My Heart-Warming Thanksgiving Story of the Flubbed-Up Pie
I want to tell you about the flubbed-up Thanksgiving pie I made. First you should know that “flubbed-up” is a substitute for my grandchildren’s sake of another term that means messed-up and also starts with an F.
My son, JD, is a stalwart eco-warrior who’s a mechanic providing biodegradable motor oil and other green automotive stuff to his customers. He keeps the family cars running for only the price of parts. He is sweet and generous and I love him like the dickens, whatever exactly that means.
JD is a vegan, and not just your ordinary vegan, but a vegan who will spend his last dime to eat only organic food that has not been contaminated by pesticides, herbicides, or even by suicides or fratricides committed by a person in the extended family or ancestry of anyone who ever touched or thought about touching his food. If this food sat across from, and at the opposite end of, a long aisle from a side of beef in the grocery store, JD will not eat it. If I’m in a bad mood, as I sometimes am, trying to cook for JD is enough to make me want to commit some kind of “-cide” against this son I love so much.
We have Thanksgiving every year in November, right? And JD has been into his organic, anti-GMO, locally-grown vegan thing for a number of recent years. One would think by now I’d have figured out that I need to plan Thanksgiving with JD in July, maybe March. But, true to form, this particular year, I waited until a couple of weeks before JD’s big turkey-less, Tofurkey Day to discuss what I should cook that he might consider eating if I tweak my nose in the right direction.
I’m getting old. I have little patience for complicated Thanksgiving dinners that involve special dishes for each particular person in this ever-expanding family. I mean, I love these people more than my own life, but I have reached my limit. I need to make Thanksgiving infinitely less complicated. Between our various food intolerances, adamant ideals, outright dislikes, and other peccadillos, there is very little food on Earth that I and my trooper of a husband, Doug – who is also getting old, but who seems to be handling it much better than I am – can cook for this passel of people to share.
My idea for this year is to make as much vegan-organic food as possible and for everyone to share it, so that I don’t have to make a regular option and a vegan-organic option of every dish. Sounds reasonable enough. I mean this idea is great if you have an infinite supply of time to figure it out and scads of money to pay through the nose for organic components of our family’s traditional dishes.
I’m about to tell you about the flubbed-up pie. I promise.
This year JD and I go painstakingly through what he’ll need to scrounge up from the mysterious places he buys organic wonder food. He has no earthly idea of the sizes available for these components or the prices for anything at all, especially for each unit. So first I give him a list of things to price, to get sizes for – the number of fluid ounces, how many cherries per can of organic pie filling, how many organic whole-wheat rolls per pan and the square footage of each pan – so JD can buy what I need to cook for an army of people to eat Thanksgiving Day, to send everyone home with leftovers, to eat leftovers and nothing else for a week, and to throw out leftovers at the end of said week while being sure to have plenty to share with the compost pile.
There are certain things I’ll be cooking knowing full well that JD won’t eat them – turkey, for instance, celery (JD is a vegan who hates celery. I have nothing to add to this). Since I have JD occupied buying organic food for everyone, I assign the vegan entrée to my son Aaron, because he’s a vegetarian anyway and he can damned well be a vegan for one day so that he and his brother can share an entrée.
We will have dressing with chicken stock in it and vegan dressing, that kind of thing. Then, for the sake of at least some simplicity, we’ll have a few totally vegan organic dishes for everyone – sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole (yes, this can be organic-vegan if you’re patient enough), rolls.
Then there will be pies. Pies are my holiday thing. When I was younger, I made two or three kinds of pie with several per type for both Thanksgiving AND Christmas. Now I’m a one type of pie per holiday person. I want the pies to be cherry for this holiday, because cherry pies are easy to make. The grandkids are crazy for cherries, and they are who I’m most interested in pleasing.
I should add that this year my hubby Doug has to work on Thanksgiving. It will be my first time to cook Thanksgiving dinner without him in twenty-three years. Not to worry. I’ve enlisted my stepson Matt to help lift, stir, and toast things and juggle the moving of things from one oven rack to another all day long. We’ve got this, me and Matt. Doug teaches Matt how to prep the turkey the night before, and it’s ready in the fridge so that Matt just has to stick it into the oven on TG morning and leave it there for hours while we cook other stuff.
Back to the pies. JD has informed me that, of all foods that exist in the universe, the worst foods to eat if they are NOT organic are cherries and berries, because the pesticides, herbicides, and other kinds of “-cides” concentrate in the cherries and berries in an attempt to murder us – just kill us outright dead.
Even though JD has always lapped up cherry pies in the past, even after he went vegan-organic, this year he will not eat them unless the cherries are organic. Not only that, he wants organic vegan crusts as well. All right. I can do this.
But JD cannot find organic cherries at his favorite haunts. We agree that I’ll make a couple of organic peach pies for him with regular cherry for the rest of us – because we are addicted to pesticide-riddled food and we don’t give a flip anymore. I feel a little guilty about this on account of grandchildren. I don’t want to feed poison cherries to children. They can eat peach pie, although I know they love cherry most.
