I do not bake often. In fact, the only baking I've ever done consists of chocolate chip cookies and out of the box brownies (the cookies are quite tasty though).
I've never baked pies because there has always been someone around who can actually do it a lot better than me (my grandmother, mother, sister and now Mandy).
A couple of weeks ago, refrigerated pie crust was on sale, so we bought a box just to have around.
So for some reason this week, I got it in my head that I wanted to make a pie with the ready-made crust (taking the hardest part of pie-making out of the equation). I somehow settled on making a pear pie. Pears are sorta in season. So yeah.
The recipe was fairly straight forward. It had me just pour the sugar/flour mixture over top of the pears once they were in the pie crust instead of pre-mixing. I thought this was a little weird, but I followed the directions anyway.
We were pretty impatient and wanted to eat pie, so we only let it cool for about 45 minutes. The resulting pictures show that it hadn't really firmed up yet and was ridiculously wet. Subsequent pieces have been great.
I thought it was a little too sweet the first day also, but I actually don't think I'd change anything in the recipe.
Well, the first pie didn't kill anyone (yet), so maybe I'll attempt another with a greater degree of difficulty in the future. Ideally I'll try my hand at some pie crust, but no promises there.
Pie Filling:
5 Large Pears (I think I used Bartlett)
1 Cup Sugar
1/4 Cup Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Lemon Zest
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/8 Teaspoon Salt
2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice (drizzled on top of the pears and sugar mixture)
2 Tablespoons Butter (cut up and thrown on top of the sugar mixture)
