Apple pie does not have to be complicated. You can slice apples, sprinkle with your favorite spices, pop them into a pie pan lined with a crust, dot with pats of butter, put the top crust on, and bake. Some apples break down more than others when cooked, but they are all tender and tasty, and there has never been any runnyness. No muss, no fuss - and delicious! Back when apples used for baking were often very tart 'wild' apples, adding sugar and making a syrupy filling may have made sense. We prefer the taste of APPLES, and do not care at all for apple 'fillings'. These days all the apples you are likely to find are plenty sweet without added sugar. The sickly sweet fillings can mask the wonderful flavor of the apples. A blend of apple varieties gives a wonderfully interesting and complex flavor to the pie. We avoid the newer varieties that are all 'sugar and crunch', and also avoid the non-browning GMO "Arctic' types. It is fun to try different blends of apples, but we never found a blend that did not work beautifully. It is fun to harvest drops from trees in the area that would otherwise go to waste, cut out the bad parts, and bake a pie!

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