The Magical Pie Nightmare

This sounds so snobbish, but… I'm sort of against store-bought pie.  Its just really hard to bring myself to eat it.  One giant store-bought pie showed up at our house last week and Caiden kept bugging me to have some and here were my difficulties with that.  First, it was giant and I was imaging what would happen when I cut one little piece of pie out of that giant thing and then the rest of it would inevitably go to waste.  I wanted to see if anyone else would want to take the pie off of our hands.  Second, after a while, I wasn't too sure if the pie was still good.  Third, after a while after that I wondered what was wrong with the pie that no mold was growing on it or anything.  What kinds of steps were taken to preserve this thing anyway?!

But even with all my reservations, I felt kind of bad about the whole pie thing and I finally confessed to David, "I don't know what to do! Caiden wants some of this pie, but I don't really want her to have it and I'm not even sure if its good or not.  What should I do?!"

That's when he encouraged me to go with my gut and get rid of the pie with the assurance that "You guys can just make your own little galette or something."

Well, to me, those words were freedom, liberation, empowerment!  Did he just tell me to make pie? Yes, he did!

So the next day, I picked up my little fools from school and asked them what kind of pie they wanted to make.  When they couldn't agree, I thought, "What the heck; it's fall; it's a beautiful day; I made enough pie crust; why not make two pies?"  So I let them each choose what kind of small pie they would make.  In my head they would be little pies, but when Elliott decided to go with pumpkin it felt weird to picture throwing out half a batch of pumpkin pie filling so we made a whole pumpkin pie and a little apple galette for Caiden.  It was so fun to whip up some special desserts without having a special occasion or any good reason to do it.

We all were looking forward to dessert after dinner, everyone, that is except for David who is basically allergic to all forms of pie.  And that's exactly when the magical aura of delight and whimsy around our pie making adventure came crashing down around us me.  David had snuck away to the couch and I grumpily ordered him to take part in witnessing our ingestion of delightful pie whether he likes pie or not. He would not be exempt from this experience, thank you very much.  And then weirdly, something went awry with my children.  They are defective.  It turn out, they don't really like pie very much and to my horror and devastation they turned up their noses at my beautiful, flaky, buttery pie crust.  On one side of the table was a weird group of urchins who only like the pie fillings, but even then only gave it a "thumbs in the middle," which means halfway between good and bad: on the other side of the table was a handsome, but pie-grinchy, old man who detests what is inside of the pie, but delights in the crust, commanding me to put cinnamon sugar on plain crust for him next time.  In short, nobody really appreciated the pie except for me.

Oh, to have someone to appreciate pie with… Will the day ever come?!  I am halfway excited that there will be more pie leftovers just for me and halfway scared of there being more pie leftovers just for me. I know I will eat them all.

And so that is how it came to be that Elliott, Caiden, and even me, had made from scratch a pumpkin pie and apple galette.

But no one was happy.  The end.