Easy as Pie

I don't know who came up with that phrase, because pie is certainly not the easiest thing that I know how to make. Nevertheless, I sometimes find that I need to make a pie for one reason or another. The first time I made pie, I used a recipe that turned out to be a complete disaster. Next time around, I went straight for my Lion House cookbook. I’ve never made anything in there that’s been bad. But the list of ingredients was a bit daunting:

¼ c. butter
¼ c. margarine
1/3 c. vegetable shortening
1/3 c. lard
1 T. sugar
½ t. baking powder
1 t. salt
1 T. nonfat dry milk
3 c. unsifted all-purpose flour
½ c. cold water

Hmmm . . . all the margarine I had was soft-spread, and lard? My grandma kept that in her pantry, but not me. I could feel my arteries clogging up just from reading this. Time for emergency substitutions. ½ c. butter and 2/3 c. shortening would have to do. And it has worked great ever since.

Last time I made it though, I swear the pixies in my house that hide things from you at the most inopportune times had made off with my baking powder, so I used baking soda instead. It just needs something to help it fluff up a bit while baking. And if you don’t have dry milk, all that does is help it turn a lovely golden brown. I put too much in last time and it got rather more brown than I would have liked, even though my baking time was the same as always.

PUMPKIN PIE:
Last week, I was taking dinner to a friend that had just had a baby. I also had a couple of extra teenagers hanging out at my house for the afternoon. How to accommodate everyone without making my kids mad? I pulled out my mini-muffin tin and made tarts. I didn’t have time to go to the store, so I rummaged through my storage room and found a can of pumpkin. The list of ingredients didn’t sound too bad either:

1 15-oz can pumpkin
1 12-oz can evaporated milk
2 eggs
¼ c. sugar
½ t. salt
1 t. cinnamon
½ t. ginger
¼ t. cloves

But when I reached for evaporated milk, all I found was sweetened condensed milk. Well, I guess they’re not that much different. One’s a little sweeter than the other, so I simply omitted the sugar. I also remembered my aunt made the most spectacular pumpkin pies, but I never did get the recipe. All I could remember was that she used cream cheese. So to offset the missing sugar in volume, I put in 2-3 oz. of cream cheese. I really was afraid this time that I’d overdone the substitutions—especially since you really shouldn’t experiment when feeding people besides your family. But I got lucky, and my kids pronounced it “the best pumpkin pie we’ve ever had.” (OK, not that we have pumpkin pie more than once a year).

APPLE PIE:
The following day, I found myself elbow-deep in canning applesauce, as my tree had outdone itself this year. For the first time in the decade I’ve lived here, I had a huge pile of non-wormy apples—perfect for pie. My pastry cutter and all the ingredients were still on hand from the night before, and we had a party to go to that evening, so I set my husband to work with my peeler-corer-slicer and decided to do tarts for the party and use the rest for a big pie for our family. 1 apple approximately equals 1 cup, so he must have done about 8 apples.

4-5 c. apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
¼- ½ c. water
¾-1 c. sugar
1-2 T flour
½ -1 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. salt
1 T. lemon juice
2 T butter

Again, I turned to my Lion House Cookbook, and while the ingredients were simpler this time, the instructions were not. Cook the apples . . . sift together dry ingredients . . . layer them in pie shell . . . add in cooking liquid. That wasn’t going to work for tiny tarts. What difference would it make if I cooked all the ingredients together first? I’d know if the filling tasted good first, that’s what, especially since I had more than 5 c. apples and they gave me a range of measurements too. I set the apples cooking in my stockpot and threw in the rest of the ingredients. All it really did was reduce my cooking time from 30 minutes to 20.

Perhaps pie really is easier than I tend to give it credit for.