For Mom and Apple Pie

I love getting into the fall season. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and Thanksgiving is great too. We'll miss you, summer, but time goes on. Time to shelve the suntan lotion and sand shovels (feel free to keep making summery trifles, I won't tell) and go apple-picking. What will you do with all those apples? How about the all-American classic: Apple Pie! For cooking, you're going to want cooking apples, like Granny Smith or Empire. Apple pie goes back to at least 1381, which was so long ago that English itself has changed so much you can barely understand this recipe. So really, things aren't "as American as apple pie" so much as they are "as apple pie as America." If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe. The apple pie has long been a pop culture icon. A 1903 newspaper article proclaimed: "No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished." That 1903 article was in response to a public debate that still looms large on the world: Apple pie or ice cream? Luckily, we can

have both. Tradition in my family says apple pie goes with vanilla ice cream, but others say pecan ice cream. Some people refuse to ever eat it with ice cream. Some say "apple pie without cheese is like a hug without a squeeze." How do you eat apple pie?