Shuttin' my pie hole

As previously mentioned, it was my turn to host book club tonight at la Casa de Lynn. This also meant that I was responsible for providing dinner for the group. Now, before we started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had thought that maybe there would be some cool South American cuisine mentioned in the book that would inspire me as far as menu.

Not so much, as it turns out. In fact, the closest the book really comes to describing what the characters eat is the repeated mention of one who compulsively consumes dirt and whitewash peeled off the walls. I do aspire to throw a memorable party, but not necessarily *that* memorable--plus, there's enough germy garbage going around right now without my contributing to the problem by making my whole book club sick.

I opted instead to take my cue from our other selection, Harold and the Purple Crayon. If you are unfamiliar with it, in one part of the book Harold makes for himself a picnic, comprised of his nine favorite kinds of pie.


In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I did cheat and use two store-bought "fruit pies" (essentially a high fructose corn syrup calzone) among the nine. However, in my own defense, the pies I was making were significantly more time- and labor-intensive than Harold's.

The two large ones are cheddar-broccoli quiche and chicken pot-pie. Next to those are a mini brown sugar pie, and the two pie-ish items (apple and cherry, L to R). Next to the Cool Whip is chocolate pudding pie (with chocolate chips), lemon pudding, vanilla pudding, and banana pudding pies (all with graham-cracker crusts).


Mmmmmm . . . pie.


We had a good discussion of the first section of Solitude, which we will wrap up two weeks from tonight before moving on to Black Like Me. And most of the pie got eaten, so hooray for that!

The only problem is that not *all* of the pie got eaten. In addition to one piece of quiche and about two pieces of pot pie, there was most of the lemon left and a few bites of the other little pies. I have no compunction about tossing the remainder of those semi-circular jelly-filled monstrosities out, but I really do hate wasting actual food. There was enough of the lemon to merit putting it away, but since the others were mostly gone already, I figured I could just finish them up myself.

In hindsight, this was a significant error in judgment. My belly is now uncomfortably full of pie, and I feel a little sick. Blurgh. I guess I'll just consider myself to be taking one for the team, or the club in this case.

I think it might be a good idea to brush my teeth and get in bed before I lapse into an insulin coma. Happy Tuesday!