Making the Pie

It is the day before we travel north to celebrate Thanksgiving with my side of the family. That means that I must bake at least one pie and if it is to be one, let it be a bourbon pecan pie. This year was the first year I had to make the crust by myself. That was always C's special job and she had it down pat. This year, I attempted a new technique that was included in the pie recipe (clipped out of a newspaper at some point and filed under "Deserts/Pies" in C's color coded recipe folder system. We not only have a wall of cookbooks in our kitchen (a subject for a later picture and post since I can't figure out how to put up more than one picture at a time on Blubber), we also have a series of color coded pocket folders containing all of the magazine and newspaper recipes that C collected over time.

Anyway, the crust experiment was interesting, especially the part where I had to roll it out between sheets of waxed paper and flip it. Needless to say, my black turtleneck still bears the signature of that little maneuver. But, all said and done, the pie looks pretty good and will probably taste pretty good as well. Not that it will matter much after we bloat out on a 25 pound genetically modified Jane Mansfield Special turkey with all the fixins, seven or eight side dishes, half dozen bottles of wine, and whatever else is included in the feast. How anyone has room for desert, I will never know.

I left the chocolate out this year as my number one chocolate fanatic is off exploring the universe, and I have always thought that it made it too sweet (sorry, love). So, this year, we have returned to the purist's version of pecan pie.

As long as I was turning the kitchen into a first class disaster area, I went on then to try a roast apple and squash soup, which I am much more doubtful about. I put the squash, onions, and apples into the oven to roast for an hour at 400 deg. and after watching it do nothing for about a half an hour, decided to skip downstairs for a second to look over emails and blogs. Well, you know what happened next. By the time I got back upstairs the onions were black and the apples had melted into sugar slag. Shit, I knew that would happen and I did it anyway.

Well, I went ahead at that point. What did I have to loose? So now, I have about 50 gallons of questionable yellow/orange liquid that I am going to throw in a cooler tomorrow, haul it 150 miles north, and hope that I can hide it in some relative's refrigerator before returning home. It is a family trait, what can I say.