We’re spending Thanksgiving with my husband’s Aunt Helen and Uncle Ed and their family. It will be exciting, because Erik’s cousin Walter and his wife Margaret are expecting their first baby, the first child of the next generation. When I say expecting, I mean expecting to have it any minute, maybe even today! It’s a boy and they’ve decided to name him Henry and I love that name and I’m glad that they aren’t keeping it all a big secret.

Thanksgiving is the only meal of the year where I want pure tradition, the nostalgia of Grandma’s stuffing (yes, cooked inside the bird, I’ve never seen anyone get sick from this, have you?) and the sweet potatoes with the marshmallows and cranberry sauce not from a can and lots and lots of gravy. But this year, I’ve been directed to make an apple pie, and only an apple pie. That means I’ve got to put all of the meaning of Thanksgiving into this one dish. All of my nostalgia and wishing to be with my family and my memory of all the Thanksgiving meals I’ve ever made and ever eaten and also that vision of the ideal Thanksgiving and the ideal apple pie. Whoa, I’ll stop right there and come back to earth (and forget about the time that we caught my brother Paul on fire). It’s just a pie and I should just try and make a good one.

I’m using a standard pie crust and I have decided to go along with Melissa Clark whose New York Times article last week suggested that a 70/30 combination of butter and lard would yield a perfect flavor to flakiness ratio. What to put inside of the pie is the big question. I’d love to be like the people in Cook’s Illustrated and embark on a quest for my version of the perfect apple pie filling, but I’ve only got about two hours to put this together and get myself washed, primped and dressed in an outfit that is the perfect ratio of casual and chic, maybe I’ll follow the 70/30 Clark formula in this arena as well.

As is often my first impulse, I turn to history, books and the internet to find out what I should be doing with my food. The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook from around 1390 has what I think is the first written recipe for apple pie in English. “For to make Tartys in Applis” doesn’t mention sugar, though it includes figs and raisins. The only spice it calls for is saffron. I am intrigued by the idea of the bright yellow color this would give, but I’m not sure that my husband’s family would like it, so I’ll stick to the usual cinnamon and brown sugar and maybe a little lemon juice to perk it up. www.epicurious.com lists 112 recipes for apple pie, but I don’t have any apple juice and I’m opposed to putting molasses in my filling and I don’t want any sort of streusel topping or nuts or other ingredients fooling around with my apples while they are cooking inside of their crust. Vanilla extract? That’s one of the ingredients listed for “Classic Double-Crust Apple Pie”, which sums up, I think, what I am looking to make, but without the vanilla extract. I think that for sources, I’ll just use what I remember from Grandma, my mother and my brother Paul. Peel and core the apples, then root around in the cupboard to make sure I have cinnamon and brown sugar. I think there’s a lemon in the refrigerator. If there is, I’ll put in a little lemon juice. But not any zest as the Joy of Cooking recipe suggests. As far as I’m concerned, the only really big question is the thickener. Flour or corn starch? Tapioca has no place with apples in my mind, though I’d use it with berries or peaches. I like the suggestion of using a little of both, because I like the way corn starch makes the filling taste in your mouth, but I don’t like the gel-like consistency or the clear looking appearance. It’s too much like the stuff that comes out of the can. Maybe I should just go with all flour? I’ve got to get over this test kitchen lust. I’ll just write it down as I go along, bake the thing and take some pictures.

The crust

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 14 Tbs. butter, chilled, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 8 Tbs. lard, chilled, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
• 1/4 cup ice water (or more if needed)

Place flour and salt in a food processor and pulse briefly. Add butter and lard and pulse again until mixture forms pea-size bits. Add water a little at a time and pulse until the whole thing comes together in a mass. Divide dough in half and form two disks, wrap with plastic and refrigerate for at least one hour and up to 3 days before rolling out.

The filling

• 9-10 apples, I suggest a mixture of 3 different varieties, I used Cortland, Granny Smith and Gala
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 Tbs. flour
• 2 Tbs. corn starch
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon (or more to taste)
• 1 pinch salt

Mix ingredients together in a large bowl, taste for flavoring. You may decide you need more sugar or more flour, depending on your apples.

Assembly and baking

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Butter a 9 inch glass pie dish. Roll out bottom crust and place in pie dish. Place in freezer for ten minutes. Roll out top crust. Place apple mixture on top of bottom crust and top with top crust. Cut off excess dough and crimp edges. Optional: wash top of pie with egg yolk mixed with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Slash top of pie in several places in order to allow steam to escape. Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then reduce temperature to 350 degrees. Bake for another 45 minutes to 1 hour until pie is golden on top.

Conchiglione al forno, Baked stuffed shells

Making ricotta to use up some leftover milk was really fun and the results were great with just a little strawberry jam drizzled on top. To make a meal with it, I decided on stuffed shells. This kind of dish is found in southern Italy. Conchiglia means shell in Italian and the ‘-one’ ending refers to something of larger than normal size. I like shells better than lasagna for ricotta because when you cut into a shell, the cheesy filling oozes out and when you take a bite you can really taste the cheese. The ridges on the shells also hold the sauce really well. For food like this, I like to keep it really simple and not add lots of extra ingredients or too much oil or cheese.

The sauce

• 3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, minced
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1 container Pom? brand chopped tomatoes (or any other canned tomato having only tomato as an ingredient)
• 1 6 oz. can tomato paste
• 1 Tbs fresh, chopped oregano or 1 tsp dried
• 1 Tbs fresh, chopped basil
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

The shells and filling

• 1 package jumbo pasta shells, cooked according to package directions
• 16 oz. fresh ricotta, or buy some at the store
• 16 oz. shredded mozzarella, divided
• 8 oz. shredded parmesan, divided
• 1 package fresh baby spinach, zapped in the microwave (in the bag) for 1 minute
• 1 egg
• 1 pinch nutmeg
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Make tomato sauce: heat oil in pan over medium heat, saut? onions and garlic until translucent, add next seven ingredients, bring sauce to a boil, turn the heat to low and simmer with lid on for 30-40 minutes.

