Smoke gets in my eyes. And my pie.

Ever since my friend Vanessa brought this pie to a party a few weeks ago, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It was a.maz.ing. Truly. It’s got a bottom crust, then apples, then a crumb topping, then pecans, and THEN CARAMEL. HELLO! It’s the best of both worlds..pie and crisp! And then I found out it was from the Pioneer Woman. I have read her blog and made some of her recipes and was underwhelmed. I didn’t get why people were so gaga over her. Until now. Guess I should have been making her desserts instead of Cauliflower Soup!

So, not wanting to just make a pie and have it sit around for me to pick at for days on end, (although that didn’t stop me from making Paula Deen’s Pumpkin Gooey Butter Cakes last week…) I was waiting for another party I could take it to. Enter: Church Chili Cook-off. Perfect! I signed up to bring a pie and had been anxiously awaiting Oct. 30th for weeks. I would read the recipe practically every day in anticipation. Dorky? Sure. I’m not the only one who likes to just read recipes, am I??

Last week I bought all the ingredients and yesterday I started to make the hallowed pie. Starting with homemade pie crust. This pie is serious business, folks. You can’t use a frozen pie shell, no way Jose. So with the pie crusts chilling in the freezer I go about my business of peeling and slicing the apples. With my apple peeler/corer/slicer, of course. How anybody makes anything out of apples without one is beyond me. I put the whole thing together in my 9” pie plate and pop that sucker in the oven. I wait the 25 minutes and take the foil off of the crust and then hop in the shower while it finishes baking.

I know I don’t have much time so I quickly hack the hair off my legs and run some soap over my body and turn off the water. Derrick and the girls are downstairs. I hear the dreaded screeching of the smoke detector. I throw a towel on and run to the kitchen and there’s a little bit of smoke floating around from some juice dripping onto the oven floor. Nothing major. I fan the air around the smoke detector until it stops beeping. Time to get dressed!

But it starts beeping again.

So I fan around it again, but this time I can definitely smell more smoke and there’s a definite haze in the air. I tuck my towel back in and head back to the kitchen. Smoke is POURING out of the oven. Pouring. All I can think about is the smoke poisoning my poor pie is getting. The stupid towel won’t stay up so I just say screw it and let it fall and I run around the house like a mad woman opening every door and window I can, while trying to fan the air around the smoke detector to get the stupid thing to stop. Which it doesn’t. We changed the batteries in it just the night before (go figure) so it was working on all 9 volts. At this point I’m coughing and my eyes are burning and I’m hoping I never have to experience death by fire. Especially naked.

I turned off the oven and took out my pie, which still had a good 15 minutes of baking time left. I ditched the nuts and just poured on the caramel and hoped it didn’t taste too smoky.

And then I found my towel again.

I know what’s next on my shopping list: a deep dish pie plate. And now I need to make this pie again…a redemption pie.

Sure hope my neighbors enjoyed the show!