My favorite apple pie recipe (it has ginger in it!) for Thanksgiving and a Giveaway with a chance to win some Martha Stewart Cookware from Macy's

With Thanksgiving only a week away, we've been busy figuring out our plans to see both my husband and my family. My son is eagerly awaiting the day that we tell him it's time to load up the car and make the drive to grandma's house. He loves his grandparents, cousins, aunt's and uncle's and has been asking me over and over when will Thanksgiving be here so we can see them all.
 

Thanksgiving 2010

While Thanksgiving can be a lot of work with cleaning and preparing food and even stressful as family comes together, I love this holiday. Growing up Thanksgiving was most often intimately spent with my parents and younger brother. My dad traveled a lot while I was growing up, but Thanksgiving day he was always around. My mom was and is a fantastic decorator (and cook of course ;D) and one of the things that brought her great joy and us as well, was to have our home beautiful, clean, with nice music playing and tantalizing aromas drifting from room to room, with an elegant table set with our fine china and crystal. It was always such a treat as a child to see everything so stunning. Things have become a bit more low key as we've all grown older, but the joys of being together and enjoying fabulous food is still wonderful all the same.

To this day, it always brings us, well my younger brother and me, a great deal of pleasure and laughter reminiscing about the not so perfect parts of Thanksgiving. While everything was always beautiful and the food fabulous, there was one little problem that we ran into countless times...

Thanksgiving 2010

Those darn turkeys... no matter how much you try, each year doing your best to perfect your roasting skills, sometimes they just don't want to get done. :-) One year I remember us waiting so long for the turkey to finish roasting, literally that bird had been in the oven all day and just didn't want to get to the right temperature, that by the time is was ready to eat it it must have been close to 10-o-clock at night. My brother and I were so tired we could hardly hold our heads up and in the end couldn't hardly eat a thing. Needless to say, with A TON of leftovers, we had our Thanksgiving meal the next night.  It's happened often enough that the turkey just hasn't wanted to get done, that it always a joke to see what time we'll partake in our delightful, all be it, perhaps late evening meal.

Thanksgiving 2010

I remember on one occasion where the turkey did get done, we had gathered together at my uncle's home. All the aunts, uncles and cousins were together, a rarity that I truly wish could happen more often. My mother was getting the turkey ready and began pulling out the insides before preparing it to be roasted and start to make her fabulous gravy. Instead of the normal neck or gizzard coming out, there was actually a whole turkey head, feathers and all. Talk about startling, disgusting and hilarious all at the same time. Mind you this was a standard store bought turkey, not one from a farm, where you might want to "extra' piece. At that point in our lives the idea of butchering our own animals was far, far from our mind and seeing the turkey head (we'll just hope that the head and body actually belonged together) did a very good job of taking a bit of our appetite away.

Every year we try a new turkey recipe and different techniques, but have yet to find one that I think is so outstanding that I feel I must share it. So for now that will have to wait, however, over the years one thing I have loved to do is bake and learning to bake the ultimate pie has always seemed to go hand in hand with Thanksgiving. I think there is a bit of an art form to pie making and a whole lot of love. It takes practice, but once you figure out a great technique and recipe the end results are so delicious and satisfying that it makes the not so great turnouts worth it.

There are plenty of recipes out there that focus more on the decorative side of pie making with the pretty details you can do or add. While that can be fun, sometimes the flavor is forfeited for the looks. I kind of like the simple, classic looking pie that leaves everyone with a smile on their face after eating one, then two and just perhaps, since it's a holiday, three slices of pie. The classic pie has a homey and inviting feel that lends to that desire to sit down and relax, while sipping on a hot cup of tea and enjoying good conversation and a fun game or two. That, to me, is a wonderful end to a fabulous day.

Rhubarb Pie

Hurray! Home-grown spring fruits and vegetables are beginning to make their appearance! My mother-in-law recently brought me a very decent amount of rhubarb and asparagus from her garden, so I thought this would be the perfect time to share a rhubarb pie recipe. We are and have been enjoying a lot of rhubarb desserts. The question is do I make a rhubarb cake or rhubarb crisp next?

I used rapadura to sweeten my pie and it worked great. Next time I might try decreasing the sugar amount and using some stevia in replacement. I should mention this pie isn't overly sweet, more like just sweet enough. Some recipes I've seen use 2 parts rhubarb to 1 part sugar, wow, that would be much too sugary for my taste buds as I prefer to taste the fruit. The vanilla ice cream or whip cream you serve with it (which I say is a must) adds all the extra sweetness you'll need, if you need it at all.

When picking rhubarb try to get stalks that aren't any thicker then your thumb. The thicker they are the more bitter and stringy they are. Young, fresh rhubarb works the best.

