My Potato Soup is Terrible But My Pie Is Delicious

The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie: Recipes, Techniques, and Wisdom from the Hoosier Mama Pie Company by Allison Scott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our theme for Thanksgiving this year (other than Indian take-out, because that’s a given) was Pies, and thanks to every other patron of my local public library also taking a particular late-November interest in pie cookbooks, The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie was the only one that had made it out of my holds queue and into my house by Thanksgiving week.

So this is the book that three novice pie bakers paged through to determine our Thanksgiving pies!

I settled on Peanut Butter Pie with Chocolate Ganache. The kid picked Cranberry Chess Pie. My partner decided on Raspberry Pie, but then the kid was all, “...nobody’s going to make pumpkin?” so for love of his daughter, he condemned himself to also making a second pie, the Pumpkin.

We’re all notably basic cooks. As far as I know, the kid has never once so much as turned on the stove in her college apartment’s kitchen. I cook pretty often, but something usually goes wrong, and that something is me. For instance, I have attempted potato soup twice within the past year, both times using well-regarded recipes, and ruined it both times, even though I have the suspicion that potato soup is the easiest and most basic of soups. My partner at least will follow a recipe, but generally as ham-handedly as it’s possible for one to follow a recipe and still have it regarded as following the recipe. It’s like his reading comprehension tanks as soon as he starts reading recipe instructions. Which I feel like is a really fair thing to do, because for some reason recipe instructions are often so inscrutable!

I’m happy to report, however, that by Thanksgiving Day, the three of us had created four perfectly passable, perfectly delicious pies!

I did not believe that the graham cracker crust I made was going to hold together like a store-bought crust, and I still don’t understand how graham crackers plus sugar plus butter equal a functioning crust, but it did, indeed, hold together quite nicely. I don’t know if the peanut butter filling was my favorite--I somehow wanted it to be more peanut butter tasting, I guess?--but the chocolate ganache was AWESOME on it, and it made a ton. I heavily drizzled it on the peanut butter pie, and then dipped homemade rum balls in the rest, and now I’m going to have to do that the next time I make rum balls, too, because that was freaking delicious.

The all-butter pie crusts came out awesome, too, as did everyone else’s pies. We feasted so hard on them Thanksgiving morning that I spent the rest of the morning with a sugar headache, and to be honest, as soon as that felt better I went back for more pie.

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