I’m sitting when I should be doing…but I’m thinking…is that doing?

It’s Pi Day.  The celebration of 3.14159265359, originally the ratio of a circle’s ratio to diameter. It now has various equivalent definitions and appears in many formulas in all areas of mathematics and physics.  Pi is also known as Archimedes’ constant.  But then you didn’t need a mathematics lesson and it is not the pie I’m thinking of.

For some reason or another, my mind goes to food by default and one of my favorite foods is pie.  Pizza Pie…”When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”  I don’t know Dean, more like when it hits my taste buds that’s amore.  I could eat pizza every day and twice on Sunday…even Hawaiian Pizza which is not even Hawaiian.  Extra pineapple, please.

Not just pizza, Shepard’s pie, my grandmother’s chicken pot pie, my bride’s tomato pie, “Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.”  Ah, no, but just about any savory pie will do.

Or sweet pie.  Key lime even if it’s Mrs. Edward’s, my momma’s cherry cheesecake which is more a pie than cake to me…and her butterscotch pie.  Bourbon Pecan pie with Jack Daniels.  Patti LaBelle’s sweet potato pie is my way of introducing more vegetables into my diet.  Sweet potatoes are not vegetables you say?  Drat…okay a way to introduce more starches into my diet then.

I don’t know where the colloquial idiom “as easy as pie” came from, it’s first use is traced back to a yarn written by a teenaged Zane Grey in 1886.  That would have made him fourteen at the time.  Writing must have been “easy as pie” for the young writer.

What I do know is, eating pie is easy, making pie is not…if it involves a crust.  Making a flaky crust seems to be an exercise in futility…for me.

I’ve tried to bake pies and have had some successes.  Outdoor grilled pizza pie and a grits pie I tried because it sounded interesting and well, I’m a Southerner who loves grits.  I’ll attach a recipe at the end, but it cheats.  It uses a prebaked crust.  As easy as pie doesn’t work for a homemade pie crust.  I know, I tried.  It wasn’t easy as pie, it was awful.

How awful?  My puppy dogs wouldn’t eat it and they ate just about anything including cat poop.  Who knew you just couldn’t add sugar to a biscuit batter and roll it out thin?  The damn pie swelled and swelled forcing blackberries out onto the baking dish I had thankfully placed under it.  Who knew you had to work the batter when it was very, very cold?  Who knew I should use all-purpose flour instead of self-rising?  I know now and it is useless information.  I’ll cheat and get a prebaked crust if I ever feel the motivation again.

I feel the need to celebrate Pi Day with a pie…but then I’ll celebrate anything with a pie.  I’m not sure which pie only that it will be bought not homemade.  Why go to the trouble when Mrs. Edwards or Patti LaBelle can do the cooking.  Maybe an “all-everything thin crust pizza” pie topped off by a slice of key lime or buttermilk pie.  As easy as pie.  Just climb in your car and go get one.

A Paula Dean Grits Pie recipe https://www.pauladeenmagazine.com/grits-pie/

“When the moon hits your eyes….” is from the 1953 song, That’s Amore, sung by Dean Martin and written by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Jack Brooks.  For some reason, I heard it a lot and I’m not Italian. 

Don Miller writes of a variety of topics.  You can find him at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM   

The image of the key lime pie is from https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/key-lime-pie-recipe/