success!

Okay, I almost NEVER make pies from scratch because, frankly, I am scared of making pie crust. On this blog, Melissa has often stated her caramel phobia; well, that's how I am with flaky pastry. It just never, ever ends well. I always seem to end up with too much filling or too little, and burnt, bricklike crust with nary a flake in sight. But I had a fridge full of apples, a lazy Saturday ahead of me and a husband requesting pie, so I figured I'd face my fears. Imagine my surprise when I took this beauty out of the oven:



I used the recipe from Cook Something by Mitchell Davis. It was the very first cookbook I ever bought myself and almost every recipe I've tried has been great (and I've tried almost all of them -- just not the apple pie, until today). It's 10 years old now and the pages are falling out. I'm nostalgic about this book because this is pretty much what I taught myself to cook from.

Once again, I used the freeze-the-butter-and-grate-it trick. You end up hardly having to work the dough at all, and I think that's the key.