Apple pie with whisky soaked cherries: better than a thank-you note

Over the holidays, I received a very generous gift of 12 year Balvenie single malt scotch whisky.

If you're wondering how to thank someone for such a kind gift, I'd strongly suggest a thank-you note in pie form.  This Apple Pie with Whisky Soaked Cherries recipe, in my opinion, will express your gratitude perfectly.

Tips for living alone and combating cheddar cheese apple pie crust skepticism

If living alone leaves you feeling like you've got no good treats to come home to, then I guess you've never tried this apple pie with cheddar crust recipe.  This all started when I was about to go out of town for work and didn't have enough time to complete all the steps of my recipe.  My empty suitcase awaited packing and the necessity of a good night's sleep beckoned me to my pillow.  

Into the freezer went my two disks of dough as I begrudgingly abandoned my original intentions to bake my second pie of the night.  This was not the first time my overly ambitious culinary nature led me to stop mid-recipe.  If it's possible for an individual to be too inspired to cook and bake, this is definitely my predicament.  Like many passionate food loving folks, my love for all things culinary borderlines on the obsessive, and my drive to create is blind to the realities of time management.  I'm a student of such philosophies as "Why buy ____ when you can just make your own from scratch?" So I find myself spending a lot of time on cooking projects that others (who care less about what they eat) would probably find mundane.       

Lack of time is no friend to a woman trying to master a plethora of baking recipes.  But on the upside, freezing the dough left me with a pie crust that was waiting for me after a busy weekend of hard work. Not only was the dough easier to work with as a result of its stay in the freezer, but with only the filling to make, the hard part was over and I was ready to reap my reward. 

Of course, friends and skeptics alike questioned the idea of cheddar cheese in a pie crust, but I held my ground and the results filled my belly wonderfully.  And there started the chain of pie slice giveaways to neighbors, friends, and loved ones, because as satisfying as it was to fill my own belly, it's even more satisfying to sway the opinion of a cheddar cheese pie crust skeptic.   There's a lot of them out there and I've been called to duty to bake for them.

A few simple steps  delivered my welcome home pie after an out of town trip.  After rolling out the dough, the filling ingredients were tossed together and nestled into the pie dish

With the the top layer of crust placed atop the filling, it just takes a brush of milk (below) to prepare the pie for the oven.  Don't forget to add some slits to allow the steam to escape! 

 Voila!  The welcome home pie is ready!  

Find this recipe in Epicurious.com, originally from Gourmet magazine.

Hard crime and brownies...

Did anyone hear about the people who were caught breaking into a Dominoe's Pizza just so they could bake some brownies at 5:30 in the morning? I swear, that's all you hear in the news these days, hard crime and brownies, hard crime and brownies. Give it a rest Couric!

Speaking of good old Katie, one of her own blog entries came up in my Google alert under "American bakers". Google alerts are quite useful tools if you want to keep tabs on certain subjects through the internet. Just when I thought that Google GMAIL had made my life complete, the folks at Google made me fall in love all over again. I discovered Google Alerts, emails that Google sends me each day with articles relevant to any and every topic I might ever desire. In theory, this system is perfection, but recently I have had to come to terms with the following Google Alert dilemma:

Sometimes, Google Alert alerts me to things that I simply do not want to be alerted about. Take the aforementioned Katie Couric blog as an example. Since I have requested that Google Alert send me emails about "American bakers", Couric's blog post featuring "her own" apple pie recipe was included in my last Alert email. This sounds innocent enough, but little did I know the horror this blog would unveil. To be fair, you should really read this blog entry yourself for the full effect, but let me highlight my favorite moment for those of you who do not opt to click the link!

Throughout the entry, Couric describes a recent family outing of apple-picking, and this all leads up to the apple pie recipe at the end. I'm pretty sure Couric never took a course in food writing, because just before the recipe at the end, she shares with her readers that baking a pie with your family can be a great way to teach your children math, while adding, in parenthesis, mind you, that ("This is so wholesome, I’m about to throw up!"). Note to Katie: Parenthesis do not equal humor, and references to vomiting in food articles seem a bit out of place. But it gets even better. The crowning glory comes as Couric wraps up the article and segues to the recipe. To her readers, she offers these words of advice for all novice bakers as they prepare to read her tasty recipe: "Remember, if I can do it, you can do it! (that’s what I tell everyone about my colonscopy, but we can chat about that another time!)".

Okay, first of all, she spelled colonoscopy wrong. Doesn't CBS hire little blog proofreading underlings to take care of this sort of thing?

You can see that I hyperlinked that bad boy once again, because if you didn't want to read Couric's blog before, you might have some twisted desire to do so at this point. But if you really want my advice, don't bother. If you're thinking that something you read at the beginning of her entry will help you make sense of the end of it, you are sorely mistaken dear reader. When it comes to food writing, let's leave the colonoscopy references out of the apple pie articles, even if that means we have to go back to stories about hard crime and brownies. I liked it better that way.