Birthday pies and presents

First of let me preface this by saying that if you meet someone named Sarah, the odds are in your favor that she'd make a good friend.  I came to this highly scientific conclusion based on the fact that I am currently friends with no less than six Sarahs.  All of them are delightful.  Recently we celebrated one of my Sarah's 34th birthday.    This is one of the Sarah's that lived with Daniel and me for a few years (yes, there were even more than one Sarah as housemates).  She keeps threatening to leave us for Portland, or as I like to call it, the lesser Durham.  Because this might be the last birthday we get to celebrate with her for while, I wanted to make her both a special birthday meal and present to remember us by when she's far away and wishing she was back in Durham.  Note:  All people who move away from Durham's awesomeness at some point in time wish they hadn't.

I've been taking a jewelry class at NC State's Craft Center, and so I thought I'd use the studio time to my advantage and make Sarah a necklace.  It's design is pretty simple.  I did an applique pendant with a house shaped cutout over a backing where I had inscribed the two addresses we had lived at together.  I'm terrible about remembering to put my art up on the blog in addition to my recipes.  Mostly it's because a lot of my pieces end up as presents, and either forget to take a picture before I give it to them or I take the picture and then forget to put it up after I give it to them.  Sarah actually saved me and took a good picture of it herself and posted it on Facebook.

At her request, I also made an apple pie, but not just any apple pie, Tyler Florence's Ultimate Caramel Apple Pie.  This pie is not, I repeat, not for the faint of heart.  I asked my sister to make it for me once and I'm still not sure she's forgiven me.  No apple pie is particularly easy unless you're dumping in a can of pie filling.  However, this is simply the best apple pie I've ever eaten.

Normally I type the recipe up again and mention what I changed and such, but this thing is a novel, and it's best to stick to what he says.  It tastes better because of the extra effort and ingredients (yes, the red wine does make a difference, so does the vanilla bean).  Plus, the website has the added benefit of a nice print function, something I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate here yet.  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/the-ultimate-caramel-apple-pie-recipe/index.html

I will mention one thing that tripped me up when I first started making apple pies.  I was not aware how high you had to pile the apples to get a normal sized pie in the end.  I kept skimping on the apples in the recipe because my pie was full, but apples cook way, way down.  If you're making a deep dish, the before picture should be even higher.  Here's my before and after of the pie at a side angle so you can understand just how much apple pies bake down.