Pies With Grandma

My mom freely admits that she never really learned to cook till after she was married, from her mother in law.  This has resulted in my Irish/Manx mother cooking like a Hungarian, for the most part.  My grandmother was an excellent baker, famous for her poppy seed rolls. Even when she was older and could no longer go easily up and down stairs, my mom would bring the dough up to her room so she could assemble the pastries for the holidays.

this is my grandma, unfortunately I don't have a
picture of her cooking

My mom is also admired for her baking, especially her pies. She makes a low sugar apple pie for all the family events that is so popular she makes it on a deep cookie sheet so there is more to go around. She is also the only person I know who still makes chocolate pudding from scratch. Everyone admires her never soggy pie crusts.

My husband is the family chef, but except for bread, which he is quite good at, he isn't fond of baking.  The problem is that he likes to cook by taste, which isn't possible when baking, where one has to follow directions and hope for the best.  He has never been able to make pie crusts turn out.  Last summer he advised the Girl, who likes to bake, that she needed to have her grandmother teach her how to make pie crusts.  So this fall and winter we spent several days at Grandma's house, learning the art of pie crusts.

First Grandma used some already prepared crusts to show her how to roll the crusts out and bake them.

 Also she showed her how to make chocolate pudding to go in it.

Next time they made the crusts up from scratch and froze them for future use. Then Grandma went to Florida with her sisters for a month.  The next week Dad wanted to make pot pies so she rolled out the crusts she and Grandma had made and helped Dad put them together. The pot pies were a big success.  But the real test came last week when her father wanted to make pot pies again, and she had to make them from the beginning, all by herself because Grandma was still out of town.

I was at work and didn't witness the actual creative process, but everything turned out just great.

I would show you what the filling looked like
but I got to the fork before I got to the camera.

The Girl is happy because she now knows how to do something no one else knows how to do and can brag about the superiority of her pie crusts.  My husband is happy to finally have a decent supply of pie crusts. Grandma is happy to finally have at least one child in the next generation learn this essential skill.  And I am happy that the Girl has this one special connection between her and her grandmother, this thing that the two of them alone know how to do. 

She doesn't understand its true value yet, but she will someday.