lemons

so monday night i endeavored to make a lemon meringue pie, which is the favorite of my farrier's. he shod my horses last week two-for-one, so i was returning the favor, if only in a small way.

however, i encountered a few hitches in the plan, detailed below:

mistake #1: i was simmering and stirring away on the lemon filling, up to the point where the recipe said to add egg yolks. what'd i do? i mindlessly dumped in the egg whites. yep. no good. but, by then the whites had already cooked into the mixture and i was like - hey, that really smells like tapioca. but it was really sweet. solution? i added cocoa powder and made chocolate pudding. delicious accident! (and then i had baked extra pie crusts in ramekins, so last night i filled one of the mini crusts with chocolate pudding and dove in and it was very, very quite good.)

mistake #2: apparently i chose a meringue recipe that was more complex than it was worth. instead of granulated sugar it wanted powdered sugar, and something went very wrong, because this is what i ended up with:


so after the chocolate pudding fiasco and powdered sugar ordeal, i gave up for the night. i was tired of standing in my kitchen and went to finish my netflix dvd.

i chose a simpler recipe yesterday, both for filling and meringue, and whipped it up, including the crust, in a little over an hour and this beautiful product was the result:


and my little pie's reception from farrier rick was sufficient reward for all the pain i went through to reach the end product. he loved it and was so delighted to receive it. he always comes to church tuesday night for a bible study, so that's when i gave it to him.

and i know certain persons out there will be grossed out by this, but fresh mushrooms and ceasar dressing dip make a great dinner :-) (i ate a lot of them.....)