Me Oh My I Love Pie

Pie, pie, me oh my,
Nothing tastes better, wet, salty and dry.
Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I’ll come to your place every day if you’ve got ‘em.
Pie, me oh my, I love piiiiieeeeeee
The Pie Song from the movie Michael


Forgive me father for I have sinned. Oh wait, I’m not catholic. Ok, um, how about a blanket I’m sorry. What the heck am I apologizing for? I am apologizing in advance for eating every single piece of the chocolate pie I am about to make. You see this pie is sinful, it’s decadent, it’s not even made yet and I can already tell you I’m going to eat it all before it is done cooling.

My grandmother passed along to my mother who passed it along to me the recipe for chocolate pie with a big ole topping of calf slobber on it. What? No, no dear not REAL calf slobber. It is what you would call meringue. It is dee-licious. I like my sweets. I love cookies, I adore cakes but honestly I just melt over pies. Bake me a pie and well… I’ll eat it.

Umm...Chocolate.....

My mother made her rendition of my grandmother’s chocolate pie. The recipe was written on the back of a yellowed stained envelope that was lovingly kept in the old Betty Croker Cookbook on the top shelf of the spice cabinet. She would get out the ingredients and start baking. I would intuitively know this and come running home from where ever I might have been hiding. Then I would stand on a stool and either stir the chocolate or turn the mixing bowl as the meringue was being whipped.

Wait! I want to lick the bowl!

I am not prejudice. I eat all kinds of pie and my mother made just about every type. The one that she didn’t make though was a pecan pie. She left the pecan pie to my great uncle, Tio. Tio would spend all day baking pies and bring them to my mother’s on special occasions. Thanksgiving he brought a pie. When my sister would come home from California he would bring two. Which leads me to a story, you didn’t think you were going to get away that easy did you?


Ummm Pecan

My brother, his wife and daughter met me at our parent’s house in anticipation of my sister’s arrival. I was living on the gulf coast at the time so I brought twenty pounds of shrimp. Tio, brought a couple of pecan pies and my brother brought the Dr. Pepper and his wife brought her appetite. My sister arrived and there were great revelries that followed with much feasting, drinking and conversation. We were all so full of seafood that none of us wanted desert just then. Hey give me a break, we ate almost twenty pounds of shrimp, we were stuffed! We cleaned up the dishes, watched old movies and talked ourselves out. We all retired to our sleeping pallets to dream of pies and other goodies waiting for us in the kitchen.

The next morning we made breakfast and started discussing what we were going to do for lunch. You see in our family our days revolve around what the next meal is to be. There is usually a lot of planning and plotting and then in an instant it has been consumed and it’s time to start the next meal. We were planning our lunch when the subject of pie came up. My sister decided that her breakfast choice would be pecan pie. Hey don’t knock it until you try it. She went to the refrigerator and started rummaging around for the pie, only it was not there. She went out to the garage and looked in the extra refrigerator, it wasn’t there either. She looked in the pantry, the cabinets and double checked the refrigerators. She even went out to daddy’s shop and looked in that refrigerator only to find nothing but dog food and cigars. She was at a loss so she started asking around, “Hey did you see that pecan pie?” No one had seen it since Tio brought it in the day before. Well almost no one. There sat my sister-in-law with a confused look on her face and she meekly said “I ate the pecan pie.” What? The room went still and quiet and my sister asked “You ate a piece of the pie?” My sister-in-law blushed and squeaked out “no, I ate the whole pie. It was really, really good.”

You see it is a curse. My family has been cursed with the pie curse. You marry into my family and you will be destined to at some time or another eat a whole pie, by yourself. It might be early morning or in the dull glow of the oven light at midnight but you will catch yourself with a fork in hand eating directly out of the pie plate. You will lie to yourself and say things like “I’m just going to straighten the edge so it’s even. Oh, geeze now I have to eat this edge. Ooops now it’s uneven over here” It gets out of hand that way. You eat a little off then it’s a little more and pretty soon you have eaten the whole thing.