Pie! (Phase One)

Last night I endeavored to make a pie. This was only the second time I have tried pie making in my life; the first was a pumpkin pie that I made from scratch (as in, I cut up a pumpkin for it - the crust was premade). This time I made the entire thing from scratch, including the crust.

My pie story began yesterday morning when I needed to go to the grocery store. I headed up Rio Grande to La Montanita Co-op Food Market, our local natural grocery store. It's about 2 miles from the house. So I strapped on my backpacking backpack and biked up there with list in hand. When I got there, I discovered that their coolers had all broken overnight, and that everything that should have been frozen was around 70 degrees when workers got there in the morning (except, I assume, the meat and cheese cooler, since they didn't balk when I bought two bricks of cheese). This was hugely disappointing because I was devoid of milk and had been for like a week, and also because these guys were actually cheap for the first time ever.

Thwarted at the cooler, I made some bonus finds in the produce section. At the co-op they have $0.99 bags of produce that they've decided they can't sell in the normal section; things that are too ripe, or slightly damaged, or what have you. I picked up two bags: one that held like five organic red bell peppers (Wild Oats sells these for like $6-$7 a pound) and a couple of yellow squash, which I love. The other bag was full of peaches, red plums, and pluots. The pluots and red plums were not too ripe, but the peaches were (they were leakin' just a tiny bit). But who out there can resist ripe peaches?!

And then there were the bins full of apples. Like major big bins. They were all hail-damaged and going for $0.79 per pound. That would be pretty good for normal apples, but these were local! Sadly, they had a picture of the farmers on the bin, and it was this older couple...I couldn't help but think of how much money they were losing because their crop was damaged; of course, they probably had crop insurance. So with a bag full of gala apples and another bag full of peaches etc. I decided it would be a grand idea to make them into pies.

For our wedding KS and PS gave us the New Best Recipe cookbook, which is a mammoth tome detailing the best way to cook all of the American classics, incorporating science! I relied on this to make my pies. The crust dough, it turns out, is easy to make but it is a pain in the ass to actually turn it into crust. I couldn't get it to work and got really frustrated, but in the end we had a crust that was filled with peach pie filling. I tried some last night and it was actually pretty good! I don't know if it's worth the effort of making the pie crust; the filling was easy. Next time, store-bought crust for me. Next time being when I make the apple pie, which should be awesome.

See below for a couple pictures of the wife making some cinnamon twists out of the extra dough!