Now THAT's more like it...

I *knew* my success with last summer's Dorie-licious blueberry pie was a fluke!

When I make pie dough, *this* is what it really looks like.

Thankfully John came to the rescue, added another couple drops of water, and as you'll soon see, my TWD Thanksgiving Two-Fer Pie wasn't a complete bust.

But first, the side story. It's sort of fitting that this one emerge during our anniversary month...

Very early in "us", John and I discovered a shared love of cooking and baking. And since I was living with my parents at the time, their oven got quite a workout in our early months. Ironically, I have no idea *what* we were planning on baking in it on the day in question. Just that I set the oven temperature to 350 without opening the oven first to ensure it was empty.

This was NOT a good idea in my father's kitchen. He used everything with a door save the dishwasher as potential storage space. And on this fateful afternoon, he'd stashed a jumbo pecan pie he'd purchased at Costco, one wedge missing. Which we noticed when we smelled the pecans burning. Since it wasn't salvageable, we pitched it in the trash. And when my father returned after the long weekend and wanted to know the whereabouts of his pie, I fibbed "John finished it. He LOVES pecan pie".

Ooops.

John HATES pecan pie. Loves the sweetness. Not fond of the nuts. In pie. He loves them raw. You figure it out.

Lucky for me, my dad never got around to baking him one of his favorite desserts.

So since I really don't want to eat 38,000 calories worth of pie this weekend, I placed a ring of pecans around the outside edge of the pie to stay true to the recipe without making it inedible for John.

The end result? Not my favorite Dorie recipe, but I'm betting some of that was operator error and that true holiday pie fans would adore it. In my case, the crust shrunk in pre-baking, and having nowhere else to go, the pecan sugar filling sort of lined the *outside* of the pie. Not unpleasant, but kind of ugly. And odd.

And it took *forever* to bake. I pulled it out of the oven after the requisite fifty minutes and dashed off to the gym. On my return I had pie soup. So back it went into the oven for five minutes. Fifteen minutes. Another 30 minutes before it was anything resembling slice-able. Not sure where I went wrong there, but it was gratifying to read the "Problems and Questions" on the TWD website and know I wasn't the ONLY one struggling with getting it to set.

Thanks to Vibi of La Casserole Carree for choosing this fitting ending to the traditional American Thanksgiving feast. The recipe can be found (thoughtfully translated to English at the end of the post) on her site. For far more photogenic versions of Dorie's masterpiece, check out the blog roll at Tuesdays with Dorie.

From the archives...
In 2006 I was playing with sugar and calling it "healthy"
In 2007 we made turkey stock that's still occupying a corner of my freezer.