Apple Pie

I consulted carefully with the gentleman operating the apple stall. I made it clear that I wanted cooking apples as I planned to make baked apples. My grandmother makes baked apples all the time. They are the perfect dessert for fall weather. The baked apple feels like a warm hug that will keep the damp out on wet autumn nights. Smothered in custard, its the perfect comfort dessert.

I brought my cooking and eating apples home and carefully separated them in my fridge. As the week went by, I would look at the cooking apples and realize that it just wasn't worth turning the oven on for half an hour to bake one apple. As the days went by, I decided that I had to use the apples quickly or the joy of buying freshly picked apples was going to be redundant. I might as well have bought them at the local grocery store. I have never managed to find cooking apples in the store, but the principle remained.

I decided that apple pie was my best chance of using up lots of apples in one full swoosh. I will spare you the pain of reading about the process of making the pie. You can conjure up a fair representation of the event by knowing that I have rarely, if ever, made pastry from scratch and that half way through slicing apples, I became bored. I began to decide that making baked apples would have been a much better idea.

The pie cooked nicely. It behaved nicely too and didn't drip all over the bottom of my oven. I let it cool and cut myself a slab. I mused over the first bite and tried again. I gave it a third bite and decided that I did not like it. The apples were mushy and the pie seemed like wet tissue paper.

Unsure if I was being prejudiced, I tricked a friend into eating eat who declared the pie good, and more importantly, normal. Apparently, this mushy mess is proper apple pie. Not being able to get cooking apples, my mother always used eating apples. The apples kept their shape and texture and did not turn to pulp. I like apple pie that way. I don't like it with baking apples.

Not that there was anything inherently wrong with the pie, but it reminded me of one that my mother made. And some memories are hard to erase. She once made the Ritz Apple Pie. The Ritz Apple Pie makes an apple pie entirely out of Ritz crackers. It tastes and smells and feels like a real apple pie. You would be hard pressed to really tell the difference.

If I'm going to go to all the effort of peeling and coring apples, then I want everyone to know that I did. From now on, I'm using eating apples. If I want proper apple pie, the I'll make the Ritz one. Crushing crackers is a lot easier than peeling apples. And no one will know the difference.