Happy Thanksgiving! No new recipes for me today, just slight variations on some old ones. For me, the best thing about food at Thanksgiving is the pie. I don't make it all that often, because I'll want to eat it all, and I know how many calories there are in all-butter pie crust. =) Okay, I'll want to eat it all if it's the right kind of pie. The pie you see above, which is Caramel Pumpkin Pie, is not for me. I don't actually like pumpkin pie. But my husband loves it, so I make it for him. You can read about my previous experiences with this Dorie recipe here. What I did differently was to make mini pies this year. I bought a couple of really cute 7" pie plates at Crate and Barrel a couple years ago, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've used them.
I also made apple pie, since that's my favorite. You can read some of my ramblings about apple pie here. I started off making my usual recipe, which isn't really one recipe, but pieces from several recipes, all put together. The crust is an all-butter one that originally belonged to a freeform fruit tart from Cook's Illustrated. The filling comes from my Betty Crocker cookbook. And I do a crumb topping--my current favorite is the one from this Epicurios recipe. My only change this time around was to rub the seeds from a vanilla bean (I got a whole bunch at Costco recently) into the sugar that I used in the filling. The result was quite tasty.
The best part of my day was early this morning, though, when I found out that Gillian made me this:
