Pie Story II

Pie Story 2:

The day before Thanksgiving I peeled the apples (all by myself since Mary was gone, sigh) and put together the apple pie. True, I cheated a bit and used a store-bought, roll-out crust. Meanwhile Russel was painting my room--a long-overdue-event--and he ran out of paint. So I put the pie into the oven and drove off to Lowe's to get the paint, giving Russel careful instructions to take out the pie when the buzzer rang, if it was a golden brown.

While I was out I decided to call him, just to make sure he heard the buzzer. Which he had. The pie looked perfect he said, and he took it out.

A couple minutes later, I realized that I would be delayed and decided to call him back to tell him to put the pie onto a wire rack, thus avoiding the heat condensation that may make the crust soggy. I explained all this to him and continued my shopping.

I returned home and walked through the door, with the delicious smell of apple pie wafting through the kitchen: I look over happily to see the apple pie. And I do see it, there on the wire rack, looking rather odd. Something is amiss, but my mind does not immediately register what is wrong with the pie; my brain struggles and balks, and then I realize it: Russel has slid the pie out of the pie pan onto the wire rack! I cannot believe it. I stare and blink and stare, and yes I squawk quite loudly and for quite some time.

Even though Russel's mom, in addition to his own wife and daughter, has made countless pies, he seemed to think that sliding a pie out of its pan had been a perfectly logical action, given my request, to put the pie onto the wire rack!!!!!!!!

The story does not quite end there. I slid the pie back into the pan, and frankly it looked better than you might have imagined were you to try the same thing. Then I tasted a little of the apple pie filling that had dripped onto the counter. It tasted . . . rather bland. Since I personally had made the pie and placed it into the oven, I couldn't figure out how Russel could possibly have done anything to affect the taste. Though that seemed to be the only plausible explanation. Then it hit me. I had added flour, but had forgotten to add sugar to the freshly sliced apples.

So I dumped the pie into a bowl, added the sugar, chopped the pie all up, and poured it back into the pie pan. It was destined to be so. Aaron told me the next day that Olive Garden serves something very much like it, called an Apple Crostata. Before serving, I added a few graham cracker crumbs and powdered sugar on the top, and it looked, well, fine-ish. It tasted fine-ish as well, not quite like a real apple pie.

(Pie Story 1 was 7 or 8 years ago when Shelby, our dog, ate an entire pumpkin pie, completely unbeknownst to us until we started looking for it sometime after dinner!--We found a pie plate on the floor earlier, but it was so completely clean, that it did not dawn on me until later that the pan had at one time held our pumpkin pie!)

Note: The picture above with the pie out of the pan, is actually the second time the pie came out of the pan. After I realized I would have to chop it up because it lacked sugar, I slid it out again to take a picture for posterity. I hadn't had the presence of mind to take a picture of it when I first saw it. I just hoped it would look something like a pie after I slid it back into the pan.