The Pie That Wasn't Meant To Be

I decided to make a strawberry pie on Friday night to take over for lunch on Saturday. The recipe I found was courtesy of Shannon over at Rocks In My Dryer. Apparently it was not in the cards for me to make this pie.

Here’s why…

Shannon’s recipe makes 2 pies, so I told Jeremy that since he had to work on Saturday I would send him to work with one of the pies and I would take the other to my parent’s house. He was excited about that and so when we got home from Wal-Mart around 7:45 that night I began making the pie. Here’s the recipe I used:

STRAWBERRY PIE
2 containers fresh strawberries, sliced and washed
2 pie shells (homemade, if you're fancy, store-bought if you're me)
17 oz Sprite or 7-Up
1 pkg strawberry Jell-o
1 1/2 cup sugar
5 tbsp cornstarch

Bake pie crust, set aside to cool.

In a sauce pan, bring Sprite, sugar and cornstarch to a boil. Cook over low heat until it thickens (5-10 minutes).

Remove pan from heat. Stir in Jell-o until dissolved. Mix in sliced strawberries. Chill mixture in fridge for 20 minutes.

Remove from fridge and pour into two pie shells. Cover with saran wrap and chill for at least three hours before serving.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Did you read the first line of the instructions? The one that says, “Bake pie crust…”

Yeah, I didn’t read that line.

I skipped right over it.

I had bought a store bought pie shell because I never claimed to be Betty Crocker. I had this gorgeous yummy strawberry goodness ready and poured it into the pie shells. I wrapped them in saran wrap and started walking over to the fridge. I was patting myself on the back for being such a happy little homemaker with my homemade strawberry pie when my finger touched onto the pie crust and a thought crossed my mind…

How is the pie crust going to harden in the fridge?

Answer: It won’t.

I immediately dumped the strawberry pie filling back into the sauté pan and asked Jeremy to come help me. He suggested that I just scrap the pie filling out of the shell and then bake them. I knew that that wouldn’t work because every time I scraped some of the filling out, the dough started getting gooey and falling out of the pie shells.

So Jeremy went to Winn-Dixie for me at 9:00 that night to buy more pie shells because he loves me. And he really wanted some pie.

I started preheating the oven while he was gone so when he got back I popped the pie shells into the over and prayed that the filling wouldn’t start to harden before I could get it into the shells.

After they cooked I set them out on the oven to let them cool.

And after 10 minutes or so I picked up a shell to test and see if it was cool yet.

And apparently I tipped the pie shell just enough for the entire pie crust to dump out onto the floor.

And then I started laughing. Like a maniac.

Because there wasn’t anything else to do at the time.

And then Macy ate the pie shell.

So I came to the conclusion really quick that Jeremy just wasn’t meant to take a pie to work, and he was fine with that seeing what I had gone through. I would have DIED if I had sent my husband to work with a pie crust that was dough. And that would have been really hard to live down, especially with some of his coworkers.

So I dumped as much of the filling as I could into the last pie shell standing and then Jeremy and I proceeded to eat the leftover pie filling with a spoon straight out of the saute pan.

And since Jeremy couldn't take a strawberry pie to work, I saved him a really big slice of pie on Saturday.

And he loved it.

It was amazing, and so worth the trouble.

And I’m going to make it again this weekend at Jeremy’s request for his parents, but this time, I’m going to actually re-read the directions BEFORE I start cooking!