Come on in ... we've got pie!

My oh my the lemon pie from last night was delicious!

I have been longing for lemon bars, lemon meringue pie, lemon cookies lemon-something for the longest time now! But the urge always hits at the most inconvenient time... like ten minutes before dinner was to be served or the middle of the night. {and no, I am not pregnant... I just really love lemon anything.}

The little dots are lemon zest... not lumps of flour... just saying :)

So I got my act together yesterday and decided to make my mom's yummy lemon meringue pie. Only problem - it required a microwave and we currently do not have one. {I know, crazy huh?} So I googled lemon pie and decided that what I really wanted was something that tasted like creamy lemon curd, like the kind you eat with scones.

 And that's when I found this recipe at Allrecipes: Sour Cream Lemon Pie.

 I followed the instructions {even though I have a tendency to expirement, I didn't this time}, used my grandmother's no-fail pie crust recipe {unless you really mess it up... then it fails. Read on...}, and it was wonderful. Go on over to Allrecipes and print it out.... you know you want to.... I'll wait.

{Humming Jeopardy Song}

Ok, moving onto the disasters that I hinted at yesterday here.

Because as wonderful as the evening was, there were a few mishaps along the way. It was a great lesson in not-freaking-out-twenty-minutes-before-hubby-gets-home.

 First off, I tripled the salt in my grandmother's simple yet heavenly pie dough recipe. You heard right... TRIPLED! Instead of 1/2 teaspoon, I put in 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt. In other recipes,that would not make a huge difference. But in a pie dough.... wowie! It was salty. And I realized it as I rolled it out. So there were two options:


~ freak out, make another dough and not get the rest of dinner in the oven, and end up eating hours late. Or...
~ hope that some of the salt would be masked by the sweet lemon curd; and if not, I would just announce my mistake and scoop the curd out.

I chose the second option. I actually forgot about the salt incident... and it was not that bad... till the fourth bite. Then it got real salty, and we ended up eating the lemon alone. It was still delicious!

The second misstep of the evening came after baking the crust. It looked lovely with the fancy twisty border I gave it {thank you 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook!} But I had completely underestimated the time it would take for a crust to cool. It took forever! And by the time the lemon curd was almost ready to pour in, the crust was still steaming. What to do?!?!

Balance it on a pie rack, on two mugs over a tray of ice cubes! Easy Peasy! And it sure did the trick :)

And finally my last mishap of the evening, by far the worst.... I lost half an eyebrow. No exaggeration. And not the end half... the MIDDLE half! It looks like two tiny eyebrows on one side - oh the horror! Although I would love to blame this Brow Blunder on a candle flame, it was all my fault.


You see I can't pluck or wax my brows to shape them like most gals. My skin is way too sensitive. It swells, bleeds and makes me look all goobery for days. So I have to shape them with a tiny electric razor made for brows. Do you see where I'm going with this? As I'm holding the razor, all finished, something caught my eye, spooked me, I lost my grip on the razor and on the way down it took half a brow with it! And no, I will not post photos... after all, Google is forever!


But after a slight panic, some eyeliner and smudger, all was back to {somewhat} normal and I was back in the kitchen busily putting the finishing touches on our dinner.

Either hubby has still not noticed...or he feels bad and doesn't want to say anything... I think he hasn't noticed... cause if he had, he would be rolling on the floor laughing!

What mishaps have you survived

moments before serving a fancy dinner?

All photos taken by yours truly.