If life gives you peaches, make peach pie

My mom picked a gazillion JUICY donut peaches from our backyard. They were all extremely ripe and even after giving them to our church, friends and friends of friends we still had a whole lot left. As usual, my mom looked to me and asked, "can you bake this into something?" CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! PEACH PIE!!! yes, I know SUPER exciting... !! but actually the REAL excitement comes from the fact that my best friend, Loretta Wang, spent the day experimenting with food photography with me. We were able to combine our interests as I baked and she took pictures! Her work is truly awesome and you should check out her blog! 

Back to the pie, so these peaches are not as sweet as your typical yellow peach and they don't have any tartness. As a result, I added more sugar than I normally wood, and I squeezed the juice of half an orange to give it a little tang! For the crust, I used a basic pie crust recipe and I had extra crust left over to make empanadas for the next day! 

Peach Pie Filling

Ingredients:

6 cups peaches pealed and diced/sliced

1/2 cup granulated white sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

3-4 tablespoons starch (I used 4 tbs because it was very juicy)

Juice from 1/2 orange

1 egg yolk

Directions:

1. While the pie crust is being chilled, Combine peaches, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Make sure all the peaches are covered with the spices.
2. Add starch to the peaches, if the filling is too soggy (like mine was) drain some of the liquid so that it looks like peaches with shiny glaze, then squeeze the orange over the mixture and set aside.
3. Preheat oven at 400 degrees. 
4. Divide the pie crust dough into two equal portions. On a lightly floured surface, flatten and roll out the crust until it is about 1/8 inch in thickness. 
5. Place the flattened crust in a 9-inch round and trim the edges leaving 1/2 inch of excess dough along the edges of the dish.
6. Pour the peach filing into the pie shell. 
7. Repeat step 4 and cover pie with additional crust and seal the edges by pinching and rolling the bottom crust over the top. 
8. Brush the crust with egg yolk and bake for 25 minutes at 400 degrees. Reduce heat to 375 and bake for an additional 25-30 minutes, the crust should be slightly browned and the filling bubbling!

**If you'd like to do a pretty lattice cut the flatten dough into 1/2 in strips. Spread them out in one direction (north to south) 1/2 an inch apart. Fold every other (north to south) strip back and place a strip (east to west) over the unfolded (north to west) strips. Unfold the (north to south) strip and repeat. It's like construction paper weaving we all did in kindergarten!