Oh what a night...

What's in the bucket? Oh just our turkey! Its soaking up it's brine on the back patio. I am taking advantage of our 30* weather and using the patio as my cold storage for the bird.

The bird was easy, at least tonight's portion of work (except I got gipped on the giblets! There was a neck in there, but no baggy of goodies for gravy!) The pies however... let me tell you a story.

I had two pies on the agenda for the evening, pumpkin and pecan. Admittedly I was going the easy route with store bought crust, the kind already placed with nice little fluted edges in the pie pan. When I went to blind bake them I realized I must have thrown out my stash of pinto beans for weighting. I was looking online for a brilliant alternative suggestion that wouldn't require going out on the cold evening for beans. Well I found one! Apparently Jaques Pepin "sandwiches" his crust between two pie pans and inverts them letting gravity do the work of keeping the crust in place. Some physics ran through my brain and I decided that it seemed easy enough. Well I peeked in at the crusts after about 8 minutes and it was an epic fail! Totally my fault, the second pie pan, which when inverted became the bottom one that supported the crust, was smaller than the first one, and the crust fell out. At this point it had cooked just enough to be beyond repair. There was no way to use the dough and re-roll it.

So back to Safeway I went. The plan now was to buy some beans and some new crusts. Well fail again! The entire selection of pre-made pie crusts, either in a pan or just ready to roll out, was gone!! There was nothing! So I bought the beans and headed home resolved to make crust from scratch. Now this is something I have done before, but not very often and not in a long time. (I've taken to making my lemon meringue in a graham cracker crust because there is no chilling/rolling/cutting butter involved.) It was 9pm at this point and I wasn't looking forward to the chill time, when I had been hoping to be done by then.

It wasn't that bad, I just had wanted to avoid it. The dough came out just fine, thanks to my food processor. I chilled it, I rolled it, I did everything it wanted. Now I have two completed pies.

But now it is 2am and I have just pulled the pecan out of the oven. Personally I think they look good, but hopefully they will taste good too. Especially the crust.

Must get some sleep now as I've got plenty to do in the morning! I hope your Thanksgiving prep went a little better than mine!