When the thermometer drops and sweater weather begins I start craving a different type of food. No longer does my body want lean cuts of meat and barely cooked vegetables with maybe a good piece of raw fruit for dessert. In fall the amount of fats and sugars that I crave goes way up.

Maybe it’s a natural response that my body has to the fact that winter is coming. Maybe it’s something that’s embedded in me from years of cultural food experience. Maybe it’s just me longing for foods that were too hot and finicky to cook over the summer. In any case, this week pancetta and pie took the places of honor on my meal roster.

It started with a pack of ::gasp!:: premade tortellini that I had purchased and wanted to convert into dinner and it ended with the creation of a great sauce. I had some extra pancetta from my rabbit au vin, a basket of yellow onions, and some thyme that really needed to get used up before this cold, dry weather kills it. Turns out that when you toss all these together you get a ridiculously tasty sauce. I named if Pancetta and Brown Butter Sauce and wrote down the ingredients as soon as we had finished eating.

Then there was the pie that I made for my geeks (sorry guys, but you are my geeks, and I love you and revel in your geekiness. It makes my geekiness seem less out of place in the world.) I’ve been gobbling up the apples from the farmers’ market. So far I’ve shared the recipe for baked apples, and soon I’ll post the apple sauce, apple crisp, and apple butter recipes, but last night it was apple pie that was on my mind. I wanted a pie like the ones you see at state fairs. A pie that has a domed top crust just to contain all the apples stuffed inside it and tastes tart and sweet and spicy all at once when you eat it. I wanted it to be moist, but I didn’t want it to drip all over when you sliced it. I wanted to create the perfect apple pie.

I didn’t manage this all just last night. I’ve been tweeking my apple pie recipe for years, ever since I was forced to recall the Fanny Farmer recipe from memory by a friend and got it just a touch wrong. The resulting pie was much tarter than the usual version and I decided that I liked it. Two years later the final product is done and boy it is pretty. And tasty! It tastes just like the pie I’d been dreaming about for years and is definitely my biggest success in the realm of baking. As you can see in the top picture, Brynne and I made a nut tart as well as the pie, but that recipe isn’t ready for publication just yet. Give a year or two of tweeking and I’ll have it down just perfect.