Apple Pie

Last week sometime during one of my (suddenly frequent) trips to the grocery store, I bought a bag of Macintosh apples, for pie. Never mind that I'd never baked a pie before. Nevermind that I didn't really know how it was done. My new phillosophy with cooking is that people did it for centuries without cookbooks, it can't be all that hard.

Turns out, it's not. Basically, I looked at the recipe in the old Fannie Farmer cookbook I borrowed from my Grandma's house, and fudged it. I think it turned out ok.

Apple Pie

2 pie crusts (I bought mine at the store, but next time maybe I'll make them from scratch.)
A few apples, preferably ones that are good for baking. (I think I used eight. Enough to fill up the pie crust in a pleasing manner.)

1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (Which is actually just ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and the recipe called for nutmeg, but I didn't have any nutmeg, so I used this, and it's good.)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place the bottom crust on the pie pan, taking care not to touch it too much. (When you touch the crust, the heat from your hands melts the shortening in the crust, and then the crust loses it's flakiness.)

Mix the sugar, spices, flour and salt in a bowl. Peel and slice apples, and coat them in the sugar mixture. (I had too many apples and not enough coating, so 3/4 of the way through, I embellished the sugar mixture with a handfull of this and a pinch of that to get more, and mine turned out ok. This isn't as hard as it looks.) Then put the coated apples into the crust.

Put the other pie crust on top, fold the edges under and press them together, either with your fingers or a fork. Cut slits in the top of the pie, and then brush the top of the pie with an egg and sprinkle with more granulated sugar. Bake in a pre-heated 425* oven for ten minutes. Turn heat down to 350*, and bake for another 30-40 minutes.

(I've read that if you want to make sure you have a crisp pie bottom, you should brush an egg white on the bottom of the crust before you fill it. I forgot this, naturally, until just after finishing the pie. Oh well, next time.)