Before I abandoned you (online) to spend time with you (in person) the better part of the last two months, leading to premature but rightly deserved obituaries*, I spend about half of the fall I was in town for obsessed with Dutch apple pie, and a significant amount of that time trying to understand what it was and was not. There seems to be a divide wherein American home cooking sites largely refer to a Dutch apple pie as a deep-dish apple pie (sometimes, but not always, in a cake pan) with a crumb topping and Dutch (or Dutch-sounding; I do not speak the language** so am making an educated guess) cooks use a more cookie-like dough that’s cross-crossed on top with a shiny finish. Fortunately, around this time I remembered that one of my son’s good friend’s mom is Dutch and she was happy to set me on the right course: yes the lattice is shiny, the dough is sweet and more buttery tasting than its American counterpart, the end result looks more like a cake, and please remember to send all samples over.

From there, I was off to the races… sort of. First I had to watch a lot of videos of home cooks making it and, as no two recipes precisely agreed, basically just throw my hands in the air and hope I could work it out in the kitchen. It does not always happen — figuring things out on an early go — but this time it did. I hope this is a good omen for the year to come, as my cooking wish list for 2018 could fill five calendars, and for you too: this is much, much easier than it looks.

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