For Thanksgiving this year, my contribution was pies. Witness:
These were the apple pies. I also made two pumpkin pies. Nearly everything was cooked from scratch – the crusts, the apples, the pumpkin filling. I only neglected to make the pumpkin puree myself since that would have involved wrestling with too-large vegetables. Even I have my limits.
Thankfully, I had some good recipes in my corner: Martha Stewart and Cooking for Engineers. Each of the recipes, however, targeted only a single pie, which led to my greatest problem.
You see, I decided upon two of everything as a redundancy measure. One crappy pie. One good pie. I could live with that. The original plan even budgeted for time to make each pie from start to finish as a self-contained whole, so that mistakes would be isolated.
As holidays are wont to do, however, I was left short on time and decided to work in parallel, doubling the recipes. Sadly, the resulting amount of pie crust ingredients wouldn’t fit into my food processor. The same goes for my pumpkin pie filing and I had to perform a fair amount of eyeballing, not necessarily a recommended technique in that scientific art known as baking.
And peeling, coring and slicing nine pounds of apples was a chore indeed.
Later, I was also informed that doubling recipes doesn’t necessarily work when baking. Something about excess moisture.
In any case, a flour-covered kitchen, six hours and a good night’s sleep in between finally resulted in some decent pies, thank you very much. Not perfect by any means, but serviceable for a rookie pie maker. I may even have to give up my day job.
In all seriousness, the holiday, as it’s known to me, is about giving. It’s not what’s on the table that matters, or how many guests arrive, or how the turkey came out… it’s simply the small or large or unknown acts of giving that occur around the table and the kitchen and the day that truly makes it. So that was the pies. They were my giving. End sentimentality.