As Thanksgiving draws nearer, I make a list out of the scraps of information JD has obtained, telling him how many cans, pans, cases, and barrels of each food I need. I tell him I simply cannot afford all this organic sh— “stuff” (I’m just going to call this “shtuff”), and JD kindly offers to pay the difference in the extra price of organic items over the price of poisonous All-American food. I tell JD that this grocery store where he plans to shop is growing faster than they can keep up with, and chances are good the store will run out of TG food many days before the big event.
Undaunted, JD waits until the last possible minute to buy the food and only then after I insist that he get his vegan behind to the store, like NOW, or I won’t be cooking one single damned organic or vegan anything for him or anyone else. I mean we have to get the other groceries for TG when we’re not working, and this is the last day we have time for that. I have no idea what to buy in terms of other groceries until I see what JD can procure at the health food store after it’s been cleared out by more forward-thinking customers. I may not have mentioned that JD is not a planning type of organic-vegan.
I won’t say, “I told you so,” but I will mention, because I am passive-aggressive sometimes, that JD’s favorite grocery store has no organic fruit pie filling of any sort whatsoever. All he’s managed to buy in terms of pie filling are two cans of organic peaches, which is only distantly related to pie filling. JD does have two sets of organic pie crusts. Okay, fine. We’ll have one peach pie then, and we’ll use the other organic crusts for non-organic cherry pie.
Meanwhile, the hubby goes to the regular grocery store for toxic cherry pie filling amongst many other things, and doesn’t realize until he returns home that he’s bought only two cans of regular cherry pie filling and three cans of organic. So, the regular grocery store had the filling JD couldn’t find at his organic vegan store, and Doug has accidentally purchased it. Man. The kismet of this, the ass-backwards synchronicity of it, is stunning.
Trying to rally, I say, “Great. I’ll use these other organic pie shells – the ones I won’t be using for peach pie – to make an organic cherry pie.” It seems like our pie problems are solved. Except on the night I start making pies in advance of TG Day like I always do, I run out of time to make cherry pies while also boiling down canned peaches for hours on end.
When JD comes home later (Did I mention he lives with us “temporarily”? Do not get me started about the gnat problem he’s caused with organic food rotting in his bedroom), I ask him to please boil down the peaches. I’ll be around doing other important shtuff, and I’ll advise him as he works. He doesn’t have time, he says. He has tons of work to do this week, he says, because in his mind I don’t have anything to do this week except to make his freaking pie.
Suggesting that JD cook the peaches, like now, while he’s hanging out grazing on food he’s spread across the living room and watching TV (and murderous TV, not any kind of flower-childy organic vegan TV) has no effect on JD whatsoever. I might as well not exist.
All right, either I’ll make the danged peach pie tomorrow or I won’t. I’ve got an organic cherry pie made already. It’s even got a crisscrossed top crust so it can be easily distinguished from the deadlier cherry pies. Whatever.
Now it’s Wednesday evening before the big day. Doug has to get up on TG morning at 3:30-ish, long before oh-dark-thirty, so that he can work while the rest of America watches football and parades. Doug will be going to bed at 8:00 p.m. this evening or as soon thereafter as he can get there. I ask Doug to please open JD’s canned peaches for me, because the can-opener and I have issues, and JD is nowhere to be found, no doubt staying out as late as possible to avoid helping me make his bleeping pie.
Doug opens the two peach cans, and there are like eight or nine tiny peach slices in each can. They are basically cans of peach juice with a few scraps of peach. I seriously doubt there are even two small peaches between both cans. This peach pie is going to be scanty on the peach side. But I am making this pie come hell or high water, so I drain off the juice except a little dab, saving the juice for JD because I’m such a good mother of a busy forty-year-old organic-vegan with important shtuff to do elsewhere tonight. I plop the pot containing a few teaspoons of peaches onto a low fire on the stovetop.
It takes almost no time for the little juice in the pot to boil off. I’ve got a half-ton of peach juice here, so I add a little more to the pot – we’re talking a quarter cup at most. I look away from the pot for a minute or two, and the pot’s suddenly overloaded with peach juice – like way too overloaded because apparently these few scraps of peaches, scrawny as they are, have about a gallon of peach juice in each of them and this juice is cooking out of those peaches at an alarming rate. Oh man. All right I’ll just have to boil these peaches for a very long time. Maybe they’ll be ready by next Thanksgiving.
But the peach juice is not cooking away. This pot is full of peach cider with some peach slices for a garnish. If I were a smart woman, which I am not at this moment, I would drain some peach juice off right this instant. But do I? What do you think? Instead I decide, with Doug’s help, that I should add this organic sugar JD has provided, in the hope the sugar will contribute to the thickening and cooking down of this mass quantity of boiling peach juice.
The peach pot is boiling. Doug makes grilled cheese sandwiches because who’s got time for making dinner, much less eating it, when it’s the night before Thanksgiving? I’m in Doug’s way trying to watch this peach pot, so I hover outside the kitchen and dash in from time to time to check the peach syrup mess. We eat sandwiches. Doug goes to bed, but before he goes we decide there may be hope for these peaches after all as the organic-sugary peach juice appears to be slightly thicker.
