I had two choices when it came to what to do with those five apples we harvested. You know, the ones the thieving squirrels so graciously left us? 🤨

Yeah, those ones.

We could have just eaten them whole, which would have been the healthier choice, but gosh darn it, we planted that tree with every intent to grow apples for apple pie!

So that’s what I did.

First, I had to explain to the pups why I didn’t have enough apples to share with them and why they probably wouldn’t like it anyway.

They weren’t too convinced.

It’s been ages since I made an apple pie from scratch and I didn’t even have a recipe for it in my book so I had to go digging around for one online. That took all of two minutes. There are probably thousands of apple pie recipes floating around out there!

Most of them called for 8 or more apples, so I figured I could cut the recipe in half and just make a little one, but then I came across this one for apple pie filling that only uses 4 apples.

Perfect!

I even had all of the ingredients handy, which was a bonus.

I went ahead and used all five of my apples and followed the recipe as if it called for that many and it came out beautifully. I prefer diced to sliced, but I’m sure it can work either way.

Oh, and because I have a hard time with too much corn I substituted the corn starch part with flour.

It worked really well and in the end, I had a delicious filling that was exactly enough for one large (not small!) pie.

Next came the tricky part, because, as I mentioned, I haven’t made an apple pie since… well I don’t remember, but it’s been years. It’s not because we don’t love them, we do, but it was never a priority for me to put all this work into making them myself until I grew the apples myself!

So it took awhile to get the lattice work somewhat acceptable.

Anyway… it didn’t come out perfect, but it came out delicious, and that’s what really counts, right?

Again, it was so satisfying making a dish using food we grew ourselves. Next year, hopefully the squirrel will leave me enough to make two or three pies! 😄