These crisp fall like days are calling for comfort food and autumnal dishes.  Now that Storkbite is staying up later and later, it’s hard to muster the energy to be creative and well fed.  I decided to “take the day off” yesterday and stay home to knit and make apple pie.  Storkbite’s Grandma came last month with a load of apples from the organic farm in Indiana and I still had apples in cold storage that needed to be processed.  Is it a Midwestern thing to melt cheddar cheese over a slice of warm apple pie?  If you haven’t tried it, you should do so.

Goat Cheese Lasagna

I was uncertain how this would turn out; however, I must say that I knocked it out of the park.  Not only was it easy and created in shifts, it was comforting on a chilly evening.

I used Barilla flat lasagna noodles.  Layered lasagna noodles with bechamel (1/4 cup butter melted with 1/4 cup flour, add 2 1/4 cups milk and bring to a boil, simmer until thickened), cooked ground turkey, sauteed yellow and red peppers and goat cheese.  There was no particular order to the layering, it was kind of a mess actually.  Once the dish was full, I added the remaining bechamel and some shredded parmesan cheese.  I baked it for about 20 minutes until golden brown at 375.  It was so warm, melted and delicious. I’m having left-overs for lunch now!

Apple Pie

Lattice top apple pie is a fall treat. This one got souped up with dried bing cherries, golden raisins and pecans.  Simply make a pie crust (look below if you actually want to do that!) and then add your mixture of cored quartered apples, raisins, cherries and nuts together with 2 tbs. of flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon and the juice of 1 lemon.  Turn it all together and fill your pie shell.  Weave a pretty lattice, paint it with butter, dust it with sugar and bake it for about an hour at 350 until golden brown.

Serve to husband / boyfriend / partner in the evening a la mode for unexpected results.

Pie Dough

This is the secret family recipe:

  1. 2 cups flour
  2. 2/3 c. frozen lard
  3. Pinch of salt
  4. 6 - 10 tbs of ice water

Combine flour and lard in a large bowl with forks or a pastry cutter until it forms pea size bits.  Add salt.  Add ice water a bit at a time and combine until it forms a ball.  This takes time and you must be careful not to over do it or it becomes tough.  Be gentle and go slow.  Lots of love makes a better pie crust.  Don’t even try to substitute butter or shortening.  It’s not the family recipe if you don’t use lard.