My Thanksgiving Day began bright and early, while it was still dark, at six in the morning after a near sleepless night (perhaps this was practice for a newborn?). We had big plans for spending time with our families. To make spending time with both my parents and siblings and my husband’s parents, siblings, aunts, etc. possible, we were going to spend the morning with my family and the afternoon with my husband’s family. Before our Thanksgiving celebration could begin, I needed to finish making the apple pie.
I set to work on the apple pie. First I preheated the oven and pulled my pie dough and apples out of the fridge to warm up a bit. I then mixed the apples with the additional ingredients necessary to make a sweet and well spiced pie. Once the apples were marinating, I started to roll out the pie dough, but it was too cold. I have never chilled pie dough for more than fifteen minutes and had never encounter the problem of the dough not rolling out nicely. After fifteen minutes of very carefully rolling out the bottom pie crust (usually it takes about two minutes!), I was able to get the crust into the pie plate but not without considerable cracking. I spent another ten minutes pressing the crust back into place. The apples went into the prepared crust and I started to roll out the top crust, but it kept cracking. I was not about to spend another fifteen minutes on this crust too … the only solution: make a fresh pie crust. In no time I had a perfect top crust and the pie was in the oven! Lesson learned: Do not chill pie dough overnight! While the apple pie baked, I made our daily omelet (sans the latte) and we ate breakfast before heading over to my parents for our first Thanksgiving meal of the day!
(To be continued …)