Now, I went all out this time around. My sister and I bought organic Halloween pumpkins from Gardens of Eagan near her house, and I spent yesterday evening baking my large pumpkin (in 11 pieces) and then pureeing it. I started right in this morning making my crust from scratch, too, using a pumpkin pie recipe from America's Test Kitchens, a PBS-based cooking show that's as good, if not better, than anything the Food Network has to offer. (The host, Chris Kimball, is superb and his two main chefs, Bridget and Julia, who do all of the demo cooking for the show are wonderful, too. And their gadget evaluation segments are responsible for my NAILING Dan's 2006 birthday gifts of a scraping/cutting tool, a microplaner and an egg slicer that he uses EVERY time he slices mushrooms now, per ATK's tips.) The recipe includes a lot of refrigeration steps during the crust-making portion, so it took me a couple of hours just to get to the filling steps given all of the in&out of the fridge steps with the crust. But I got the first pie in the oven (I'm making two of them) and the timer's beeping now to let me know it's done. Let's see what we've got... After a few extra minutes in the oven to firm up the filling, it looks good! ...and about an hour later the second one looks tasty, too. I was careful to f
ollow my mom's advice to put foil around the crust during baking to keep it from getting burnt - worked like a charm, as always. I even had a little crust dough and filling left over so I made four "mini pies" in a muffin pan. I've included a photo of my finished products for all to see. Wipe that drool from your chin!Epilogue: After a late Wednesday night at the 400 Bar, I treated myself to a mini pie upon arriving home. It was DELICIOUS. Dan tried one Thanksgiving morning and pronounced them TASTY, too. And the family concurred at Aunt Ellen's house after the Thanksgiving meal. Who knows? Maybe I'll do it all over again in 2007...
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