Today’s George Washington’s birthday ,and what better way to celebrate than by making a good old apple pie as American as George himself.

Or, even more tailored to the Father of Our Country, make a cherry pie in honor of little boy George, who, the legend goes, chopped down a cherry tree and then ’fessed up to his father when confronted. The story has since been disputed, but cherries still stand for our Founding Father’s belief in honesty and selflessness.

There’s no better time to bake a pie, and it’s a skill that too many young Americans haven’t learned to do.

For many members of the baby boom generation, the kitchen was a place where Mother drudged for hours to get dinner on the table before Father came home from work — and then spent another hour after dinner cleaning up the mess. A place, in other words, to be avoided.

For their children, generations X and Y, who now are in their 20s and 30s, the kitchen was where the microwave was. What else did you need to know about it?

But in recent years, as those boys and girls have grown into adulthood, they have been bombarded by an onslaught of food-related TV shows, magazines and celebrity cookbooks, all dedicated to mastering the finer points of the kitchen. Suddenly, cooking became chic. And in the nervous nesting age of post 9/11, it suddenly became not only trendy but necessary, satisfying to the soul as well as the stomach, to know how to cook.

Friends are awed, dates are delighted and the world becomes a more interesting place if you know how to feed yourself and others in relative style, with a minimum of pain and trauma, and without resorting to takeout.

There are many fundamentals to learn: dicing and chopping, braising and broiling and roasting. But at this time of year, you should learn to bake a pie.

You don’t need homemade pie to survive, of course, but there are few things you can create in the kitchen that will make you feel happier to be a cook. And what better party trick than to take a pie?

Yes, we know, your mom or grandmother had the pie-making thing down, and every pie turned out picture-perfect. And yes, we know it seems complicated, and that some of you have tried recipes that required you to chill the shortening, chill the water, chill the dough before rolling it out, and it was a hassle.

But if you think about it, humans have successfully been making pies since medieval times, in dark dingy huts and low-ceilinged cellars, where ice water and refrigerators weren’t exactly abundant.

So relax. Here, we introduce you to guerrilla pie-making, with illustrations.

No chilled shortening, no icy water, no refrigerated dough or marble rolling pins. No hassle. And it will work #* even if your pies aren’t perfect the first few times, they will be delicious, and they will be yours.

So keep trying. Grandma started out patching her pie crusts, too.

We follow a basic recipe that uses shortening, although other versions rely on a mixture of shortening and butter, or on butter alone. Here, we make an apple pie. This dough recipe, however, makes enough dough for a cherry or any other kind of 9-inch, double-crust pie and can be doubled if you’re feeling extra ambitious.

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