We just had to celebrate today! After all, Pi Day is a holiday just for us nerds and pi is a big part of our farm. Or is it pi are? Not sure. Anyhoo, I baked up a yummy Apple Pie, using some Northern Spy Apples we had in the freezer.
Northern Spies are, hands down, the best apples for pies. So that’s the variety of apple tree we will be putting in our orchard later this spring. It will be a couple of years before we will have any apples on it, but it’s a start. Until then, there are plenty of orchards around here, we should be able to pick up a bushel of them in the fall to make more pies.
Here’s a secret: when Northern Spies are fresh and in season, we peel, core and slice them up just as we would for pie, plus add all of the seasonings, sugar and flour for thickening the recipe calls for. THEN, I line pie pans with foil, plop in the filling and freeze it all solid. When frozen, I remove the pie disks, wrap them individually in foil, slip them into freezer bags and label them before putting them back in the freezer. When we want a pie, I make the dough for crust, roll it out, slap a frozen pie disk in there, cover and bake about 10-15 minutes longer than the recipe calls for. Easy as, well, um, pie.
