December 24th, 2019.

Dear Diary,

It’s Sally again,

Today was Christmas Eve. The first anniversary of the pumpkin pie incident. I recently realized that I never did journal about that, so I’m going to do it now.

This is what happened one year ago today:

We went to the neighbor’s house for dinner, and I was asked to bake a pumpkin pie for dessert. Well, you and I both know that I can barely cook let alone bake. But I didn’t want to hurt any feelings, so I agreed, figuring I could find an easy recipe. Big mistake.

By the time I actually found a usable recipe at like noon, I couldn’t understand any of the language they used. For example, what on earth is evaporated milk? I figured it couldn’t be that different from regular milk, right? And I also hadn’t realized that I needed a real pumpkin. I had to run to the store to get one. (This was before I was enlightened as to the fact that canned pumpkin existed.)

The instructions said to mash it up. So I did that. I set the pumpkin on a large piece of butcher paper and took a hammer to it. It made a huge mess, but I still got the required two cups of the stuff.

I had no idea what the recipe meant by beat the eggs, so I did what it sounded like. I put the eggs into a zip-loc baggie and held it up with one hand while punching it with the other, and called it good.

I did know how to pack the brown sugar, so that part was fairly easy.

The thing is though, that I didn’t have any real brown sugar… What I had was saccharin, and food coloring. I figured it would work fine.

Thankfully I didn’t have any trouble with the seasonings.

I preheated the oven to the required 400 degrees, and started work on the pie crust. That part of the recipe kinda spoke for itself, except for the part about “cutting” in the butter.

I wasn’t really sure what that meant, so I just melted it so it would mix in easily with everything else.

When it came time to put the dough into the pan, I was surprised that the recipe wanted me to “flute” the edges of the dough, but I did it anyway. I don’t have a flute, as you know, so instead I just played a tune on my piccolo while standing next to the pie pan.

When I got to the instructions on how to make the filling, it wanted me to do more beating. So, I got all of my filling ingredients and put them into another zip-loc and punched that one as well.

Then I assembled all of the parts, and put it into the oven to bake. It was supposed to bake for forty to sixty minutes, so I set the timer and sat on the couch to watch an episode of my favorite show.

Next thing I knew, I had fallen into a deep sleep. I woke up to the smell of burning pumpkin pie. I raced into the kitchen and looked at the clock. I had been asleep for over an hour. I immediately try to pull out the pie, only to be very rudely reminded of the fact that I wasn’t wearing oven mitts. I jumped back and held my hands under cold water for a minute. Then I remembered the pie was still in the oven. After another minute or so, I got oven mitts on and pulled the pie out.

It was completely burned. I stood there for a moment and pondered what to do next.

Then the thought came to me to take a knife and cut away the burned parts. So that’s what I did. Of course, when this chore was finally finished, there wasn’t a whole lot of pie left. But it looked alright. When it all cooled, I covered it with plastic wrap and went to my room to get ready to leave.

When I got to my neighbor’s house with the pie, I began to feel my confidence slip away. When dinner was done, and after everyone had made a big to-do about the fact that I had baked a pie, the pie was finally cut into. This was the moment of truth.

As it got sliced and passed around, my sister leaned over to me and whispered,

“Sally? Those aren’t pumpkin seeds in there that I see, are they?”

Then it dawned on me. That’s what seemed so different about this pie.

I meekly whispered back,

“Yeah. Pumpkin rind too.” Then she looked at me with an indiscernible expression on her face as she settled back into her seat.

I eagerly watched the faces of the group as they tried my pie.

They tried their hardest to hide it, but I could tell they hated it. Then I finally tried a bite. My face went slack. The pie went down my throat as difficultly as if it had been sandpaper. It tasted terrible. The seeds and pieces of rind made it hard to stomach, and the saccharin gave it a plastic-like aftertaste. The crust tasted like no pie crust should ever taste. I later found out that you’re never supposed to put melted butter in pie crust.

After forcing down a few bites, pretty much everyone shoved their plates away and complemented me, saying things like:

“What a wonderful job you did, Sally.”

“How delicious. Great job Sal.”

“What interesting choices you’ve made. Quite interesting.”

I felt just about as terrible as that pie tasted.

“That’s it,” I told myself, “I am never baking again!”

While I was still silently fuming, we all noticed that Alexander, one of my neighbor’s children was volunteering to clear the table. That was odd. The next thing we all noticed was that Alexander seemed to be dumping all of the leftover pie pieces onto his own plate, which he brought back with him to the table.

We stared at him, dumbfounded, as he shoveled the pie into his mouth. His parents didn’t even care at this point, about the fact that he had already eaten five pieces of pie. All we were thinking was, as my brother stated aloud,

“How can you possibly eat that? It’s disgusting!” Alexander just smiled and replied,

“I’m glad you all think so! That just means more for me!”

“Unbelievable.” Was my brother’s reply.

At that, we all just burst out laughing. None of us really knew why, but we did, and the rest of the night went off without a hitch.

And that was the first and last time that I tried to bake a pumpkin pie.

Amanda Rose, an Italian-Mexican-Irish mix, was born in Southern California, but from the age of six, she grew up in the wild beauty of Southwestern Alaska. She can often be found drinking insane amounts of coffee, and is always open to recommendations of new books, coffees or teas to try :)