“A hundred years ago, when pies were often eaten at breakfast as well as at supper, many American housewives baked a dozen or more fruit pies every week.” This is a stunning statement from that great cookbook, The Joy of Cooking.

Reading it a few years ago I laughed in surprise and shared it with my husband, which was a mistake because now he often says, “Where’s my pie?” or “How are all those pies going?” But today I did get one of my twelve-pie quota completed, a fresh apricot pie complete with a latticed, woven crust. It looked so good coming out of the oven all bubbly and golden that I had to take a video of it. Check out the relaxing pie video at the bottom of the post.

We have a lovely little apricot tree that came with our house. All the apricots came ripe while we were away for three days romping at the beach and laying about reading. So when we came back from the classic New Zealand Summer weekend there was our carefully netted tree with half of the apricots rotted. It had been unusually warm over the weekend and off they went. The morning was spent picking and sorting our crop and deciding what to do with what was edible but damaged. Using my IPad and a recipe app I was able to find a fresh apricot pie recipe, grabbed some premade pastry from the freezer and before you know it I was away in domestic pie world. I opened the good, old Joy of Cooking cookbook that I brought with me from America for the details of how to do a lattice crust. There was that quote again, twelve pies a week.

I don’t make twelve fruit pies a week or even in a year but today I have made one and a video and finally posted to my blog. Not bad I say. This housewife is more of a Joy of Living kind of gal and I feel really good about that.