Secret Family Pie Crust Recipe Unveiled!

I have been looking for a great pie crust recipe where I don't have to worry about the amount of liquids I add and the crust doesn't shrink. I've tried and tried and even with the spray bottle trick, I am still having difficulty with crust shrinkage. I have began to give up on the so call "fool proof" recipe. Tada~ I was handed a photocopy of Grandma Lussier's family pie crust recipe like a little golden baton. It's a family treasure. Before I misplace it again (err oops... that shouldn't say "again"), I will immortalize it on the net.

The recipes that I tried before taught me one thing; butter is awesome especially for savoury fillings. However, I find it overwhelming for simple fruit fillings like apple. Grandma Lussier's recipe is all shortening which makes the crust very flaky but... bland (sorry grandma).  I know the pie crust holy grail is suppose to be all butter; I still find 50:50 butter to shortening ratio strikes the best ratio for flavour and flakiness for apple pies. For those who wants to go all butter, roll out the dough and fold it over itself 4 to 6 time then roll it out again to achieve flakiness.

Where All The Good Apples End up...

My boyfriend's favorite thing in the world is apple sauce. 4 toasts with a generous helping of apple sauce on top of each slice are part of his daily breakfast (I approximate this is how he enjoys breakfast 300/365.25 days a year). This roughly translates to 24 oz of apple sauce every week and a half. Lucky for him, I enjoys my early fall apple picking trips and making apple sauce and apple butter (and other apple related things). Apple sauce is basically a cooked apple puree, and the apple butter is the thickened jam version. I've always thought apple butter is a funny name for it as there's no butter. That is, until I've tried it. It's just so rich and velvety in your mouth!

Going Back in Time to My Very First Bread...

I have never ever baked a bread in my life until approximately 6 weeks ago. It was a nice day in the fall after a weekend of apple picking... I had a huge bag fresh off the farm. The distress call for new apple recipes over Facebook had proven to be useless as the best recipe consisted of: wash, dry, then eat the apple. Granted that was how some of the apples met their ends, I was still on the prowl for apple recipes on the internet and in my cookbook library. I settled on a few recipes to start, one of which was a delicious looking sweet apple bread recipe. The original recipe calls for a bread machine. I didn't have one so I did it the old fashion way following instructions from James Peterson's "Baking". I was (and still am) not sure how correct my methods were and the bread didn't rise as much as I'd hoped. All in all, it was still delicious. One apple down and another 50 to go!