Apple Pie - recipe review

Just a very quick post on my all time favorite apple pie recipe - the one I begged my mother to make as a child, and the one that's better than all the others I've ever had.  I always assumed it was some magical family secret that would someday be passed along to me.  Well, I suppose it has been passed along to me, in the form of "it's just the recipe from the Joy of Cooking - follow it to the letter!"  By the way, it's also important to use the right apples - my favorite combination with this one is Jonagold, Golden Delicious, and Gala.  I ended up with that once because it was slim pickings at the grocery store, and it turned out extremely well!

Seriously?  The Joy of Cooking??  How embarrassing that my obviously unrefined taste buds prefer this to any of the many fancier apple pies I've come across!  And yet, this recipe holds up.  It is delicious.  Months ago, when I made it for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, I brought the leftovers to my coworkers.  My favorite of the compliments I received was "you can come live at my house and make me this pie every day." 

I always do this pie now with a lattice crust, because I just think it makes a prettier pie, and because I think it's easier than preserving the integrity of a giant piece of pie crust on the top.  Plus, since everyone thinks it's ten times harder than it actually is, it wins you lots of points.

Please do give this recipe a shot - if you're an apple pie fan, it's the best!

Sidebar:  I use the Joy of Cooking for a lot of recipes, along with Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and a whole lot of Martha Stewart's recipes.

I'm kind of a moron in that, by the time I got married, I could make an excellent potatoes au gratin dish (thanks, Martha Stewart!), but I had to look up how to hard boil an egg (Mark Bittman, you totally saved my butt!).  I feel like the combination of the three sources I have cited here works very well to help fill in the holes in my culinary knowledge while giving me more advanced stuff to try out as well.