twd: thanksgiving twofer pie

close up of my pecan crusted twofer


I wasn't going to bake this pie.

You see, I had this idea that I didn't like pumpkin pie. And why waste all those precious pecans on pumpkin?

And so I spent last Sunday night peeling Jonathan apples and composing a poem, "After Apple Peeling," as a riff on Robert Frost's delightful and dark meditative poem "After Apple Picking." Only these apples were bad. As in every single one I started peeling was half brown and mushy. I suspect that they are last year's crop posing as new, relatively local fruit. Ugh.

And so, Monday morning I threw the remaining unpeeled apples and a single peeled one as evidence into my trunk, intending to return them to the grocery store after work. (Am I really now the woman who returns produce to the grocery store? So it would seem). Not wanting to deal with more apples, and missing the communal adventure of baking the week's TWD recipe, I gave into the promise of Dorie's Thanksgiving Twofer Pie, selected by Vibi of La casserole carrée. I filled my cart with all the goodies I needed, and headed home to bake.

Now, Monday night was one of those catch-up-and-cram evenings, in which I graded a handful of essays, read three short articles for class, talked to my best friend S, and made the Twofer. And hence I made this rookie mistake--I baked and talked. On the phone. And so I forgot the bourbon I was going to use instead of the rum. And I mixed the pecans into the gooey syrupy filling (I used maple syrup instead of corn syrup because I'm a little crazy about avoiding corn syrup) instead of following Dorie's advice to layer them over the pumpkin. And so my pie was a little messy and a little haphazard, but I can unequivocally say that it's also delicious. I would eat Pumpkin pie like this all day, all season long.

I brought the pie to a multi-cultural club harvest feast on Tuesday, and it was a lovely finish to a meal with foods as diverse as pierogi, papaya salad, Italian macaroni and cheese, and stollen.

For my family, I made my classic Maple Bourbon Pecan Pie. I use an all butter crust, and a Bon Appetit recipe from the November 2003 magazine, replacing the corn syrup with dark/Grade B maple syrup. My parents and I polished off the last large piece today before we drove through the snow so I could fly back to Wisconsin after a fabulous long weekend. It was the sweetest end to a delicious holiday.