Apple Pie

This recipe is a modified version of the Apple Pie from allrecipes.com. After making cookies with a friend, I made some bold claims about being able to teach her how to make the world's best apple pie from scratch, and of course when the time came to make the pie I screwed up somewhere along the way while following the recipe. I did still manage to teach her how to make the world's best apple pie since the unintended recipe modification ended up improving the taste... though it looked a bit dicey for a while there. Just one more testament to my highly superior teaching skillz.

Ingredients:

Pie Crust (from the Pie Crust recipe)

5-9 of those small reddish-green apples that you can get by the sack at the grocery store in Massachusetts in the fall (I can't remember exactly which type I bought but the flesh was white and soft and didn't oxidize - not particularly good crispy apples that you would normally eat)

1 stick of butter

3 tbsp all-purpose flour

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup water

1 dash of lemon juice

1 dash nutmeg

1/4 tsp cinnamon

4 whole cloves

Tools:

1 pie pan (I use a round glass pyrex casserole pan that's slightly bigger than a normal pie dish)

1 apple peeler

1 small pot/saucepan

1 rolling pin (or, if you don't have one, you can substitute with an empty icewine bottle covered in saran wrap, or a saran-wrapped roll of heavy contact paper that you found in one of your kitchen drawers from when your landlord was renovating your apartment - like I did for many years. Ghetto-fabulous!)

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. If you have the pie crust recipe all ready-made, roll out the bottom half of the pie and line your pie pan. Start peeling the little apples and cutting them into slices. Note the ambiguous number of apples in the ingredients list - basically, just keep on preparing apple slices until you have a mound of apples filling your pie (I like my pies crammed full of apples, so feel free to pile it up an inch or so above the crust line). Splash a little lemon juice on the apples so they don't rust. Next, take your small saucepan and melt the stick of butter (this is the step where I kind of mysteriously screwed up and made awesome caramel, so... bear with me. I'm just writing it as I saw it - so hopefully it's a repeatable mistake. I used some questionably old-ass butter, so there was a foamy part and a clear liquid part in the saucepan). Stir in the 3 tbsp of flour to make some kind of paste. Dump in the white sugar and brown sugar (I also had old-ass brown sugar which I had to microwave and chip off chunks, so that might have also had something to do with the screwup), and the water. Stir over low heat. If you did the "screwup" portion of this recipe right, you should have a sticky thick glob of caramel at the bottom of your pot and a layer of clear melted butter on top. If you didn't "screw up" then you'll have pour-able homogeneous mixture of brown caramelly goodness. At this point, stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, and simmer this "caramel sauce" on low for 2-3 minutes. Make a latticework top crust for your pie, then carefully pour the sauce all over it (making sure to cover as much of the pie crust on top as possible - everything that gets sauced becomes sweet and crunchy in the oven). If your "caramel sauce" is that thick gooey stuff that I described above, just pour in the goo and leave the clear melted butter portion in the pot. Next time I do this, I'll try using maybe 3/4 of a stick of butter and I'll let you know how it goes.

Now, shove that bugger in the oven and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, turn the heat down to 350 and bake for another 35-45 minutes. Technically you should let the pie cool so the innards congeal before serving it, but it's just as good hot (if not, better, if you put some vanilla frozen yogurt on it). If you somehow manage to consistently get that gooey caramel texture for your sauce, TELL ME HOW YOU DID IT. I must know! Especially since I was asked to repeat this recipe because the pie came out so well (and failing to do so would totally result in everybody finding out that I fucked up and accidentally made something delicious instead of doing so by design).