Pie Wars.

On occasion, I'll fall down the rabbit hole of watching Cupcake Wars or something similar on television.  And if you aren't familiar, the premise of this particular type of show is basically this:  create cupcakes using lemon peel, Captain Crunch cereal, and goat's milk.  Assemble using only a soup spoon.  Do it in just 45 minutes and then a team of judges (always inexplicably including Jessica Alba) will judge the creation.  Bonus points if you wear pink jackets and say the word "yummy" a lot. Picturing Jeanne and I in some sort of random pie baking war, the table of bizarre ingredients never gives me pause.  Jeanne lives for that sort of challenge and asking her to create a pie out of crushed cereal would leave her completely unfazed.  Rather, what would slay us is the time limitation in most of theses competitions.

Until today, of course.

Last week, I received a call from someone hoping to order 10 nine-inch pies for pickup today.  While we are closed on Mondays, I knew Jeanne and I would be at PJP Buttonwood for a better part of the day to prep for Roots and Blues this weekend, so I accepted the order for pickup at 9 am.  And while I remembered, I didn't think to remind Jeanne.  She arrived at PJP Buttonwood at 6:30 and started making dough and rolling shells...and when I arrived at 7:50 after dropping kids off at school, I asked her how much of the order she had gotten done.  And when she said "what order?", I knew we were in some serious trouble.

And look, I'm telling you now, you have likely never seen two people bake 10 pies so fast.  None of the pies were the same flavors, so we divided and conquered the list.  We fired up the ovens, put on our aprons, and moved quickly.  We didn't even talk, if that tells you how focused we were on our pie-making.  Every time an oven timer went off, well...

running late

And in the end, we had all 10 pies in the oven in 42 minutes.  And when the customer arrived to pick them up just as the last one came out of the oven, we told them that they likely had the 10 freshest pies in Missouri in their possession.  (But we never said the word "yummy" once.)

Which brings me to my final point...if there is a pie bake-off show, we would basically win.  We can make pie out of cellophane cheese,  Wheat Thins, and dried apples if we need to.  And clearly in 42 minutes or less.  Let's just hope Jessica Alba is ready for us.