There shall be pie....FINALLY!

I have been telling my oldest that I would make an apple pie for at least a week or more. 

I bought a bag of apples at the store and planned to bake them into pie about ten days ago.....



On the tractor ride to the apples

then our family went apple picking at an actual orchard, where they were still in the trees on Columbus day.


Don't they all look so enthused?  Our oldest boy
opted to stay home.

The apples were HUGE!  And delicious.  I bought a kind I had never heard of before that are supposed to be good for baking.  



Picking apples from up high

The night we picked them I fried some up to put on top of pancakes with whip cream. Oh my geez they were so stinking delicious! 


butter, brown sugar, orange juice, and spices

All week long I have been promising to make them into a pie.  The ones I bought at the store all went bad and had to be tossed away.

My apple pie recipe is still packed away in a box somewhere in the garage, so I set about online looking up recipes.  None of them seemed just right.  My friend even emailed me a recipe, but since I didn't have all of the ingredients for that I struck out on my own.

I took bits and pieces of recipes and put them all together. 

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The Crust:
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup frozen butter cut and cubed
1/2 cup ice cold water

The filling
7  apples peeled and cut in quarter inch thick slices (enough to fill the bag 3/4 full)
Place apples in gallon size bag with 1/2 cup orange juice and shake to coat apples
In small bowl mix 1/3 to 1/2 cup of flour with 1/4 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 cup white sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice, and 1/2 tsp nutmeg.  Stir to blend together.
Dump flour mixture in the bag with the apples and shake to coat.

Pour apples into crust
slice  1/2 cup stick butter (4 tablespoons) over top of apples
cover with pie crust, cut slits into top crust

Put tinfoil over the edges of the crust. Place in 425 oven for 45 minutes.  Remove foil and put in for another 15 minutes.  You can coat crust with an egg wash before baking for a golden color.

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It is in the oven cooking as I type. 

After I put it in the oven I realized that I forgot to add in the butter pats to the apples. 

I had a little bit of crust left over and some apples so I put them in a mini pan and added some butter to that one. 

It just came out of the oven and Oh MY FLIP!!!! It is SO SO good.


Here is how the butter less pie turned out.

You definitely want to add butter.  It is good, but not as good as when it has
butter.

If it is as good as the mini pie I will let you know.