2020 Thanksgiving Pie Bake Off

My personal challenge was to write a blog each day while I am on vacation this week. Today I struggled to come up with anything interesting to write about. I thought to myself that most days are pretty routine, and this would be a good challenge for me to come up with something to write. So in the spirit of exercising my brain so it does not shrivel up in my old age. I am recording for eternity or when the internet disappears, My 2020 Thanksgiving pie bake off. 

My great great great grandkids might find this blog as they are researching their family history and wonder why I would just write about baking pies when a major pandemic was happening. My answer to those future grandkids is; there will be more natural disasters, pandemics, and other traumatic events that we cannot control. But what we can control is how we think during stressful times.

Thanksgiving for me is my favorite holiday, because this is the week that I reflect on what I am grateful for. I have a lived a pretty good life, I have two wonderful sons, an amazing husband who has made my life so much better, three granddaughter that are stunning, three sisters and one brother still alive, and so many nieces and nephews that I am so proud of and love dearly, I have a roof over my head, and funds to buy food. My health is okay for a soon to be 66 year old. 

The bake off started because we had a couple of items that we wanted to pre-cook for tomorrow's dinner. One was pies and one was green bean casserole.  

We had bought a pumpkin pie from the store just in case the pies we made did not turn out. I choose to make my favorite pecan pie and my husband choose mincemeat pie. 

The very name "mincemeat" sound pretty gross, so I looked up the ingredients and it was mostly fruit with a bit of meat sauce, so I was okay with the mincemeat. My husband bought the jar of mincemeat and made a streusel topping. We bought the pecans and found they were just as expensive as buying a pie from the grocery store. My husband made the dough and we each rolled out our own pie crust and made our fillings. He and I like to do cooking competitions. I knew I would have the inside edge on this competition, I am not aware of anyone who does not like pecan pie. I told him about what I read in my cookbook about cutting a 12" inch square of foil, then folding the foil in four and cutting out a 7" circle to use to cover the crust for the first half of baking. He did not believe me, so I had to show him in the cookbook. Maybe I should not have shared, so he would have had burnt crust!

I rolled my pie crust out first and he thought it was pretty neat that I rolled up the crust on the rolling pin and then unrolled the dough right into the pie pan. His dough looked much better when he rolled it out. He told me that it was because of a job he had working for a pizza place. I got a bit nervous when I saw how nice his dough looked in the pan compared to mine. 

Once we got the crust foiled up, and put the two pies in the oven, we started chatting and waiting for 25 minutes to take the foil off, my husband asked if I set the timer. NOPE I had not and neither had he. Lucky though, I had taken a picture of him putting the pies in the oven and the picture had a time stamp on it. Yippee! 

We had a great time cooking together, and the pies looked like they turned out really good. Tomorrow with be the day we find out if our effort was worth it. 

Three pies for three people! Tomorrow I will post pictures of the entire dinner.