Cool cherry cream, nice apple tart/I feel your taste all the time we're apart - Meatless Monday

I'm not always in observance of Meatless Monday, though I do try for at least one other meatless night, particularly if we miss it on Monday. Yesterday I spotted some lovely, huge portabello mushrooms and thought we'd have burgers made with them today. I marinated them for a few hours in a mixture that included soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, white wine vinegar, a bit of canola oil and spices. To go along with the burgers, I made oven fries. I think potatoes are often too wet to get properly crispy when I make baked fries so I sliced up the potatoes a few hours in advance and let them air dry for a few hours before baking. It gave them a sort of chewy texture and I liked it.

Since I had leftover custard sauce from yesterday, I thought I'd make an apple pie today to go with it. This was a total cheaters apple pie. I don't apologize for using the Jiffy pie crust mix, because I love that stuff (and you do still have to mix and roll it out, so it's not completely cheating). As an aside, add a little sugar to that mix and you have a basic pate sucree. When strawberries are in season, I make a cobbler/pie hybrid with slightly sweetened pastry, strawberries and blueberries that is soooooo good. Anyway, I do apologize for using a can of apple pie filling. I can't even remember why I had a can of apple pie filling, but I needed to use it, right? I doctored it up with some cinnamon, nutmeg and just a little grating of lemon zest. The texture turned out to be all right in the finished pie, not nearly as mealy as that canned stuff usually tastes. I sprinkled some raw sugar and dotted some butter on the top crust, just to add a little richness to the pie. All in all, it was pretty good.