Make filling: in a food processor combine ricotta, 1 cup mozzarella, 4 oz. parmesan, and next four ingredients and pulse to combine.

Assemble: spread 1/2 cup of sauce in bottom of a large baking dish (or two small ones), spoon filling into shells and arrange them tightly together in the dish, ladle tomato sauce over the top, make sure that all of the shells have some sauce covering them, sprinkle the remaining mozzarella and parmesan over top.

Bake: 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes and let cool 10 minutes before serving.

Serves 4-6.

I hate to waste food. I almost always finish everything on my plate (my brother, Paul, calls it plate-clearing syndrome) and I try to turn leftovers into things that we really want to eat. Last weekend, our friend and former colleague, Ames, and his partner, Yumiko, came up from the city to see us and brought along their two year-old son, Yugo. They also brought a half gallon of organic milk for Yugo’s bottle, but he didn’t drink much of it. He was mostly busy running around and going up and down the stairs and being adorable. Because we are a strictly skim milk family, I looked at the carton of milk on Sunday afternoon and wondered what I could cook to use it up. I’d been wanting to try making cheese, so I decided to find a recipe for ricotta. Normally ricotta is made from the whey that is leftover from making other kinds of cheese, like mozzarella, so it’s not technically a cheese, but a bi-product of cheese making, an idea that I love because it uses up something that would otherwise be wasted. You add an acidic liquid like lemon or vinegar and simmer it until the stuff starts to coagulate. This is the second time it’s been cooked, hence the name ricotta, which means ‘cooked again’ in Italian. You don’t need to have whey to make ricotta; you can just use milk, so that’s what I did. We’re going to eat some of it with honey and walnuts or maybe the strawberry jam we made this summer and the rest of it will go into stuffed shells with some parmesan and spinach and be topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella.

Ricotta

• 1/2 gallon milk
• 3 Tbs lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt

Put milk, lemon juice and salt in a pot, turn heat to medium and heat the mixture to 195 degrees. Put the lid on the pot and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Line a colander with several layers of cheese cloth and ladle in the curd. Let the mixture drain for about two hours and then gather up the ends of the cheese cloth and tie them around a wooden spoon or some other long straight utensil (I used a metal skewer). Hang the ricotta over a pot and place the pot in the refrigerator for one or two days. Empty the liquid from the bottom of the pot from time to time. Use the ricotta within a week or freeze it for up to six months.

Reading about food is one of my favorite pastimes. I subscribe to several food magazines and inevitably buy more of them at the grocery store. Erik calls them “food porn,” and I think he’s right. Pornography, from the greek terms for prostitute (porni) and writing (grafi), represents the body in order to arouse. Reading about food gets you in the mood, brings on the appetite and gives you new ideas, new cravings. One of the things that I love to read about, but rarely ever try are restaurants. I finally came to the conclusion that in this arena, I need to stop just reading about them and start trying them. I’ve made a list of the restaurants to go to in the next year and we went to the first one last weekend.

Prune was opened in 1999 in the East Village and started serving comfort food before 9/11, before we started looking for retro pumped up versions of macaroni & cheese. It’s a small bistro owned by Gabrielle Hamilton. I’m not going to give you the restaurant critic’s review of the place. For that you can read, “No Pretense, Well Hardly Any,” at the New York Times. I’ve been wanting to go there because of the kinds of adjectives that are associated with the place: cheeky, retro, homey, simple, French.

We started our meal with cocktails, I had a Manhattan and Erik and our friend, Melinda, had Vodka Stingers (vodka with a little cr?me de menthe, shaken with ice, strained and served in a martini glass). With the drinks came a tin box of pappadam. As a first course, I ordered the monkfish liver on buttered toast; - this is the one item that reviewer after reviewer has written about. I was not disappointed. Erik had grilled prawns, the largest I’ve ever seen at a restaurant and Melinda had curried lentils with grilled spring onions, which didn’t inspire me when I read the menu, but which were perfectly flavored, the kind of thing that will make me try a new way of cooking lentils. I’m still thinking about them, maybe because I only had a taste. For the main course, we all ordered the lamb shank, which was cooked in parchment. It was a little tough, I think it could have used some more time in the oven, but the flavor was great and the juice in the bottom of the dish was rich and thick and coffee colored.

Too bad there was no bread or anything else to soak it up. We used our spoons and slurped it down. With the lamb shank, we shared a side of fresh greens simply dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. With the food, we had a good bottle of Spanish red. We ordered dessert, of course. My wine biscotti with a small serving of port were great, Erik’s pot de cr?me had more pure chocolate flavor than in any I’ve ever had and Melinda’s upside-down peach cake was a gooey, caramelized, crunchy, fluffy confection that I’m going to have to try and replicate. I was able to get the waitress to confirm my suspicions that the buttermilk whipped cream (6 parts cream to 1 part buttermilk) had orange flower water in it. The service was exactly as described in the reviews. Our waitress was funky and smart and had perfect timing. Another waitress heard me mention that I would have liked my Manhattan served on the rocks rather than straight up. She instantly picked it up and brought it back to me in a great heavy tumbler with lots of ice. It’s true that the place is a little small, but I was quite happy to be squeezed into the corner of the room with a view of the kitchen to my left, the bar only a few feet in front of me and the long line of diners rubbing elbows to my right.

So did the experience match reading about it? You’ll have to try it yourself. Come on, expand your horizons.