust. I dug out the rolling pin and some flour and had it thinned out to about 1/16″ thickness, but it still wasn’t wide enough to cover the whole top. So, it went on in the middle and I decided to make a crumble to fill in the part of the top of the pie without any crust.
After several discussions with my buddy Eric regarding him making pies I am now aware of the many and varied approaches to topping a fruit pie—full-crust versus lattice (and the debate of flat versus woven lattice) versus crumble. I had left-over butter/sugar mix from coating the apple pieces so I threw in some flour and a bit more white sugar and whipped up a crumble in no time. I added it around the edge of the pie and then it was into the oven.
I knew—and also had heard from my buddy Eric—that you need to wrap the edge of the pie in foil so as to prevent it from burning. I scoured my Mom’s kitchen looking for foil with no success and then spent a few minutes staring at my to-be-cooked pie wondering how to achieve what I wanted to do. I thought of the old paper bag trick I know from cooking a Thanksgiving turkey—you’re supposed to put the roasting pan in a paper bag so the turkey can cook without drying out the crust too quickly. I found a paper bag, put the pie in it, put the whole thing in the oven and set the time for 20 minutes.
Ding! You’re 20 minutes are up. (Actually it’s an annoying ascending-tone chirping sound on my Mom’s stove.) Take the pie out of the bag, put it back in the over for another 25 minutes and go back to washing the dishes. Another Ding! and the pie is done. I turn off the oven, leave the oven door ajar, and let it begin to cool down. After a half hour cooling in the oven I take it out and put it on the stove-top. Another hour after that and the glass pie pan is still too hot to touch with a bare hand. But it is time for some pictures.
On a side note, I never knew how hard it was to take decent pictures of food. I turned on all the lights in my Mom’s kitchen so it would be bright enough and I was still having trouble getting decent pictures of the pie. The three pics below are the best of seven that I kept. These seven were the best from an initial group of 39 pics I took of the pie. Two of the three below needed some color correction done to them to make the pie look more like it did to my eye. But I think these pics show the pie as it really was.
As for the taste review, that is below the pics.
Apple Pie 01 (nice golden brown)
Apple Pie 04 (Mmmm, cinnamon crumble crust)
Apple Pie 05 (the cooking show shot)
How Many Freaking Bail-Out Programs Do We Need?
The $700 Billion bail-out of the financial industry has not been all that successful, so the government decided to throw in another $300 Billion just for Citigroup. And now they have decided to spend up to $800 Billion on buying commercial and personal debt products???
When does this madness end? If the Fed keeps printing money—Yes. I do know that it is the US Mint that actually prints money—to stimulate the economy eventually all those dollars put in circulation are going to become diluted in value and then become worthless.
Why isn’t anyone in government doing the thankless task of telling Americans that our past actions put us into this situation and it will take several years of strained economic circumstances to get us back to normal. If a problem takes several years to develop why does anyone think it can be resolved in a few months? We need political leaders to come out and tell the nation that things are going to be really bad for a few years and we all just have to suck it up and live with high prices and unemployment until the market works out the kinks itself.
See, I am a big believer in market forces and I think the market should be allowed to remedy the problems we have of ridiculous amounts of bad debt. But, in doing so there will be many, many people who will suffer greatly as a result. I think that it is a good thing, though. People need to suffer now so as to learn from this lesson and change their future behavior. So the folks that thought they could somehow buy a house way outside their price range learn to accept that modes income necessitates a modest house and modest lifestyle.
And if the people who suffer from their poor choices, or the poor choices of others, rise up and confront the powers that be and force fundamental changes in how the economy operates, that would be great. That’s what I think is really missing in all of this. In Switzerland there have been major protests, with significant parts of the population participating, due to the way the Swiss bank UBS dealt with its financial problems. Those protests come from all segments of Swiss society and have been directed at both the bank and the government for not dealing with the bank problems sooner.
How many large protests have there been in this country against the banking institutions and the political leaders who looked the other way as the banks built their huge piles of bad debt. There have been some, but nothing on a wide-scale. I want things to get so bad in this country that people will take to the streets in anger and protest and demand accountability from their government and business leaders. Until that happens, apathy will continue to be the main response to major crises in America.
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As for me, I am somewhat apathetic to the whole mess because I reject most of the tenets of America’s consumption culture and live within my means. I have almost no personal debt, a fairly robust savings plan, and a decent retirement plan. Basically, if I can’t afford to buy something outright then I don’t buy it (or buy it with the ability to pay off the purchase within two months).