Saturday: Rest Day = Pie Day

Saturday is my day off, according to my nifty sixteen-week training schedule. I celebrated it by sleeping until 3pm and then baking a television-inspired pie.

See, one of my favorite new television shows is Pushing Daisies on ABC. If you have not seen it yet...you must. It's adorable, Burtonian...just lovely all around. Anyhoo, the show is about a piemaker. The piemaker has an undead girlfriend who regularly (and anonymously) bakes a pear pie with gruyere baked into the crust for her grieving aunts. This pie looks SPECTACULAR every week, and I reached a breaking point with last week's episode ("Corpsicles"). I could no longer fantasize - I must bake this pie.

[Try as I might, I could not find the image-that-broke-the-jogger's-back of one of the aunts actually biting into the pie, so this will have to do.]

Having never baked a pie before (ever), I started with some background research. Incidentally, I think this show should be getting paid some kind of royalty from the pear industry, since half of the links I found to "pear pie" mention something about being inspired to bake such a pie by this show.

In the end, I decided to bake this pie recipe with this crust. I used Bosc pears, and it took six large-ish pears (about 4.5 lbs) to make 5 cups. Pears are outrageously expensive now, and since I cannot bring rotten pears back to full ripeness with the magic qualities of my touch (a la the piemaker), I think I might use canned pears next time? I doubt that would work, texture-wise...perhaps I will just have to abstain from making them every week. Also, I didn't have time to chill the dough for 4 hours, so instead I just put it in the freezer for one hour.

I made two main changes to the recipe - instead of using 1 tsp cinnamon, I used 1/2 tsp. cinnamon and 1/2 nutmeg. Second, I didn't sprinkle the sugar mixture on each layer; instead I mixed it up with the pears. I also left out the lemon juice, but only because I forgot to add it. Also, it didn't even occur to me to grate gruyere INTO the pie crust dough, but I will definitely do that next time.

Here's how it came out:

Not bad for my first pie, right? It is really, really delicious. Seriously. I wish you could try some.