D’oh!Mestic

When I was in college, I worked for the university paper as a designer and sometimes features writer. I remember one week in October of ’96, my features editor handed me a stack of CDs and told me to review them even though the slightly-deaf girl is probably not the best music critic on staff.

In that stack was Warrant’s comeback attempt, although they’d had the foresight to dub themselves Warrant 97, as if it were going to totally distract from that 80s hairband. The sound was like this: “Warrant? Us? Not us. We are not the ‘Cherry Pie’ guys, even though we totally sound like them. We are totally different and way more grungy. I mean, it’s 1996! Grunge is still totally in, right? Where’s my Aqua Net?”

I talk about this because I made a cherry pie and, because I am a predictable creature, I had “Cherry Pie” running through my head for the better part of twenty-four hours. I made a cherry pie. A sweet cherry pie. A sweet cherry pie with a lattice top — another first. Sing it, Warrant.

It was decent as my pies go. The filling was grade-A perfect and more or less the same recipe as my apple pie. I’m guessing that most fruit pies are a variation of sugar, lemon juice and corn starch enveloped in two flaky crusts. Nom. Pie. The lattice crust was my first and the strips were less rectangles and more rhombuses, but the Capt’n has since bestowed me with an engineer’s ruler for lattices lines straight and true, and I’ve promised myself to pick up a fluted dough cutter the next time I’m near Williams Sonoma.

Oh, and mental note — tent the pie with foil at the 25 minute mark, not the 40.

The Capt’n was totally down with the pie and then asked what I’d put in it. I rattled of the ingredients and then we discussed the ingredients list of canned cherry pie filling — two types of corn syrup, red dye #40 and a random acid to keep that red dye red — and how it took me about the same amount of time to make this pie from scratch that it would take the anonymous middle American to pop open a can of this cherry filling/topping concoction and slather it between two slices of pre-made dough. And while I know and you know that it’s not the case, not really, I still don’t understand why someone wouldn’t take the extra ten minutes and make the filling from scratch. It’s so much more satisfying, gratifying, and healthy. Cherries. Sugar. Lemon juice. Corn starch.

I mean, it’s pie. Pie, by the very nature of its being, equal a special occasion, because there is pie! Why not take that extra ten minutes? Why not? Why not?

The Capt’n reminded me that I’m an odd one in the world — that I care about taking the time out to do things from the base up, but that I tend to do things in a lovely, half-assed manner, that I’m not Martha Stewart and have no aspirations in that direction, but that he understands why my delicate kitty sensibilities can be thrown out of whack by the casual, slipshodness of everyday life, and that’s why he loves me.

Or at least, that’s what I think he was saying. His mouth was filled with pie.