Winesap, Macintosh, and Jonagold...OH MY!

the leaky beauty

   Today was the perfect day for making apple pie.  It was a chilly, drizzly day in Ohio.  Today, I was just fine with having the stove set at 425 degrees.  It was a busy day in my kitchen.  I made two apple pies and five apple pielets.  The first pie looked a little crazy and reminded me of that saying "a face only a mother could love".  The second pie was beautiful but during the cooking process it managed to spill some of the loveliness all over the bottom of the stove.  Climbing on top of a chair to poke at the smoke alarm always adds a little bit of excitement to my kitchen adventures.
   Yesterday I went with Wendy to her  CSA's  end of the season farm day.  That was a good time and it was there that I scored the apples for the pies.  I grew up with seven or eight apple trees in my yard which was really cool.  As a child, my job was to pick up most of the fallen apples.  Even though I got paid for these tasks (usually with an addition of a new toy), it was rather daunting.  Sometimes Wendy would get roped into this child-labor scheme my mother had going.  Nothing like working your ten year old fingers to the bone for a Skipper barbie doll.  I did learn a few lessons from all of this apple picking.  The first being that there are all different kinds of apples out there.  The second being that different apples have different qualities.  This seemed pretty self explanatory, but became perfectly clear when I accidentally stepped on them during the clean up process.
   This wealth of information that I gained as a child did not prepare me for choosing apples for the pies.  Let me just say, I had not done my research.  So here I was standing in front of box after box of different varieties of apples without a clue.  A few names I recognized: Winesap, Macintosh and Jonagold.  After a few minutes I figured - what the hell, these are all locally grown and fresh from the farm, they are going to be about a thousand times better than store bought apples anyway.  So I just picked a bag full that looked good to me. 
   These apples went into two full sized pies and five pielets.  As far as I can tell, the random apple combination worked out well.  I have so much pie I have to give it away.  There is nothing like becoming a pie maker after you have decided to reduce your size a little.  Kinda a cruel joke I am playing on myself.  But then, I have always been intrigued by pseudo-masochism.

the apples