Using Up Pie Crust Scraps

As a little girl, I would love to help my mom and grandmas cook in the kitchen and one of the "specialties" I had was to take leftover pie dough trimmings and sculpt them into elaborate shapes for "cookies" or as Lilliputian pie shells for jam fillings. Neither tasted particularly good, but I had a lot of fun working the dough onto my own cookie sheet.

Now that I'm making gluten-free pie crusts and the time spent shopping for and money spent on various types of flours is so dear, I was eyeballing the scraps I had trimmed off two pumpkin pies I was baking the other day. The pie crust recipe I use is Bette Hagman's Featherlight Vinegar Crust (for recipe see my previous post for Apple Sour Cream Pie) and it is wonderfully flaky and has a nice flavor. I then spotted the bag of apples that had gone instantly mealy from the time I purchased them to their arrival at home. Voila! Apple crisp! The pastry scraps got fluffed around with a fork and I had an apple crisp topping. Double frugal score to boot!

Here's sort of a recipe:

6 past-due apples, peeled, cored, sliced
Brown sugar
Butter
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Pastry Scraps, fluffed up

Butter a small baking dish (1 quart will do). Toss apple slices with brown sugar and some cinnamon and nutmeg to taste. Sprinkle on pastry scraps, some more brown sugar and dot top with butter.

Bake at 350 degrees for 1/2 hour.

Everybody ate it up, especially when I served it with our dinner, along with the pumpkin pies. Two desserts with dinner was a hit with the kids and I was pleased they were ingesting a vegetable and fruit on the same plate.