thanksgiving eve

Wednesday, nov. 25, 2009

What’s that you say? It’s 9pm the night before Thanksgiving and the baby refused to nap all day and you didn’t get a chance to bake or slice or dice or anything? Commence frantic late-night back-aching bleary-eyed pie bake-off jamboree!

My family pie dough recipe is thankfully sleep-deprived-simpleton-proof: 1 cup flour plus 1 stick of butter plus 3 ounces cream cheese. That’s it!

After rolling out one pumpkin pie bottom and one apple pie bottom, I didn’t quite have enough cream cheese to make a third pie shell to top the apple, so I made two-thirds of a recipe and cut it up using my set of variable-sized scalloped cookie cutters.

Now the gaps between dough seem purposefully artful, versus poorly planned and depressing. At least that’s what I tell myself, in the quiet voice usually reserved for calming frightened animals, as I gently pat my own head.

We’ve only had to make two emergency missing-ingredient trips to the grocery store. And we only set off the fire alarm once! So far.