Pie

For some strange reason still unknown to me, at the beginning of the summer of 2009 I decided to make a pie a day all summer long. Pie has always been my favorite pastry, but I didn’t feel that I had mastered the process. Understanding that repetition is the road to mastery, I set out on a journey. It changed my life. I know that’s a dramatic way to characterize the simple task of making pie, but the journey became much greater than the sum of the simple parts that make up a pie. To ensure that I followed through with the daily task I had set myself I went public on the Good Food Blog. I said 2009, right?

I shared my successes and who I learned from and more importantly I shared my failures, and there were many. Nearly everyday I was crying in my pie. Gradually my posts started conversations within a worldwide virtual community of pie lovers. Folks commiserated with my failures and cheered my successes. But even better, they began sharing family memories and recipes and photos of pie. There were new takes on old favorites, and even pie adjacent interests like design (aprons, dishes) started to bloom. It was at this point I approached the head of KCRW and suggested we have a pie contest. She looked at me like I was nuts, but a mall had asked the station to put on an event there and somehow the 1st Annual Good Food Pie Contest sprang into being. Four hundred spectators watched a hundred or so pies compete. Our last in person contest in 2023 saw five hundred pies, thirty judges and ten thousand pie crazed event goers! I can’t tell you how much satisfaction I get from bringing people together over a simple (ok, fiddly) dessert.