Friday, October 23, 2009


As American as Apple Pie!

Fall is truly in full swing and Barry and I are hard at work making the pies that we give as gifts to family and friends (and land friendly farmers who allow hunters). So far we've made 26 pies with plans for 6 more in the works. We ran out of sugar last night or we would have had them all done. Thank heaven for friendly neighbors (Lorrie Sandberg) who donated the cup and half of sugar we needed to complete just those we had already started last night.

Our assembly line style of pie making uses a recipe from an Occident Family Flour cookbook so old that the cover and any copyright information, including the year it was published, are now long gone. My guess the cookbook was my grandmothers but I've had it so long even I don't remember. All I know if that this is the recipe that I have used for apple pies all my life and one that I know is a 'no-fail'.

Barry's a great help in this process. He's the master with the apple peeler-corer-slicer and he helps with the rest of the assembly to - preferring to be the cinnamon and butter guy. Together we can pump out 16 pies in about an hour and a half.

Real ingredients are important to us but you can see that we use store-bought pie crusts. I never was very good at crust and with most of the pies being given away, it saves on having to buy pie tins. We do use Pride Dairy butter fresh from the creamery/dairy in Bottineau and of course the apples from the tree here at the farm. We make sure to use ND's own Crystal Sugar and ND Mill and Elevator four when we can.

The pies are assembled and then wrapped in freezer paper and frozen for delivery. We put baking instructions on the top and always include the phrase, "please place a baking sheet under the pie when baking, they're so full of goodness it might just ooze out into your oven."

Home-made and hand-made always tell a story, we hope that our pies tell our friends and family that we care about them - enough to take the time and effort to give something that we grew, created and then gave with love.

Happy Fall!
PS - we wish all the hunters out there a safe and successful season!