My Thanksgiving Tradition
by: Manny Aragon
Ahhh. Thanksgiving is my favorite time of the year. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas and New Years too. July 4th is fun, and the other holidays have their place. But there is nothing quite as satisfying as the run up to Thanksgiving and the day itself.
One of my long time traditions and one that I have participated in since I was a kid is pie making. Usually the weekend prior to the big day, my family hosts a Thanksgiving pie making “event”. The deal is that we provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner for those hardy enough to make it out to our house and help in the pie making process.
The night before pie making (this sat night) we halved and cleaned the pumpkins, then steamed and cooled them. Once done, we scooped out the insides and put them in a container for the big day. Pie making morning, I got up, ate and then got straightaway to washing, peeling, coring, and slicing about 2-3 dozen granny smith apples for the apple pies..
By the time I’m well into the apples, the hardiest of the bunch began to show up at our house. They helped me with the apples and started to wrap our dining room table in a table cloth for the crust making operation. After that, it was wash the pie tins out time (my wife has special tins she uses- no more of my old ways of using whatever tins happen to show up that year…). No, she invested in a set of perfectly sized and shaped pie tins that make pie making a breeze.
So, then its was time to make the crust. For the past 4-5 years, I have been the apple prep guy and my wife has been the crust prep girl…that is until this year. You see, it all started when I saw my wife and my mom struggling with rolling out the crust. It was breaking up in the pie tin and they were patching it together with bits of dough and so on…Honestly, it looked painful to me.
But they were struggling and I thought I’d give it a go as Ive made crust many, many times. Problem was, the crust was too dry and not sticky or pliable enough. Now, I’m no chemist and certainly not a recipe cook (like my wife) so , in my mind, I calculated that there was too much oil and not enough butter. Mind you, we were using Kerrigold grass fed butter this year and it ain’t cheap, but I figured it was worth a try and that I would fix the dough if I screwed up the ingredient ratios.
Sure enough, on a hunch, I used 1.5 times as much butter as the recipe called for and half as much oil, and 1.5 times as much ice water and Voila! The crust rolled out easily. No guts, no glory!
So, the crusts turned out great, I let my wife handle the filling once the apples were cut and the pumpkin was cooked, and the crusts (and lids for the apple pies) were made. My nieces decorated the tops of the apple pies with beautiful knife cut designs and rolled pieces of dough (we even had a Hobbit themed pie!). And baking went on until 9pm.
Folks who’ve come to help all take home one or more pies and we usually end up with quite a few to gift out over the next few days. This year, our next door neighbors came home with their first newborn (a boy!) on Saturday (the day prior to pie making)- so we took an apple pie over to help mom get her energy back up post birth.
By the time Thursday rolls around we will have a total of 3 pies left. One to take to Thanksgiving (at my sister in law’s house this year) and two to take to our dear friends and prior neighbors who have a “friends” Thanksgiving at their house every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday this year and look forward to hearing about your Holiday traditions!