A Thanksgiving Pie to Freeze Instead of Bake

Pie is good. Pie with ice cream is better. So why not cut out the middle man?

Come next Thursday, when the turkey didn’t defrost quite as quickly as you hoped it would, the sweet potato casserole came out two shade darker than “golden,” and “light flurries” turned into a blizzard warning, the last thing you'll want to do is start on a pie.

Do as former Food52 editor Brette Warshaw’s family does every year and save your sanity by making a ten-minute pie up to a week head of time (that's today!)—while helping both pie and ice cream reach their full potential. Hello, Ice Cream Pumpkin Pie.

Here’s what Brette says about her family’s pie:

Growing up, my family hosted Thanksgiving dinners of epic proportions: thirty to forty guests, scary-giant turkeys, magnums of red wine, etc. I have many classic suburban-American memories from that time of my life, ones filled with gourds and golden turkey skin and braised cabbage and mashed potatoes. And yet I have zero memories of actual pie-making. Instead, a week or so before the party, my mom would head to Scoops, an ice cream shop the town over from us, and pick up a few pints of pumpkin ice cream. She'd go to Stop n' Shop, and get Nabisco Gingersnaps. And then we'd smash the Gingersnaps, mix them with melted butter, press it all into a glass pie dish, and fill the dish with the pumpkin ice cream. I'd eat the melty leftovers, the pie would go in the freezer, and that was it. Instant classic.

Brette’s mom, Sheri, calls it “embarrassingly simple”—but we can’t think of a better way to represent the best parts of pumpkin pie.

Scoops Ice Cream Pumpkin Pie

View Recipe

Ingredients

1 1/2	pints pumpkin ice cream
1/2	box Nabisco ginger snaps (crushed)
6 1/2	tablespoons butter (melted)

1 1/2	pints pumpkin ice cream
1/2	box Nabisco ginger snaps (crushed)

6 1/2

tablespoons butter (melted)