apple pie to the rescue

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
-Carl Sagan

Two weekends ago in Ithaca, dogooderlawyer and I stopped on the way out of town at one of his favorite fruit and vegetable stands on Interstate 81, near Whitney Point. As the owner told us, it was unusual for her to open for business at the beginning of November, but she had decided to do so because the weather was so glorious that weekend. We bought 1/4 of a peck of Cameo apples (which I was amused to later discover are the "apple of the future") for baking and the same amount of Spy Gold for eating.

Two nights ago, I baked an apple pie from scratch with the Cameos. I used a recipe for All-American Apple Pie, which sounds totally corny but actually turned out really well. I made a few adjustments, adding lemon juice and cornstarch to the filling and sautéing it for 15 minutes before baking, as well as substituting 1/2 cup brown sugar for the white sugar in the topping. I also reduced the amount of sugar in the filling, something I never thought I would do. When I was 18 and living in Costa Rica and cooking for myself for the first time, I had a very opinionated roommate who would drive everyone in the house crazy by interjecting, every single time desserts were being made, "I find that recipes generally call for too much sugar. I find that you can usually cut the amount in half." So of course, I never did, and I swore that I never would. I'm stubborn like that.

The pie turned out to be very timely, for a number of reasons. Dogooderlaywer's roommate, sonofjeter (so-called on this blog because of his totally absurd yell of encouragement for his favorite Yankee: "Derek Jeter is my father!"), arrived home that night completely exhausted from work and only the promise of warm apple-y goodness cheered him. Then, our friend hinjew found out that his fiancée had had a terrible day of work, so the apple pie was off to spread more joy, this time with vanilla ice cream. I think it acquitted itself nicely.