Can You Bake a Pie? Neither Can I

Any minute now Nathaniel and Emma will be arriving home from the Trinity Valley Exposition. They will rush to the kitchen, salivating in anticipation of the Chocolate Cream Pie that I am supposed to have baked in their absence. They will find instead the pie plate with Emma's perfect flaky crust in it, broken into giant puzzle pieces with several of them missing.

I ate them. I ate them out of sheer frustration.

Emma has been on a pie thing lately. I picked up a Joy of Cooking book for her that specializes in pies and tarts. She carefully followed their persnickety directions to a "T". It paid off. The dough was magnificent. I could tell the difference when I held it in my hands.

One of the steps is to put the pie crust in the refrigerator for 30 minutes after you get it fixed in the pan. Well, somehow when I jerked open the refrigerator door in desperate need of iced tea, the pie crust jumped out onto the tile floor. Did I mention that it was a glass pie plate?

The sound. . .oh, the sound was just awful! Horrified, Emma rushed to the scene, hoping that somehow the perfect flaky crust could be salvaged. It could not. Luckily, she had the dough for another pie crust in the refrigerator, waiting to be rolled out. She did that. I volunteered to bake the pie crust and make the filling while she was gone.

I baked the crust. It was so purty, like something out of a magazine or a Joy of Cooking book. I was so proud for Emma. Placing it on the stove to cool, I began adding the filling ingredients to a pot that I had set on a burner in preparation for the cooking step. I measured out a cup of sugar and put that in. I measured out 3 tablespoons of cornstarch and put that in. I measured out 1/4 tsp. of salt and put that in. Oh, no! I put the salt in the pie crust instead of the pot. Drat and double drat! Well, I thought that I would just tip that pie crust over the pot, and the salt would simply pour in. It didn't. It stuck. I tried to hold the still-hot pie pan with one hand and brush the salt with the other. Plunk. The whole crust fell into the pot. Nooooooooooooooooo!

So here I sit, dreading the coming scene. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa!