Apple pie with pecan crust

I was asked to make an apple pie for Thanksgiving and decided to try out something that I have been thinking about for a while, creating a crust using ground nuts in place of some of the flour. Pecans seemed to be the nut that most complimented apples so I used ground pecans.

First I roasted 200 gms of pecans until they were just becoming fragarent.

Then I ground these in my small food processor until finely ground, but stopped before they started to turn to pecan butter. I kept out a few for decoration.

I combined this with flour to make up about two cups

Pastry - enough for a very large pie plate or 2 smaller ones.

• 2 cups of flour and ground nuts
• 3/4 cup of butter or shortening
• 2 tablespoon of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of salt.
• 2/3 cup of orange juice or enough to hold it together.

Add the sugar and salt and combine well, then rub or cut in the shortening/butter, until you have the texture of course bread crumbs.  Then add the orange juice, just enough to hold it together, so do not  add all at once, and you may not need it all.

Warning - this is not an easy dough to work with, but it will be made easier by wrapping in plastic wrap and holding in the fridge for an hour or so.

Roll out just larger than your pie plate and gently roll it around the rolling pin and lift it in.

For the filling, I combined about 8 apples peeled and chopped with 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 1/8 cup of ground cinnamon and cooked it until the apples were just starting to collapse.

I then very carefully folded the pastry over the apples and baked in a 350 oven for about 40 minutes.

This was a very rich pie and went well with some vanilla ice cream, but a small piece was big enough for me as I am really not much of a dessert person but the pecans did give a rich nutty flavour to the pastry and it screamed fall.