The Easiest Pie Crust

So you're the lucky one tasked with making the famous Pumpkin Pie for Thanksgiving dinner this year.  You could be lazy and pick one up at the grocery store.  Or you could be semi-ambitious and make the filling yourself and put it in a good old Pillsbury ready made crust.  Or you could just *gasp* make the pie and the crust yourself.  I swear on my life that this is the simplest pie crust ever - it's made with just 4 ingredients and is still super flaky.  The best part of all is that I consider it foolproof...in all the years I've made it, it's never once ripped on me while I was rolling it out.  Time to be the Turkey Day all-star in your family!

Lemon Meringue Pie

Happy Sunday!  I peaked out my window and it's still looking a little gloomy today, so I thought I would share a recipe that reminds me of the warm spring days we're all longing for right about now: Lemon Meringue Pie.  I baked this dessert on Valentine's day for Howie because he isn't a huge fan of chocolate (apparently these type of creatures exist??), and he absolutely loved it.  How couldn't you?  There's nothing else quite like a tangy lemon custard filling over a crunchy, buttery graham cracker crust, topped with fluffy, sweet meringue that gets lightly toasted in the oven.  Try baking Lemon Meringue Pie this afternoon to bring a little fresh springtime flavor into your kitchen!

Apple Pie

Let me start off this blog post by saying that this apple pie recipe is very near and dear to my heart.  It was actually the recipe that first inspired me to start a cookbook back when I was 19 years old.  I was in between my freshman and sophomore year of college, and made an apple pie on a warm summer afternoon.  I decided to photograph my beautiful pie after it came out of the oven, and realized that it looked just as good as some of the pictures I would see in cooking magazines.  Before I knew it, I was furiously baking and cooking as many recipes as I could to photograph them before I went back to a cramped dorm room sans oven or stove at Miami University.  I used an online publishing software to design the layouts for my cookbook, and finally finished it in Fall 2012...all because of this simple pie recipe!