As American as Chinese Food and Flipper

Last week one of my dearest friends told me to get in the kitchen and bake her an apple pie. I was willing to oblige, though needed to get some apples and time with which to "pie." Yesterday I found the apples, they were in the produce section at the grocery, exactly where I thought they'd be. Oh, previous to seeking out apples I printed a recipe from the internet. Back to the apples; they were right on the apple shelf, ready for purchase. I intended to bake the pie last night, but you know how Friday nights are: last class at 3pm, meet with a group to study at 3:15, take the test at 4, home by 4:30, pick up groceries and a pizza, eat half of said pizza, plan on doing some homework but talk to Muffin Man instead, finally do that homework around 7, by the time that's finished it is too late to bake a pie, so you watch Southland's most recent episode and call it a night, 10pm. Friday nights are always so crazy. The point is that the pie had to wait.

This morning was spent with homework and various other tasks, for example, I researched carbon dating forgery. Finally it came time to bake this pie. The recipe I had chosen was for baking the pie from scratch, as they say, I didn't use any scratch in it. Just flour, sugar, salt, crisco (gross, by the way), apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, butter and water. I wish someone would have seen me trying to mix the crisco, flour and salt. I was laughing at myself. I tried using a spoon to mix the stuff (I'm in a college apartment, we don't have a mixer device), but kept throwing the flour on myself. I gave up my fears and just stuck my hands in the goo. That goo doesn't come off the hands easily, let me tell you. It sticks in the friction grooves, which I find to be unpleasant. The next step after mixing those items was to add ice water in tablespoon increments. I hadn't prepared that part before hand. In an effort to be lazy, I grabbed a paper towel to use to open the fridge and get some water out of there. I didn't want to wash the goo off my hand yet as I would need to knead some more. The paper towel, while not a very precise means by which to accomplish my task, was very effective. I was able to get a bowl of water and take care of the necessary steps of adding to the dough.

I began rolling out the dough and my dear friend, the requestor of this pie, came over to watch. She helped by peeling the apples. I tried rolling the dough on wax paper, using a plastic cup as a rolling pin, again, college apartment, 4 guys live here, we don't have all the necessary baking tools, though we are all pretty skilled in the kitchen (and sometimes our microwave makes popping noises and there are flashes of light from it. Of course that creates quite the startle response. When this occurs we just unplug it and talk about how we should tell the apartment managers as they provide the microwave with the apartment. Instead we don't tell them and a day later when someone wants to use it, they plug it back in and everything is fine, until the next time). The dough was sticking to the cup and to the wax paper. Eventually I asked if I could just put the dough in the pie plate and press it into place rather than roll it flat and drop it into the plate like the recipe said. I did so. This is where the trouble came in, the recipe said use a 9 or 10 inch plate, so that's what I got. The dough was not enough to do the job however. Next time I'll get a smaller pie plate. I filled the plate as best I could leaving very little dough left for the top. I flattened that out as best I could and then cut it into 8 strips. I wove the strips on top of the pie for the old school lattice look. After about 50 minutes in the oven I had this


I made a pie from scratch, without even using any scratch. Thats my story, I hope you enjoyed it. I don't think you did, but that is OK. Neither did I....or did I?