Warm Apple Pie . . . Not Always A Good Thing?

Apple pie is my favorite fruit pie.  Well, sometimes it is a toss up with cherry, but mostly I will choose apple pie.  As mentioned, my mother, in my opinion, made the very best apple pies.  Even her crust was the best.  When she would make pies, with the leftover dough, she would just bake the strips of the crust and we could not eat them fast enough.  They were so flavorful and flaky.  (This is the part where everyone starts thinking about baking them with a little cinnamon and sugar.  We never used the left over for that, we would just make pie crust cinnamon rolls.  We loved the crust strips the best.) I guess that I failed to post her pie crust recipe when I posted the pie recipe.  I will have to remedy that soon.

I often made her apple pie recipe.  As life became more hectic with the babies, I would buy pre-made crusts instead of taking the time to make her recipe.  This obviously drastically changed the taste of the recipe and it was no longer even close to mom’s recipe.  I say close, because no matter what I did, hers always tasted better. I found a cheat, though, that seemed to help.  I started making her apple crisp recipe!  Wes and the children loved it.  They even at times asked if I could just make a pan of the “crisp”.  Haha.  I did make them a small pan once and they found that it is not good without at least a bit of the fruit, though.

I would always store whatever desserts that I made in the oven.  I did not refrigerate them and I did not just leave them on the counter.  There is probably some “gasping” now at the thought of not refrigerating them.  If I made them today, I would refrigerate them but I did not then.  They usually did not last long enough to worry about refrigerating them anyway so that is why I never did.

My husband worked for a trucking company initially.  This was before he started his construction company.  I had made an apple crisp along with supper before he left one night.  When he returned home he was so excited because he “found” it in the oven.  He had figured we finished it off, but checked the oven anyway and to his delight there was some left! He grabbed a plate and fork and served himself a huge plate.  He was pleasantly surprised that the pie was warm!  How exciting for him!  He had no idea how I had done that but he grabbed a second huge piece.  He figured that I had recently served it and had warmed it up.

Suddenly, he was not so excited any longer.  As he was eating this second, huge, warm piece, and was all smiles, he noticed something.  He started picking at it.  There appeared to be this white, fuzzy stuff on the pie.  He was not happy at all.  Mold had grown on the crisp.  He wondered when I had made it and why this had happened.  He began to feel a bit nauseated but just because he was thinking about it, not because it actually made him ill.

Well, after some investigating he solved the mystery.  Someone, possibly me, who knows, had left the oven light on.  Wes made a point to tell me all about his “warm, apple pie” and to explain to me that I had left the crisp in the oven and with the light on.  He stated that with the light bulb on, I had created a thing like an Easy Bake Oven.  He said that this had created an environment to grow mold.  He was a bit upset. We all found it funny.  He seems to be getting a bit irritated with the fact that we find him and the things that happen to him to be so humurous but that just makes us laugh more.  We just cannot help ourselves.  He is so funny!  He was sort of gloating saying that he was getting to eat the rest of it and we were not going to have any.   Was that some sort of justice? Also, we all were very happy. We were happy because he had the bad crisp and saved us from it.  Haha.

That was the day that I stopped keeping desserts in the oven and started refrigerating them.