Easy as pie

When I was little, I would come home from school.... wait, that's a different story. I get lots of mileage out of it, clearly. But seriously, folks. When I was little, we didn't have birthday cakes for our birthdays. We had birthday pies. I don't know how the tradition started, actually, but the result is that I'm not a big fan of cake and instead I'm a huge fan of pie. I'd wager that for the rest of my life, my favorite dessert will be apple pie. It's as simple, and as complicated, as that. You see, apple pie is easy to come by. Look in the bakery of any grocery store, and you're bound to find an apple pie or ten. But the sad fact of the matter is that good apple pie is impossibly hard to find. Scour the planet, if you will-- I know I have. And in all my years of searching, I've yet to find an apple pie that tastes as good as my father's or my grandmother's. When we find ourselves at a restaurant that serves apple pie, inevitably I order it. And John shakes his head, knowing that it won't live up to my exacting apple pie standards. It's a tricky combination of pie and apple filling, you see, that has to be met. The crust needs to be sturdy enough that it doesn't fall apart at the mere appearance of a fork, but it also needs to be flaky. The apple filling has to be flavorful, but has to let the apples speak for themselves. The few times that I've had such a pie in restaurants have gone down in Emily History. I talk about them to this day. There was one time, years ago, at a restaurant in my hometown, where I had a delicious piece of deep-dish apple pie. Who knows what else I ate, frankly. The pie was all that mattered. Then, more recently, when John and I visited Portland, I had a slice of apple/blackberry pie at McMenamin's Edgefield that nearly killed me with its deliciousness. And, actually, that's it. Apple pie. It's a tricky mistress.