I keep watching the peach pot. I do other shtuff and come back and watch it some more. My office is in a converted garage off the kitchen, and I need to do some shtuff out there. I adjust the fire lower and go to the garage office for ten minutes – it can’t be one second more than twelve minutes. Suddenly I think, uh-oh, peaches! I run into the kitchen to greet a foamy pot of peach goo that is partially burnt. But do I handle this sensibly? Of course not. Before I have thought a single thought, I have stirred this pot of peach goop enough to spread some burnt shtuff throughout the pot. I’ve contaminated this alleged peach pie filling. I wonder how toxic this burned shtuff is, but I simply don’t care anymore.
There has got to be something salvageable here, because I want this to be true and am proceeding as though it is. While the peach goop cools into some sort of peach fudge or taffy or peach peanut brittle without peanuts, I patiently poke holes in an organic pie shell and set it to pre-bake while I make a crumble pie topping out of the other shell by adding more of JD’s organic sugar and organic cinnamon, too. I’m determined for this shtuff to be good, damned good.
I go away for like five minutes and come back to discover that the pre-baking shell is a convex mound of inflated crust. There’s a Super Dome all up in my oven. Evidently the holes I’ve poked in this shell are not sufficiently doing their job. I reach into the dangerously hot oven with a fork and poke bigger holes until the shell deflates. I tamp down the edges until the shell no longer resembles a flying saucer.
By now the peach goop in the pot looks pitifully small and brown. It seems kind of stretchy, definitely gloppy. But it’s made of lovely organic peach slices – however few of them are left – plus organic sugar. How bad could it be? It will be a super-organic peach candy pie that’s only a tiny bit burnt.
I slap the peach goop into the pie shell. It doesn’t even cover the whole bottom of the shell. I scrape every drop of syrupy goop into the shell, any goop that’s not too shtuck to require a hammer and chisel to get it out of this blankety-blank pot. Even though the peach pie innards are only about an inch thick and sparse – extremely sparse – I throw on the crumble topping, and spread it to cover the filling – which is easy-peasy since there are so few peaches to cover. I stick this concoction into the oven, set the timer and disappear to my office, stage left.
I’m playing a computer game, tweeting, and other shtuff in the office when I realize that a beeping noise I’ve been managing to subconsciously ignore must be coming from the kitchen timer. I rush into the kitchen, throw open the oven door, grab some pot holders, and pull out an overly baked peach pie that is too brown. But it is not burnt. It is NOT freaking burnt!
This is fine. This is totally and completely fine. I will serve flubbed-up, organic, much too brown, overly sweet, nearly peachless, candified peach pie for Thanksgiving dinner and nobody, I mean nobody, especially JD, better say a mother-flubbing word about it.
I leave this thing I’ve created to cool and return to noodling in my office. JD at last comes home. He has his grazing palate of munchie-type organic vegan food spread across the coffee table in front of the television when I finally come back inside. I sit down and tell JD the story of the flubbed-up pie, and I am not saying flubbed, I promise you that. JD and I start laughing, and we keep laughing. We’re trying to be quiet because Doug’s upstairs above us trying to sleep – I mean the poor man has to get up at 3:30 on flubbing Thanksgiving morning to go to flubbing work.
But trying hard not to laugh too loudly just makes JD and I laugh more and harder. Come on. This is hilarious. We concoct delirious stories of what the insides of the so-called pie might look like now that it’s cooled – how far will it stretch? Will it be fudgy or so hard that we break teeth on it? We are doubled-over crying and laughing and shushing each other to laugh quieter.
Finally we run out of steam, and I head back out to my office. I am an extreme night-owl. I make no apologies for this because they would not stop me from being one. JD has inherited this annoying trait from me, and I’m a little sorry for him about that.
Before I leave JD so he can keep binging on food and his murderous TV show, I ask him to please cover the pie with decidedly un-organic tin foil and stick it in the fridge before he goes to bed. I’ve got a heartwarming Thanksgiving story to write, and I have no more time for taking care of this so-called pie.
I am out here writing for way too long because, as everyone who knows me at all understands, I am wordy. I realize it’s 3:00 a.m., which is too late even for me. Doug will be getting up any second. I have to get inside and pretend to be sleeping before he stumbles past me to get coffee so he can get ready for flubbing work. I abandon this unfinished story and make haste to pretend to sleep.
But Doug, because this is already a flubbed-up Thanksgiving, has forgotten to make coffee and set the timer. He’s banging around in the kitchen half-asleep, and I give up on this pretending to sleep idea and give Doug lots of sympathy for his coffee-less predicament. He laps this sympathy up.
Doug schlepps off to work, I sleep for a little while, then I get up to finish this never-ending Thanksgiving tale. Now it’s a little past time to start the turkey baking, Matt has just pulled up to help me, and I’m still in my PJ’s, having completely forgotten to drink my coffee. This is already a flubbed-up flubbing Thanksgiving. I have more flubbing shtuff to bake and burn and destroy. I’ve got to get moving.
