Wednesday, November 26, 2008

My Contribution

So Thanksgiving this year is at Tanya's house. As any polite future guest would do, I asked what we could bring. She suggested a cherry pie would be nice, so with high hopes and lofty expectations I decided to make my 1st ever cherry pie with homemade crust. I've never actually made any kind of pie before, so this was be a brand new experience.

Why is there cherry pie at Thanksgiving when cherries are not in season? I can't imagine the pilgrims shipped them over for the occasion. Maybe they canned them ahead of time. Were pilgrims big canners? I believe things might have gone differently if it was cherries that were taxed and not tea. It would have been the Boston Pie Party. Which would have lead to the issue of having to find a new name for the Boston Cream Pie as the Boston Pie would be cherry.

Back to the current issue...

Since there were no fresh cherries at the store, I had to choose between canned and frozen. I conducted my own little semi-poll at the grocery store and 3 out of 11 people polled said to use canned cherries. The other 8 people either didn't know or just kind of stare at me... it was a little awkward.

I mingled three recipes from online and also had to make a call to my grandma for some expert advice. My Grams saved the pie by telling me not to throw out the juice. She said it's the juice that makes the pie thick and not just a pile of dried up dead cherries in a shell. Okay, she didn't use those exact words, but that's totally what she meant.

The test pie is in the oven right now. I just peeked at it and the crust doesn't look as ugly as it did when it was raw dough. I thought Alan was going to do a cartwheel when I told him that he wasn't going to have to wait until tomorrow to have a piece.

I don't think Alan realizes just how big a guinea pig he actually is. He told me that you can't screw up a pie unless you accidentally grab salt instead of sugar. That just goes to show you he never tasted the brownies my cousin Shanda and I made that contained rootbeer, a bottle of mint extract and a half a dozen eggs.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Enjoy your holiday!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

so--tell us about the end result!
Aunt Joyce

Anonymous said...

Oh. My. Heck. BEST best best pie ever!!!!!!!!
thank you miss baker of all pies on the cove now for any function whatsoever where we can include pie. dinners with perrypie, welcome home babypie, good by bladder infectionpie
mondaypie tuesdaypie etc.

Anonymous said...

Both the test pie and the real one were fantastic! Yum yum.
-Alan

Anonymous said...

Hahaha! Everyone who reads and/or writes any portion of your blog is funny funny.

I baked ALL day Thursday, as Thanksgiving in my family occurred on Friday. I baked pumpkin cranberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, and 50 - 5" pies: pumpkin pie (made with vanilla ice cream in the batter), maple pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and sweet potato pie. Can I tell you that even after 11 hours of baking, I still freakin' LOVE baking! And apparently people like what I bake. :) Yay!

Love you, Princess!

Anonymous said...

Contrats on the Great Pie Project. I hear it turned out wonderfully..heavy on the fully. Just wanted to reminisce about the Mint Brownie debacle: You totally forgot to mention that the crowning glory of the whole concoction was the bottle of green food coloring you added! It made an already awesome (and not in a good way) dessert even more awesome! This weekend, Shanda reminded me that after I insisted that each of you to eat half of the *mess*, she ate her half like a good girl and you fed your half to the neighbor kids! Even then you were quite a saleswoman!

Holding my Breath said...

Mom - Food coloring! I totally forgot about that! Surprisingly, it was the total and utter blandness and concrete-like texture that made them so, so , so bad.

I learned a huge life-lesson from the Mint Brownie debacle. From that point on I made sure that if I figured out a way to get out of doing something horrible, like eating my half of the worst brownies ever, I made sure to share that knowledge with whoever I was being punished with!

And since we're adding to the story, it was Mike and Mark Badders that I gave them to and they LOVED them. They never got anything homemade. Poor little hooligans.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure The Mint Brownie Debacle was the very worst yuck you ever cooked...remember the fudge you and dad made? He couldn't find the vanilla so he added lemon flavoring? In my opinion that was just the WORST. As least the brownies also looked as awful as they tasted. The fudge looked wonderful. It was after you tasted it that you got the..ZOWIE!