Easy as Pie

This is how one man’s supermarket blunder became two new culinary experiences.

It all started one day when Lionel Ferguson was making his way through the local grocery store. Lionel wasn’t much for any kind of shopping, but he was okay with shopping for food as long as there weren’t a lot of other shoppers in the store. As a matter of fact, he found it kind of relaxing to go to the supermarket and look at all the food.

As he walked down the frozen food aisle he noticed a buy-one-get-one-free special on Brubaker’s frozen crumb apple pies.

History will show that up until that day Lionel had never purchased a frozen pie. But the lure of two for one was too much to pass up. Besides, he liked pie. So he bought two of them and took them home. Then things started to unravel.

It seems he incorrectly assumed that Brubaker’s frozen crumb apple pies were like those cakes you could buy and just let defrost before eating them. You can imagine his surprise when he read the back of the box and discovered he actually had to cook them.

You have to understand that Lionel wasn't much for cooking, As a matter of fact, Lionel never cooked anything. If you asked him, he’d tell you he can’t remember if he had ever actually turned on the oven in his apartment’s stove.

That pretty much limited his shopping to things he didn’t have to cook or items he could just warm up in the microwave. For example, his foray down the frozen food aisle that fateful day was in search of ice cream and frozen toaster waffles.

“How hard can it be to cook a pie?” Lionel reasoned after he discovered his mistake. Surely a grown man could figure out how to take a frozen uncooked pie and convert it to the state of being unfrozen and cooked.

He read the instructions. It called for placing the pie on a cookie sheet in an over preheated to 375 degrees. To a man who never used his oven, 375 degrees could seem hot enough to melt lead. But that wasn’t the problem.

Lionel didn’t own a cookie sheet.

Desperate, he took out the cook book that came with his microwave. It was right next to a cook book his mother had given him when he moved into his own place: An apparent act of wishful thinking on her part that he would ever actually cook something.

Then again, Lillian Ferguson had always been an eternal optimist when it came to her only son. For instance, it may have taken 28 years, but he was out there on his own in his tiny apartment and, in her mind, on the fast track to becoming a successful member of the community.

Lionel was relieved to read that he could cook the pie in his microwave. There was only one problem, the pie came in a metal pie pan.

When he left home Lillian gave him a lot of advice, a good part he ignored and another good part he simply forgot during his drive across town to his new place. But one thing he always remembered her telling him was never put anything metal inside his microwave.

It was like she thought the first thing he was going to do was stick a sprinkler head in there and turn it on at high power.

The cookbook said to use a glass pie dish. You’ve probably guess this by now, but he didn’t own a glass pie dish either.

So he took the pie out of the metal pie pan, set in on a regular flat plate, put it in the microwave and turned it on.  Even a kitchen neophyte like Lionel had a feeling from the beginning that this idea was doomed to fail.

As he watched the frozen pie sitting on the flat plate he knew it might collapse without a pie dish to keep its shape. Sure enough, about 20 minutes later he had a plate of what he decided to call apple pie mush.

None of this stopped him from eating it. After all, it was still apple pie parts, they just weren’t all where they were supposed to be.

Plus he factored in the two-for-one aspect. It only cost him half as much to mess this up as it would have if he had paid the full price.

Lionel proceeded to get on with the rest of his life until a couple of months later, when he noticed the second pie sitting in the back of his refrigerator’s freezer compartment.

He figured, why let the second pie go to waste?

This time, seeking a better result, he asked a neighbor if she had a glass pie dish he could borrow. Experience teaches you the importance of a glass pie dish at a time like this.

She didn’t have a glass pie dish, but she did have a glass dish that was about an inch or so deep. This had to be better than the flat plate approach, so he borrowed the glass dish, stuck the pie in it and cooked it in the microwave.

Once again, the pie collapsed (Brubaker’s frozen crumb apple pies are nothing if not consistent), but it did have some semblance of form since the dish was about the size of the pie.

Lionel considered this a major success and dubbed this creation apple pie cobbler. He ate it in two sittings.

Now that he's out of Brubaker’s frozen crumb apple pies Lionel will probably never buy them again, even if the supermarket has another two-for-one sale. It’s not that he has anything against the product, but this cooking thing is a lot of work.

And besides, once you’ve mastered apple pie mush and apple pie cobbler, where can you go from there?