A Peach Pie in Disguise for #Halloween by Lucy Burdette

LUCY BURDETTE: I remembered making a wonderful pie ten or so years ago for wonderful writer Nancy Pickard, whom we’d invited to teach a class in Connecticut. The recipe came from Whole Grain Baking by King Arthur flour. It was a peach pie with a crumb crust, and oh so good. Since the peaches have been so amazing this year, we froze 6 cups of them to use in a future pie. At the last minute, I added some blueberries that were otherwise going to go unused. This is not actually a Halloween recipe, but I thought you could admire John’s pumpkins and gourds from the garden while reading about my peach pie in disguise.

Ingredients for the filling

6 cups of peeled and sliced peaches, either fresh or frozen

Other fresh fruit as desired

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon almond extract

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon water.

1/4 cup cornstarch

Ingredients for the topping.

2/3 cup of old-fashioned rolled oats, pulsed in the food processor.

1/2 cup oats, left whole.

1/2 cup brown sugar, either light or dark 

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

The King Arthur recipe also had a fancy crust which you can look up in their book. I had a crust in the freezer left over from my experiment in tomato pie. So I decided to make it easy on myself and use that.

Defrost the crust, but keep it cold.

For frozen fruit, place it in a large pan and heat to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to break up the bigger pieces. Stir the nutmeg, cinnamon, and almond extract into the peach mixture. In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch, the lemon juice, the water, and stir this until smooth. I found there wasn’t enough liquid to smooth out the cornstarch, so I added some from the pan of fruit. When this is smooth, stir it into the peach mixture.

To make the topping, pulse the first batch of oats until it’s partially broken up. Add the cubes of butter and pulse this until distributed. Mix in remaining oats plus the vanilla and the pinch of salt.

Remove the crust from the refrigerator and place it on a pan covered with parchment. (You will thank me for this later!) Add the peach mixture to the crust. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the top of the pie.

Bake at 375 until the topping is golden and the filling is bubbling, about 50 minutes. You can see that mine was a big mess! Serve this with either ice cream or whipped cream or nothing.

But oh so good!

For some serious Halloween posts, you can check out the cheese ball dressed as a pumpkin or Alison Roman's carrot cake or even a fancy stuffed pumpkin. Happy Halloween!

USA Today bestselling author Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mystery series including A POISONOUS PALATE and A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS. Join her mailing list right here.

Book 15 in the Key West series, THE MANGO MURDERS, is in bookstores now!

The trade paperback edition of A POISONOUS PALATE is out now! 

And the trade paperback edition of A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS is out now!