Happy Thanksgiving!

Dorie's Amazing Apple Pie

Happy Thanksgiving! It's really snuck up on me again (I think I say that every year) but we are so excited to have time with family, enjoy the beautiful weather and some of our favorite traditions. This year I'm in charge of bringing the rolls and pie. I'm going to make our favorite easy dinner rolls and try a new-sure-to-be-favorite, Homemade Raspberry Honey Butter. Janet's blog is beyond lovely and you can see her similar roll recipe with careful and gorgeous photos to walk you through the cresent-roll making process if you are a little nervous.

A nice buttery homemade apple pie is my favorite Thanksgiving dessert and you can see my favorite (shown above) here as well as a lot of other pie recipes in my archives. As I told the women at Church at our pie class last month, when it comes to pie, all those great ingredients thrown together with ice cream on top- how bad can that be? I'm going to make our pies today and throw them in the freezer so Turkey Day is as stress free as possible.

Don't miss David Lebovitz's great stress-free baking tips here- there's something for everyone. Have a very happy Thanksgiving- I am so thankful for each of you that stops to say hi or lets me know that one of my recipes made someone feel special! Hugs!

Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough
adapted from Dorie Greenspan

Ingredients
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks very cold unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon-size pieces
3/8 cup very cold (frozen is even better) Crisco (plain, not butter flavored), cut into 4 pieces
About 1/2 cup ice water

Put the flour, sugar and salt in a food processor fitted with a metal blade; pulse just to combine the ingredients. Drop in the butter and shortening and pulse only until the butter and shortening are cut into the flour. Don't overdo the mixing—what you're aiming for is to have pieces the size of fat green peas and others the size of barley.

Pulsing the machine on and off, add 3 tablespoons of the water—add a little water and pulse once; add some more water and pulse again; and keep going that way. Then use a few long pulses to get the water into the flour. If after a dozen or so pulses, the dough doesn't look evenly moistened or form soft curds, pulse in as much of the remaining water, or even a few drops more, to get a dough that will stick together when pinched. If you've got big pieces of butter, that's fine. The dough is ready and should be scraped out of the work bowl and on to a smooth work surface. (be careful not too add too much water- if the dough looks dry after adding most of the water, pinch it with your hands to check if it's coming together, and finish combining it by hand)

Shape the dough into a disk and wrap it. Refrigerate the dough at least 1 hour before rolling. The dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 5 days or frozen for up to 1 month.