How a girl like me — a girl whose idea of the perfect food is a chocolate buttercream layered sponge cake, a girl whose childhood dinners were considered incomplete without a slice of fudge-frosted Entenman’s tacked on to the end of them, a girl who could eat this morning, noon, and night — ended up being the mother of a cake-hater like my 9-year-old? I’ll never know. What I do know is that on the big day, birthday pie works fine, too.
Cranberry-Apple Birthday Pie
2 9-inch frozen pie crusts, such as Pillsbury or Trader Joe’s (or if you have Martha Stewart’s pâte brisée in the freezer, lucky you!)
5 to 6 apples, peeled and sliced (about 5 cups)
1/4 cup fresh cranberries (or to taste)
1⁄3 cup sugar
1⁄2 teaspoon cinnamon
Dash of nutmeg
Juice from 1⁄2 lemon
6 to 8 dots of butter
1 egg, beaten
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Lay the first piece of dough inside a pie dish. Toss the apples and cranberries in a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon juice. Toss, then dump into prepared pie dish. Dot the fruit with butter, cover with second pie dough, using your fingers to seal it around the edges. Using a knife, cut a few ventilation slits in the top. Brush the crust with egg wash.
Bake for 40 minutes. If the crust is looking too brown before the fruit is bubbling out the side, cover with foil. Once the pie is cool, add candles. Serve with vanilla ice cream.
We celebrate pasta embarrassingly often in my home, only because my 3-year-old daughter refuses to eat almost anything except macaroni and cheese. We were living in Norway and “the blue box” of mac and cheese could only be procured in rare delicatessens with insane markups, like they were truffles or something. I know, it’s crazy.
Only because it was something very American did I give it to her, and she’s eaten maybe 4 boxes in her entire lifetime, yet she was totally hooked! I saw the dangerous road we were headed down, so I decided then and there that mac and cheese would only be made from scratch in our home, which, in truth, is just as easy as the boxed electric yellow stuff.
After you portion out the kid’s bowl, toss in some sauteed spinach, diced ham, chopped sundried tomatoes, mushrooms, or other leftover meats and/or veg for the adults’ bowls, and you’re *really* cooking.
We will happily consume mac and cheese to celebrate pasta day today. And any day, really.
Love the cookbook and I do not buy many cookbooks. With all the recipes I can find online, why? But yours is worth it and many of my friends agree. I have made the Chicken Soup With Orzo every single week for the last month. My daughters are 7 & 8 (16 months apart; I feel your pain, especially the posts about children who awake at 5:30 am). They slurp it up every time and proclaim I am the best mom in the world. They shun the orzo but that’s ok. I love giving them something so wholesome and healthy, and it is such an easy recipe. Thank you for adding a great weekly staple to our dinners. Keep up the great work. Fondly, a stay-at-home mom in Des Moines, IA.
We like our pasta with little more than some parmesan, butter and basil. I have to pick the green flecks off the kids version and then I add some cherry tomatoes to my version. We are all happy.
The perfect pasta in our house is when I make a winter sunday sauce. I cook a red sauce with italian sausage and meatballs all day long on sunday. it makes the house smell amazing and produces a huge pot of a beautiful dark red sauce that I use to cook with all week long. We have pasta with red sauce and meatballs and sausage on Sunday night, then I might make pizzas one might and a lasagna another night that week. If there is any sauce left I freeze some and use it as a fast pasta dinner night.
yummm…pie!!! 🙂
the pasta pack and pot look awesome! i would celebrate with Marcella Hazan’s famous simple tomato sauce…i really could eat it everyday 🙂
Oh Nancy – Briermere pies are the best! I have recently been contemplating driving out there (from our new location in NJ! with my newborn baby!) just to get one of their pies…
I put the above comment in the wrong place, and for some reason my name is linked to a weird Bible website on it. Would you mind deleting it? Thanks.
Pie is a great idea, especially if the birthday girl isn’t a huge fan of cake. Thanks for sharing.