Lazy Fall Saturday

Fall is officially upon us. It's been gray and rainy, with a chill in the air, for the past few days. It's been nice to pull out the sweaters, slip on the corduroys, and snuggle up with a cup of tea.

After doing some pro bono work in the morning (keeping an eye on the police at an anti-war march), and slogging through some Civil Procedure, I rewarded myself with an apple pie.

I think the most difficult part about making an apple pie is deciding how to slice the apples. Growing up, we had one of those apple-corer-slicer-peelers, which was always the highlight of apple season for me. I'm used to thinly sliced apples for pie, but the cookbook (yes THE cookbook) said to cut the apples into 1/8ths. I thought those slices would be too big for eating, so I went ahead and sliced each apple in half, excised the core, and sliced the apples thinly, like an onion.

Tossed with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice,and a dusting of flour, those babies were ready to go.

After I trimmed the crust, and got the pie in the oven, I had a lot of leftover dough. I squeezed it all back up into a ball and rolled it out into a rectangle. I brushed some egg white on it, then generously sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, and tossed on some nutmeg and allspice. I rolled it up and put it in the oven with the pie. 20 minutes later, we had a nice little snack of cinnamon bites.

While the baking was going down in the kitchen, I snuggled up on the study chair with the first sleeve of the Minimalist cardigan. It was nice to be back with the familiar moss stitch, after the brief foray with the Ribbed Lace. The kitten has adopted the chair as her very own, so she was a bit put out to have someone else sitting in it. She took out her anger on the ball of yarn, at first. But then she just sat next to me and watched, not even going after the needles! What a good kitty.