Saving Your Leftover Thanksgiving Pies

Did you, like many of us, make or buy too many pies for Thanksgiving? Have you eaten and sampled and re-eaten until you don’t want to eat that pie again for another year? Well, before you toss them out, how about freeze drying some of those leftover desserts? We simply took the extra pies: razzleberry, pumpkin, lemon meringue, cherry, and apple crumble and mashed each one separately so the crust and the filling looked more like a dough. (Note: You can also do any of your cream pies too, like chocolate silk, banana cream, or coconut cream. But ours were eaten too fast.) We scooped the dough-like mixture using a small ice cream scoop/melon baller and placed them on our parchment-lined freeze dryer trays and placed them in the freeze dryer for a standard cycle to let it do the rest of the work. When complete, these will be yummy cookie-like treats that can be eaten now or stored for the next time you're craving your favorite Thanksgiving pie. Below are a few of the finished freeze-dried pies: apple crumble, pumpkin, razzleberry, and a few cheesecake bites to fill the trays. We put some in canning jars and the rest in mylar bags. Not pictured, but taste-wise, lemon meringue was our favorite. Delicious!