Pies =)

Pies =)

My Grandma Bair taught me to make pies.  I still remember her voice telling me the ingredients, her hands showing me how to measure and knead the dough.  It makes me happy every time I use the recipe she gave me to make pies for others.  I play around with new filling recipes all the times, but here is my basic pie dough recipe, straight from my Grandma Bair.  The fun part is it’s sort of a pitch and pour recipe, but I’ll try to make it make sense. 

1 cup Crisco

2 cups and a bit of Flour (the ratio of flour to Crisco is a little more than 2 to 1, so you can make as many crusts at once as you like.)

Some sugar, maybe a quarter cup. 

Pinch of salt.  My Grandma taught me to measure a pinch by cupping my hand and pouring just a bit of salt in, but I think it’s like an eighth of a teaspoon.

Cold water added a bit at a time until the dough balls up.

Then you just need to roll out the dough.  Here I use a trick from my Mama.  If you roll the dough between waxed paper, with a nice coat of flour sprinkled on top and on bottom, then you’re less likely to have to overwork the dough to get it big enough.  Grandma Bair made pies all the time and could just roll it out straight on the counter with flour, but I don’t practice enough.  You want it to be fairly thin.

Then you transfer it to the pie pan!  For a pudding type pie, I bake at 350 for 12-15 minutes.  Be sure and poke the crust with a fork so it doesn’t bubble up. 

For fruit pies, you need a second crust, and you can either crimp the edges with a fork, or by pinching it between two fingers.  I loved it when Grandma Bair taught me to do that, it made it feel like fancy baking =) 

For Serenity’s Thanksgiving banquet today, I made a coconut pie, a chocolate pie with irish cream flavoring, and a cherry almond pie.  I ran out of eggs or there would have been a maple pumpkin pie too!  Have to save that for next time.  Enjoy the recipe!

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