Pie Crust Cookies

When I was little, my family and some of our friends did some volunteering at a living historical farm. As a girl who loved Little House on the Prairie, it was a dream come true to wear dresses and pinafores while chasing kittens in a barn or swinging on a rope swing across a creek. Even chores like milking cows or stuffing lumpy hay mattresses seemed like fun to me and my friends. To us it was just an elaborate game of dress-up.

Being little girls, one of our main tasks was to help the farm’s cooks prepare a lunch for all the volunteers. We’d peel endless piles of potatoes, churn butter, and roll out biscuit dough in the sweltering heat of the wood burning stove. Even though it took all morning to make lunch and it could get unbearably hot on a summer day, I loved the chatter and resourcefulness produced by all the women crammed into that kitchen. There was just something communal and deeply satisfying about it. I like cooking, probably more than the average person, but there’s still many a meal time I wish I could tap into the enthusiasm I had during those summers on the farm.

I get nostalgic about those days every time I trim the overhanging crust off a freshly rolled pie crust, for the farm is where I was introduced to pie crust cookies. The crust is one of my favorite things about pie and it’s a shameful sin to just throw away the leftover scraps. You’ve already done all the hard work of making a pie, so consider this the pie’s gift to you. Sometimes I’ll even make 1.5 crust recipes just so I can have more of the flaky, cinnamon sugary goodness. At our house, the pie crust cookies are gone long before we’re able to slice up the pie.