Diamond shoes

We had dinner guests last night--my brother-in-law D. and his brood, Miss I., Miss R., and Mr. C. D. is an excellent cook, so I always want to be at the top of my game when I'm cooking and he's eating. Yesterday afternoon, I was there: I had a disk of pastry dough and a bag of cut-up apples sitting in the fridge, just waiting to be used. So I made an apple pie for dessert. I even cut out stars for the top crust, for an extra-fancy presentation, and baked it before I left to run a couple of errands. I thought everything was in the bag. I was feeling pretty cocky.

Then I got home late, our guests arrived late, and somehow dinner, instead of being on the table at 6:45 as planned, didn't get served until 7:25. And when I brought out the pie (warm from being reheated in the oven) and cut into it, I realized that it wasn't quite as cooked as it looked. The crust was a little gooey, the apples were a little crunchy. Still edible, but not exactly spectacular.

D. & Co. left around 8:30 to get the kids into bed; we put Miss B. to bed and cleaned up; and I, pouting, put the pie back in the oven. (I had decided that the culprit was the cookie sheet I had put underneath to catch any spilled juice, and it seems I was right--another 20 minutes in a hot oven without it and it was another dessert altogether.)

I, still sulking over my not-perfect dinner, cut another small piece and went into the living room, where DP was starting up the DVD player and checking the news. I, in my clean, safe, well-heated house, full of dinner and carrying a piece of warm pie and a glass of cold milk, glum over my dessert fail, walked in...to see the latest footage from Haiti.

Then I remembered that, if an underbaked apple pie was the worst thing that had happened to me today, I was one damn lucky woman.

Red Cross

Médicins sans frontières

Oxfam