KUO KITCHEN -- Easy Apple Pie

Cooking is like my happy time.  I love planning meals, going grocery shopping, chopping things up, and particularly, that nice sizzle and aroma from, say perhaps, when you throw some sliced garlic into a perfectly heated, oiled pan.  YUM. (side note - I have an obsession with cooked garlic.  And I'm pretty terrible at keeping the horror from my face when someone tells me they don't like it. What, you don't like FLAVOR?!) I'm not a huge fan of recipes -- unless you can find me one for that sauce they put on the "wet" chow fun noodles -- and I enjoy simple dishes, where you can just use whatever ingredients you have in the fridge and somehow end up with something very tasty.

And for all the reasons listed above, I pretty much avoid baking like the plague.

I should specify, baking from scratch.  I'll make those break and bake cookies all day, every day, be-caaause I know exactly how they'll turn out! So long as I have the oven turned to a specific temp and remember to take the cookies out when the oven beeps at me (always 1 min under the recommended bake time. Always.), I'll end up with the ooey-gooey deliciousness I love.  "Semi-homemade" is okay, too.  I have no problem looking up ways to make a batch of cupcakes from a box taste better -- for example, replacing the egg and oil portion with a small carton of plain greek yogurt to make a healthier, more moist cake.  Changed my life.  But from scratch?! Let me waste hours and hours of time stirring and measuring and and whipping, just to remove these muffin tops from my oven?! I wanted ooey-gooey cookies! Should have just gotten a back up of the break and bake. Argh.

But every once in a while -- and I do mean, a very long while -- some sort of combination of urgent cravings as well as an overly-confident belief in my abilities will come over me, and I'll decide that I'm going to bake something from scratch.  Which always starts with a semi-expensive visit to the store (because I don't have a single one of the ingredients needed.  Except eggs. And maybe butter -- oh. Expired.), followed by a ridiculous amount of time and mess, and inevitably ending in failure.  

EXCEPT.  This one time.  When I made apple pie.  And I don't even like apple pie that much.  But this one? Delicious.  Which is why I feel like I need to share this recipe.  Did it take a long time? Yes.  Have I made it since? Absolutely not. Was it worth it?  Very much so, particularly when eating the first slice, still hot, covered in a huge spoonful of vanilla ice cream.  Mmmm. 

So here is the recipe I used for the pie, and here is the recipe I used for the crust. There are a couple different crust options on that page, but I went with the basic one and did the lattice just as the apple pie recipe said.  I did take some pictures to document the fact that lazy Debbie was indeed baking this pie...

Slicing apples...so many apples.  I ended up not using a couple of them.

Making the dough

Pie crust

Final Product

So you can see all that sugar on top on the final product...this is where I thought my whole pie was going to end up being trashed.  This is the sugar mixture that was supposed to be a little more liquid-y so you can pour it over the lattice top into the pie.  Mine ended up globbing up, so I just mixed some cinnamon with the apples and tried as hard as I could spooning the mixture on top.  It ended up making a really nice sugary crunch on top.  See?  Magic recipe.  Perfect for the July 4th holiday!