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It's all about the pie

The day before Thanksgiving is my fun day. When I'm not working, like this year, I bake my pies and pre-bake the sweet potatoes for the sweet potato casserole. The oven makes the house nice and warm and filled with the scent of pie. This year I made my favorite buttermilk pie and a cherry pie. When I asked Oz what kind of pie he wanted, he voted for rhubarb, but we couldn't find any and bought a bunch of frozen pitted cherries instead. I've never made cherry pie before, so I looked around on the Internet and cobbled together my own recipe, which is kind of a fusion of all the cherry pie recipes out there.

Cherry pie

4 cups cherries, pitted
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon butter
Pastry for double crust nine inch pie

In a large mixing bowl, combine cherries, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Let stand 15 minutes, then place filling in pastry-lined pie dish. Dot with butter. Put top crust on, cut vent slits in top crust and flute edges. Sprinkle with sugar.

The online consensus for the baking time was to bake at 425 °F for 25 minutes, reduce heat to 350 °F and bake for 25 to 30 minutes more. I actually had to bake the pie much longer, sixty minutes at 350 °F, possibly because I used frozen cherries which were still kind of frozen, or possibly because I placed the pie dish on an insulated cookie sheet to catch drips (of which there were none).

The pie outcome: delicious, but the filling is a little on the fluid side. Many of the recipes I saw online called for quick cooking tapioca instead of flour. I'll try that next time to see if that yields a thicker filling. Still, the cherries were dark sweet cherries and the pie has a yummy Bing cherry flavor. It tastes like summer!

We got to talking about pie and puns and then found ourselves wanting to invent a sweet beer pie. We're thinking Guinness. Maybe chocolate. And definitely not this Guinness pie. In one of my cookbooks, I found a chocolate pie recipe into which we can easily substitute Guinness. We'll let you know how it turns out.

Also, happy Thanksgiving, whether you celebrate it or not.