Even as I bake and hand off 30 Thanksgiving pies to my beloved customers, I have begun to worry about what will happen to one particular pie. It’s the pie I plan to carry onto a plane bound for California on Thursday.
CurvyMama’s Thanksgiving pie preparations began at the Bethesda Central Farm Market, where I picked up a half-bushel of local apples from Twin Springs Fruit Farm. I picked up some Winesaps and Staymans, along with a hefty portion of SunCrisps, which I’ve only recently discovered, and are drop-dead delicious in pies.
The biggest baking days of my year begin in the most prosaic way possible: with paper and a calculator. How many pumpkin pies? How many “best-ever apple?” How many cups of sweet potato puree, brown sugar, and heavy cream do I need? How many pounds of apples, tablespoons full of molasses, trays of eggs? How much butter and leaf lard for my dough? Off to the markets I go!
The second installment of CurvyMama’s Pie-of-the-Month Club is baked and ready for pickup tonight! Last month, we gave our founding members a yummy sweet potato bourbon pie with sweet-and-salted pecans. This month, it’s Best-Ever Apple Pie (that’s the one that made me abandon my longtime indifference to apple pie).
As you know, Art of the Pie’s Kate McDermott has been baking up a storm in my kitchen for the past couple of days. In June, when I first lured her to D.C. from Washington state to teach pie workshops, apricots piled up at my house for those sessions. This time, when she came back for fall workshops, the change in seasons left us awash in pears and cranberries. I confess that I had never had a pear pie–pear tart, yes, but never a pear pie. And I had never had a cranberry pie. But both
Art of the Pie‘s Kate McDermott has returned to CurvyMama Pies’ kitchen in the Washington, D.C., environs to teach more pie workshops. You probably recall that I lured Kate here from Seattle for her first East Coast workshops last June. (If you missed my posts about that, you can catch up here, here, and here.) A Washington Post story about the workshops generated demand for more, so Kate flew back into town last night for back-to-back sessions this weekend.
CurvyMama went to Colorado last weekend to see the youngest offspring, SweetiePie Sara, who was wearying a bit of dormitory life and feeling rather far from her home in D.C. I thought I’d bring along a predictable taste of home–pie–until she texted, as I was packing: I would love to make pie with you! So I threw a rolling pin and a pie tin into my carry-on, and away I went.
Remember that yummy sweet potato pie I bragged blogged about the other day? I promised you I would post the recipe, and CurvyMama always keeps her promises. So here it is.
We are excited about making your Thanksgiving pies! We’ve posted a new Thanksgiving pie menu and special order form for the most pie-crazy day of the year. The door is open for orders! Since we are such a small operation, we will need to have your orders by Saturday, Nov. 17 so we can stock up, prep in time for the big baking day. Pies can be picked up in Bethesda on Wed., Nov. 21.
