The Pie Bar

Make your Pi day (March 14th) or Thanksgiving day an event to remember because you actually get to join in and enjoy it!

I love pies during the holidays, but a perfect flaky-crust-to-filling ratio is hard to achieve and sometimes I just don't want to take the time. This post showcases my favorite way to prepare and serve pies: the build-it-yourself Pie Bar.

The concept is easy: separate filling from crust and let people put as much or as little filling on their cooked cutout crusts as they want.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Place flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Stir together. Use pastry blender to cut the shortening into the flour until it forms rice-size pellets. Sprinkle in water one tablespoon at a time, mixing with large spoon or rubber scraper until flour is moistened and dough almost cleans the sides of the bowl as you stir.

Gather dough into one ball. Flatten on a lightly floured surface and roll out to about the thickness of the ridge of a standard canning lid. The nice thing about the pie bar is you don't have to roll out a perfectly round dough. Just roll it out to whatever shape it becomes.

Cut out pie shapes large enough for one reasonable serving of pie and place dough shapes on ungreased cookie sheet (though I almost always clothe naked baking sheets with parchment paper and recommend it if you've got some). Take a fork and generously stab the dough shapes to prevent dough bubbles. With this leaf shape, you could make your fork stabs look kind of like leaf veins.

Always be adventurous in your creativity. You can brush some of the dough shapes with cream or egg white and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar for crusts to be eaten without filling. Or grate some gruyère and press it into some dough shapes for serving your apple pie filling.

Bake shapes 10 to 15 minutes or until a golden finish just begins to appear. Remove from oven and let cool in pan 3 to 5 minutes.

Remove from pan and serve or carefully set aside on display plates for when it's time for dessert.

For fillings . . . there are countless recipes out there. Mostly I choose the easier routes for the Pie Bar because the concept was engineered for laziness. Make your cream pies from box puddings. A couple scoops of a variety of puddings on as much crust as I want is kind of how I imagine heaven will be. Somehow correlated. . . .

I still cook up my favorite fillings, just without the crust where possible. The only pie I still make in a pan with the crust beneath the filling is the pumpkin pie, because, well, pumpkin pie.

I slice up fresh apples, mix them with sugar, flour, and pie spices and dump them in a ceramic pie dish and bake the filling without crust at 425, stirring occasionally, until the apples are soft. I even once dared mixed in one can of pie filling to make my apples go farther. It felt like I was sinning. The filling was still delicious.

I line the parchment-shod bottom of a pie tin with pecans and dump in corn syrup, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla; and toss them both in 350 degree oven until set. Then I take it out, mix up the gooey filling, and put it in a separate serving bowl.

Open up cans and boxes and make the holiday easy on yourself for once. No one complained at my house to have this freedom of pie choice. But if you think about the past, no one ever really gave thanks for the two hours each of those twelve homemade pies represented either. So if you love making pie for the sake of making pie, choose your favorite one and take as long as you want to make that pie your PERFECT pie. Then take a load off and serve up the rest Pie Bar style and I promise your holiday will still make everyone happy.

The best part about the Pie Bar is that you get to break all the traditional pie rules! You can have apple-coconut-creme-with-chocolate-shavings pie if you want. You only limit yourself to whatever you put on the table. Toast up coconut shavings; cut out even smaller dough shapes and serve them as "top crust" garnishing; dice up fresh pears and caramelize them with some butter and toss in roasted pecans, because why not?; of course make the Oat Crumble Topping because that's good on anything.

And so you see, by looking outside the pie pan, the height of creativity jumps over the moon.

Happy adventures in the kitchen to you, and happy holidays too!