a spatula bigger than your mom

Have you ever written an essay for a scholarship application to then realize you don't qualify? I read two words: food and blog, I figured since I blog and I am a whore for food I obviously qualified for this scholarship... low and behold I missed the "college hosted" in front of the word "blog" and now have no one to share my funny story with.

But wait! You still exist, my little bloggy readers, so I will share with you.

The essay I will never be able to submit:

American. Pie. American Pie. Pie holds a warm place in Americas hearts be it a sweet apple pie filled to the brim and oozing all over the plate before anyone can even take the first bite, a tart cranberry pie with a cobbler like topping and hardened sugar on top of that making every bite melt in your mouth, or a secret family recipe that is so easy a four year old could make it. In fact, a four year old did make it, and I was that four year old. I won’t get into the specifics, but imagine chocolate mousse, melted peanut butter, a graham cracker crust, and enough whipped topping to support a small girls fancy for at least an hour (provided she’s mighty distracted, I don’t mess around when it comes to whipped topping, I mean she, she doesn’t mess around). It was easy, it was served cold, and it is one of the best pies I’ve ever had.

One day, little four year old me was making the pie; I was short enough I needed to kneel an a kitchen chair to reach the pie and while being covered in melted peanut butter was the obvious highlight of my day, filling the pie with mousse was quickly to become a close second. However, being four years old presented me with a unique set of challenges: the bowl of mousse was larger than my wing span, the spatula was the length of my forearm, and the desire to stick my tongue on and into everything that came within twelve inches of my face made it improbable I would successfully transfer the mousse from bowl to the freshly peanut buttered crust. But, for Pete’s sake, that wasn’t going to stop me from trying. On my own, I might add; I am a very capable four year old, I’m sure of it.

I grab the bowl, suspiciously light for its size, and the spatula then somehow maneuver it to relatively the same vicinity as the pie crust begging to be filled. I begin to tip it, all is going well; the filling starts to flow out with gravity as its aid (not that I’m thinking about gravity, all I know at this moment is pie) and I help a little with the spatula but mostly with my hands to get as much as I can into the crust. I’m doing it, I’m succeeding! More than half of the mousse has miraculously made it into the pie and I only have a little more to go before I finish off with the whipped topping. But, what’s this? The bowl keeps tipping, well past where I need it to be to get my hands into it to direct the still cascading mousse into my perfect beautiful pie. I can’t really stop it from tipping; in fact, it’s slipping out of my pudding covered hands. It’s out of my control! It’s on the floor; so is the pie. How did this happen? I was doing so well, where did I go wrong? I start to cry, as much out of frustration for my failure as for my loss of the glory at a future pie. My mother walks into the room, and there I am, covered in chocolate mousse, peanut butter, and tears. She sees that pie and mousse under the table, face down as according to all laws of physics and she laughs! She laughs at me and my pie, so I hop down and grab a piece of the broken peanut butter crust and thrust it into my mouth, all while completely ignoring her ploys for me to “Stop Denise!”

We all have dropped things while in the process of making something we’re very excited about, I dropped an egg down the counter and onto the floor a few weeks ago while trying to make a cheese sauce, I’ve dropped an entire gallon of milk breaking it and covering myself and the kitchen. Sometimes it’s easy to just get too distracted from what will possibly be the best meal ever prepared to pay attention to something at trivial as what we’re doing. And that’s okay; you can always buy more milk.