Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Billy Boy?

I used to be able to. I used to whip out delicious cherry pies with gay abandon.

Pie outside. Soup inside. NOT correct.

            And yet, my latest effort, in addition to the several earlier efforts, was more cherry soup than cherry pie. Now mind you, the crust was excellent—flaky and crisp and wonderful and of course created entirely by these two hands—but it contained not cherry pie innards but cherry soup.

            Is it disturbingly retro that I care so much about how my pie turns out? Am I some drooling Betty Crocker zombie?

No. (And let's face it, even if I were, I would deny it.)

This, however,  is a family pride issue. The women in my family DON’T FAIL at pie. Even my sister, whose feeling about cooking is that it’s something best left to the minions (and Santa, if you’re reading this, she would very much like a minion or two for Christmas), always WINS at pie. Before this cherry soup disaster thing started happening, I have always WON at pie. It’s encoded on my DNA. My mother is a GRAND MASTER of pie. My great grandmother was a JEDI MASTER of pie.

            A failure at pie besmirches my family name. It won’t be tolerated. Pies will be baked until the technique for a cherry pie in which the filling has thickened the way pie filling should is revealed.

In the meantime, K has his spoon ready.