on ego and a pie

Sunday night, after a few hours of revising my short story attempt for Monday night's class, I started to panic.  Just a little.  I worried that the story didn't change enough from draft one to draft two, that I did too much telling instead of showing, that I had missed the boat on fiction because I chose to write a character who was real to me.  I read the 11 pages again and again and the more I read the more I panicked about having to hand it in.  So I took a break.

I went to the store and picked up apples and a Pilsbury pie crust* and came home and made three apple galettes for my office Pie Fest the next day.  I peeled and cored and preheated and folded and then cut tiny little leaves out of extra dough to make it pretty.  Forty minutes in the oven for each and they came out looking like something that should be photographed.

Except I didn't photograph them because by the time they were finished it was late, my draft wasn't ready, and I was just a little too far on the wrong side of cranky (ahem, crazy) to take out the camera.  And then when I moved them from the cooling rack to the tupperware for transport, they broke into pieces.  So I threw a minor temper tantrum.  I announced to Mike that I would not enter them into the Pie Fest the next day and felt pretty strongly that they were rotten no good ugly pieces of apple worthlessness.  When I took them out of their tupperware at work (I brought them in because, crumbled or no, they were still pretty tasty) I left them on the kitchen counter, two floors above the Pie Fest festivities in the conference room below.  There may have been some huffing and pouting as I walked away from them.

An hour later when people returned to their desk from the party they passed by the kitchen and saw my disaster.  Only it wasn't a disaster.  I hadn't looked at the galettes as I tossed them out of the tupperware when I got to work and somehow overnight the pieces had cooled and gelled back together.  What was left were two pretty pies that I had been too ashamed of to offer up to my colleagues at the Fest**.  People kept stopping by my desk asking why I hadn't brought them down and I had to fumble for a reason that wasn't, "well I had a mini breakdown last night when I thought they were ugly and was too embarrassed and angry to bring them to you all."  There's a moral there somewhere.  Maybe even several.

photo of Dinner A Love Story's galette

*sorry Dad, no time to make a homemade one.
** Mind you this was just a Pie party, at work, where very little culinary scrutiny takes place.