Me? I have trouble with that. I can’t seem to get it right. I start off with the same ingredients my Mom used, but somewhere along the way something always goes wrong. If I’m lucky enough to make it to the stage of actually getting the mess into a pan, it usually ends up too thick and doughy on one side and burned to a crisp on the other side. Or it just takes a shortcut straight to the wastebasket before the oven was preheated to the proper temperature. I am very very good at hitting the trash can, but if it hit the floor, there was more satisfaction in that anyhow.
Maybe it’s because I don’t wear a cotton dress when I try. Maybe it’s because I don’t even own an apron. And maybe it’s because I don’t have the patience to wait it out until something is second nature to my fingers. Maybe it’s because I wake up and rush to a job and rush home to a houseful of chores that never seem to get done. And maybe it’s because there was not enough love in the house to enable creativity in the kitchen.
Whatever the cause, it seems to me that I am doomed to continue failing at pie crust 101. And, by the same token, relationships seem to be in the same ballpark as pie crust for me. I just can’t seem to get it right. One is too thin, one too doughy, one is too tough, one too delicate, one is without the proper consistency and another just had no possibility at all and was tossed away.
I don’t have a lot of patience or faith in the whole process. It seems to me that it should happen magically and without effort on my part. It seems to me that it should be something of fate rather than something of hard work. I don’t want to work hard at this. I want it to flow, like the water in a fast river. I want it to just be and just shine and just sparkle with it’s own qualities. However, this pie is a long time baking. Ha ha ha ha
One time I had it turn out perfectly. It was beautiful. It was everything I could have hoped it would be, both flaky and tasty, pleasing to the pallet and the eye at the same time. Oh, it was lovely. But it was so good that I ate it quickly and didn’t save any for another day. It went too fast. And unfortunately all the other pies that I have tried to make since that day of perfection have fallen sadly short of the immortal blue ribbon pie. They seem to be doomed from the get / go. They seem to all fall into the fast lane to the trash can. Poor things.
And so, let them eat pie. What the heck does that mean, anyhow?