What You'll Need - one 9" covered pie

Whole Wheat Pie Crust
3 cups organic whole wheat or spelt flour
1 tsp. sea salt
2 tbsp. rapadura - optional, but works well with this pie
1 cup cold, organic butter
12 tbsp. cold, organic milk

Filling
6 cups rhubarb, washed and cut into 1/2" pieces
1 1/2 cup rapadura or white sugar
1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp cornstarch (I did try arrowroot the first time I made this pie and didn't have much success. I'm going to try it one more time with a couple of changes. I'll update the recipe it it works.)
1/4 tsp. sea salt
2 tbsp. cold butter

Other Items
2 large mixing bowls
Pastry Blender or two knifes
Fork
Mixing spoon
Measuring cups and spoons
Rolling Pin
9" pie pan
Rimmed cookie sheet lined with tinfoil


Getting Started

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

1. Follow the instructions for making the whole wheat pie crust from my previous post:
http://artistta.blogspot.com/2010/05/whole-wheat-or-spelt-pie-crust.html

2. In a large mixing bowl, stir together your rhubarb, sugar, cornstarch and salt.

3. Roll out your bottom pie crust so that it's at least 2" larger than your pie pan when the pan is upside down. See the picture below.








4. Place the rolled out dough into your pie pan and fill with your pie ingredients, then chop your 2 tbsp. of butter and place on top.



5. Roll out your top crust so it's about 1" larger than the top of the pie. You can either place it directly on the pie and cut several 2"-3" slits in the top to allow steam to release or you can cut it into strips to do a lattice top. As you'll be able to see from the following pictures I decided to do a lattice top.

Trim your edges of excess dough, then crimp them with your fingers or the tines of a fork.







6. Optional Step: Brush the top of your pie with milk, cream or an egg yolk mix with 1/8 tsp. of water then sprinkle a little sugar on top.

7. Place your pie on your cookie sheet that has been lined with tinfoil. This is in case the juices from the pie overflow. You don't want them to get on the bottom of your oven and start to smoke, unless you like that natural smoke flavor in your pie! :-) I've made that mistake before and it's so frustrating, because once the juice starts smoking there's nothing you can really do about it, except clean your oven really well before you use it next time.

I'd also recommend covering the edges of your pie with tinfoil so they don't burn. They will bake much faster then the rest of the pie.

8. Put your pie in a pre-heated 425 degree oven and bake for 30 minutes. Then turn your oven down to 350 degrees. and bake the pie for an additional 30-35 minutes. If you covered the edges of your pie with tinfoil, remove it when you turn the temperature down.

Allow the pie to cool completely before serving and make sure there is a large scoop of vanilla ice cream or whip cream to go with it!

Whole Wheat or Spelt Pie Crust

If you are going to be a home baker and you want to use whole wheat flour as much as possible, It's a good idea to have a delicious whole wheat pie crust recipe in your arsenal. There is this myth that you can't make a good pie crust with whole wheat flour, which is beyond me because it's simply not true. I've been doing a lot of experimenting with pie crust over several months, trying different types of flour, fat and liquid. I'm still working on a dairy and wheat-free version, but in the mean time I thought I'd share a more traditional pie crust – one with lots and lots of butter! :-)

If you are a calorie counter you might want to turn that part of your brain off while making this recipe! :-) Good fat is essential to making a delicious, flaky pie crust. There's just no getting around it. Even a couple of tablespoons can make a difference.

The first time I made this recipe I used white whole wheat flour and the second time, spelt. Both work very well.


What You'll Need - will make 2 - 9" pie crusts

3+ cups organic whole wheat or organic spelt flour
1 tsp. sea salt
2 tbsp. rapadura or white sugar - optional
1 cup cold organic butter
12 tbsp. cold organic milk

Large mixing bowl
Pastry blender or two knives
Fork
Rolling pin
Wax paper


Getting Started

1. Mix together your flour, salt and optional sugar. I will sometimes use sugar if I'm making a fruit pie.

2. Cut your cold butter into small pieces, approximately quarter inch and add them to your flour mixture. Cut the butter into small chunks before putting it into the flour to make the next step a bit easier.

3. Using a pastry blender or two knifes, cut your butter pieces into your flour until there are no pieces larger than a pea. Be careful here, you don't want to cut the butter up so much that it begins to become a paste with the flour. It's important to keep the butter as cold as possible. The chunks of butter are what create the flakiness in the crust once it's been baked.



4. Drizzle your milk a couple tablespoons at a time over your flour mixture then using a fork mix it in until the mixture is evenly moistened and begins to stick together. You might not need all 12 tablespoon of milk and you may need more. When you can press some of the mixture together to form a ball that isn't sticky, you have added enough liquid.


5. Turn the mixture out onto a work surface and press it together until it forms a ball. If it's still too crumbly, sprinkle a little more milk over it. Divide the dough in half then flatten into a round disk.



From here follow your favorite recipe. You don't need to refrigerate this dough before rolling it unless your butter has begun to soften. If you think your butter has softened too much, then put the dough in the refrigerator for about an hour before using it. Pie crust dough freezes very well, so it never hurts to double your quantity and put some in the freezer for future use, just make sure to wrap it really well so it doesn't get frost on it.