Thanksgiving Pies

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.  I like cooking as much as eating so it is the perfect opportunity to do both.  In my own and my wife's family, we always have a range of pies to eat for Thanksgiving, and there are always some good selections to choose from.  I enjoy pies much more than cake in general, and a couple years ago I decided to try my hand at making a Thanksgiving pie.  I like fruit pies so the pie I decided to bring as my signature Thanksgiving pie was a raspberry chiffon pie I saw on the cooking show, America's Test Kitchen.  I love raspberries, so does my mom, and it is a fairly involved pie to make.  It was right up my alley.

The first thing I had to figure out was how to make a crust.  I am aversely opposed to ready-made crusts; in fact, this morning while the kids were watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, someone showed how to make a chocolate pecan pie, and I immediately tuned out when he said he was using a ready-made Pillsbury pie crust.  I found a recipe online that said it was the Marie Callender recipe so I decided to give it a go.  I have been very happy with it, and I have gotten better at making it every year.  This year was my most successful attempt.  I was discussing the recipe with my mom, and she was surprised to learn that the recipe uses an egg yolk in it.

 The next step is the raspberry layer.  To make it, the recipe calls for a combination of frozen raspberries and fresh ones.  The frozen ones are cooked while adding pectin and sugar.  Afterwards, using a fine mesh strainer I strained out all of the raspberry seeds leaving a very delectable raspberry goo.  The fresh raspberries are then folded into the goo to complete the first layer.

 The next layer is the chiffon layer.  It consists of heavy whipping cream, cream cheese, raspberry Jell-O mix, and a little raspberry goo taken from the previous step before the fresh raspberries are added.  It's whipped until stiff and spread generously over the first layer.

Add some homemade whipped cream on top of that, some more fresh raspberries for garnish, stick it in the fridge to let everything set up, and it has become not just a fairly complicated and fun cooking project, but it is also one of my favorite Thanksgiving pies to look forward to eating each year.

This year, I decided to be a little ambitious, and I volunteered to bring another pie.  One of my favorite pies ever is lemon meringue.  Between making my crusts, the fillings for my raspberry chiffon pie, 12-hour butter horns, and gravy from the turkey drippings, I had bit off more than I could chew (excuse the food pun).  I had found a recipe online at food.com that sounded like a good lemon meringue recipe.  It had received good reviews from other users, but amidst everything else, I had to be bailed out by my wife.  Apart from the crust, the credit for the lemon filling and the meringue go to her, and it turned out wonderfully.  The duo of pies complimented one another perfectly with their sweet and tart flavors.  I am almost convinced that marrying the two to create one pie with raspberry and lemon would be a little slice of heaven.