PIE STORY

After two large kettles of apple sauce, why not pies? Pies? You must be mad, insane, out of your mind. But it sounded so reasonable to me. So away we go.

“Make two,” Samuel said. Two?

“Who is the other one for?” I asked, thinking of who might be the best recipient.

Peeling, slicing, then peeling and slicing some more. When the bowl was full there was way more than enough for two, so it had to be three.

Mentally asking myself, do you really want to spend the day making pies? Sure.

But then the crust.

“Samuel, I’m out of flour,” I said, dismayed that there was exactly enough flour to make just one pie.

“OK,” he said, adding, “I’ll go get more,” already salivating for the imagined apple pie as images swam in his head more desired than sugar plums.

We don’t have sweets around much because I’ll eat them. Though losing my taste for sweet desserts or candy, there is not enough will power within me to resist. And lately, since becoming a calorie counting maniac, this endeavor was madness. Why didn’t I see it?

Happily rolling out crust after crust, it is an art, and one has to be in the right frame of mind. There have been times when it was too wet, or too tough, and just terrible. But this time? Perfection for all three.

One went to friends down the street, one for the freezer, and one for Samuel. And though he had already been to the store once that day for more flour, he swung by again arriving home with ice cream cradled happily in his arm.

“What! Ice cream?” I exclaimed.

Later than evening, Samuel came into the living room with a dinner plate. Not a dessert plate, a large dinner plate with an ample slice of the most perfect pie I’ve ever made swaddled and surrounded by mounds of white cold creamy ice cream.

Happy to have brought such sweetness into Samuel’s life, I went to bed also satisfied that I did not indulge. That lasted until a bit after 8PM, then it was all over. And unfortunately it tasted so good another piece might as well go down. (with ice cream too)

Mentally counting the calories while trying to sleep on a bloated stomach the truth was bitter. Those kitchen trips were a day’s worth of calories. The truth was bitter, but that pie sure was good!