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)