A Honey Crisp Apple Pie

I made an apple pie, yesterday, with good old Minnesota Honey Crisp Apples. Wow, is it ever good! I only cheated by using a ready made pie crust - Pillsbury makes a great refrigerated crust (2 crusts) that you just unroll one of the crusts onto the pie plate, fill it up and place the second crust on top, cut little vents and pinch the edges closed. Easy as pie!

I used my old faithful apple pie filling recipe from my old faithful Betty Crocker cookbook that I've had forever. In fact, I was working on a Squidoo lens about cookbooks and discovered that if this particular Betty Crocker cookbook was in pristine condition it would be worth a lot more than it originally cost. I'm hard on cookbooks, though.

Making apple pie from fresh apples isn't difficult. The hardest part is peeling the apples and when you really only need five or six you can't exactly complain. Here's the recipe for the filling. It's for a 9-inch pie.

First you need pastry for a 9-inch, 2 crust pie.

Then, combine:
3/4 cup sugar (I used raw sugar)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Dash salt
6 cups thinly sliced pared tart apples
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Prepare the pastry. Stir together the sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt; mix with the apples. Turn the filling into the pie crust, dot with the butter and cover with the top crust. Cut some slits into the crust (I always do this before I place the top crust onto the pie filling). Seal the edge and either flute with your fingers or with the tines of a fork.

Cover the edge with a strip of aluminum foil or pie crust shield to prevent over browning. You can remove the foil the last 15 minutes or so before the pie is finished.

Bake 40 to 50 minutes or until the crust is brown and the juices begin to bubble through the slits in the crust.

I usually check it at about 30 minutes just to see how it's doing. If I've forgotten to put the foil on the crust edges, I will do it then. But that's really asking for burnt fingers - ha!

Cool on a wire rack. Delicious served either slightly warm or cold with vanilla ice cream. Mmmm.