Pie Season

We have a few fruit trees in our back yard: a green plum, a cherry, a crab apple, and an apple tree. I lovingly call it "the orchard" even though it takes up hardly any space... Last year, we had plums galore. This year, it was apples. The first batch of apples came off our tree during an early September storm. I had enough apples to make five pies and a batch of applesauce. Apple pie is kind of a tradition in our family. The summer I was born, my Gra'ma made a pie every single day, and every day she, my mom, and my dad consumed an entire pie.

 Every autumn I can remember, my father would buy a big batch of apples, sit at the kitchen table, and begin peeling them for my grandmother, who would make pie after pie. She always claimed that the apples made the pie and she was always looking for the perfect combination of flavorful and crispy apples - ones that would taste great and keep their form. She would often use two or three different kinds of apples in a single pie. She made large batches and we froze them to enjoy through the winter. Each pie would taste amazing, but she would always say, "It's good but...." The crust wasn't quite right, there wasn't enough cinnamon, the apples were not a good combination, something. I thought she was crazy.

Gra'ma's pies were a very specific type: flaky crust, paper-thin apple slices, super sweet, tons of cinnamon, sugared crust. She would boil the peels and cores with sugar to make a syrup for the filling. She added chunks of butter. Her pies were so sweet, you couldn't eat them with ice cream - they needed cheddar cheese instead. They were not pretty, but they tasted amazing. A pie from Gra'ma was an act of love.

Over the years, I have adapted her recipe. I add considerably less sugar. I use one kind of apple at a time and use whatever we have on hand. I use deeper pie pans so we have more apples and less crust. I'm still trying to figure out the crusts. I love baking, though, and I subject both my family and friends to tester pies. I now understand Gra'ma's attitude - each pie is different and there is always room for improvement.

As luck would have it, our tree produces perfect pie apples. They are flavorful (toward tart) and crisp. I know there are many apple recipes out there, but they are so good in pies, it seems a shame to make anything else.

Here's the rest of the harvest from the tree:

Toe and I made a GIANT batch of apple sauce with the little apples so we wouldn't have to peel them. Toe learned to cut with a real knife and we worked companionably for a long time before he started eating the apples and then was done.

 After the sauce was on the stove, I started peeling apples. I made three pies: two a la Gra'ma and one with a granola-type crust. There are many, many apples left. More pies to come. Darn.