I know- not a race report! But seriously fun. Krista had an afternoon free and I had lots of beautiful apples from the tree and the Julia Child book.
The Apples
Beautiful Gravenstein apples from the tree. We’ve set the scene and are ready to bake. Krista peels them while I make the crust, narrating what I am doing as if being filmed. The crust, is what Julia calls “short paste” or some such- it’s basically a sweet pie dough that resembles shortbread in texture and flavor. Since there are a lot of apples to peel I use the method of cutting hte butter into the dry ingredients with knives. It takes a bit more time than the food processor but works great and is easier on the cleanup.
The dough comes together nicely, and with addition of some cold water is fashioned into a disc and chilled until we are “ready to roll”. Meanwhile we have this opulent pile of apples ready to be tarted up. The apple slices get mixed with sugar, cinnamon and melted butter (mmmm). Before we can put anything into the oven we have to grease the pan. Julia says to use 2 tablespoons of butter for this, and we do. 
That’s a lot of butter, actually. Next time, please note, you don’t actually have to use this much, greasing your pan as usual will work just fine! Turns out all the butter in the apples melts into the apples, which also lose liquid and when you un-pan your tart you will have butter everywhere. I mean, yum, but some extra clean up there.
This particular recipe we are using is actually the upside down apple tart, which seemed the simplest one to make. So we put the apples and butter in the pan, rolled out the dough and put that on top. You bake the thing for as long as it says. I forget, I think maybe 55 minutes? So we had girl-talk and getting the table ready and washing some bowls and stuff and then we had a delicious tart! Yeah, so as noted before all the butter dripped out and we worried it might make the crust soggy but in fact this does not happen!
Getting it out of the pan goes like you’d think- you put the platter atop the pan and flip it over. Gingerly lift off your pan (easier if you’re using springform) and there you have it! (Angels singing) Not sure if you can see the steam rise or smell it in the photo, but boy was that a good smell. After it cooled for as short a time as possible, we served it as shown, for dinner, as it turned out, because no way are you going to eat vegetables and stuff if you can have this instead. Right? I mean, come on.
Gallery
American Gothic, Kitchen version:
Ok, now everybody smile:
