The Ghetto Pie

In celebration of my first real weekend alone in quite some time, I decided to celebrate the blissed silence by baking a pie.
Well, not quite - it certainly didn't start out that way. Rather, it began with a rude awakening in part due to the alarm clock which I had set for 9:30 am the night before, thinking that I needed to call and coordinate a futon pickup between two separate parties, neither of whom knew the other beforehand. The futon plans themselves got derailed thanks to the weather and a distinct distaste for driving a pick'em-up truck in the rain with a futon pad in the back soaking up the dirty truckwater like a sponge. Mmm... yeah. That's exactly what I want to sleep on when I'm drunk (well, actually, *I* wouldn't be sleeping on that futon, it'd really only be my drunk friends who are too sauced to drive their asses home afterwards. I could really say they almost deserve it, though then again, we are talking about my drunk friends here - often times they're too drunk to even notice the foul odors and squishing of their sleeping surfaces anyways. Besides, hygiene notwithstanding, it's still an improvement from the drunk bag of yore - and when has hygiene ever been an issue to my friends anyway?).
After making the appropriate round of phone calls, I tossed myself back into a restless sort of half-sleep that I'd been engaging in since roughly 7am. I won't really go into details, but suffice to say, I kept rolling over in the middle of my dreams catching a whiff of something that just didn't smell right. I became half concerned that I was really smelling my upper lip, and that my breath really did just smell that bad - a conclusion not altogether that far-fetched, considering the late night half-warmed dinner of tomato beef fried rice I'd consumed the night before. It was humid after all, and I did have that sweaty facial sheen, thanks to the unilaterally unbearable weather that characterizes the east coast. Then again, I've had past experiences with lucid dreaming that have yielded somewhat unpleasant actual physical effects (one time in particular, I nearly urinated in my bed after having no fewer than 4 iterations of a recursive dream in which I truly believed I had gotten up and was using the can), so perhaps this was yet another in the unfortunate series. After some rather violently concerted sniffs, I more or less sniffed myself awake, and realized indeed, the bad smell was something tangible and real - not the stuff of dreams at all. Content in concluding that the smell was not my breath, as it seemed to be emanating directionally, I began my search for That Which Smelled Bad.
My cat emerged from under the bed, so I thought to lift her tail and check (just earlier last week she came to mommy to get hugs and kisses, and I put her back down on the ground promptly after smelling something horrible and discovering a fresh turd hanging halfway out of her ass). Alas, this morning, I found nothing. Just a little leather cheerio tucked beneath the curly black tail. She seemed somewhat incensed. Still determined to find the smell, I peered under the bed, only to find a single large bean of the cat-rectal variety. At first I had thought she'd burgled it, considering my cat has proven herself to be a known turd burglar (kicking shit out from her litterbox - quite literally!). However, upon inspection I realized that the turd itself bore no trace of litter whatsoever - it was very much sprinkle-free. I picked it up with toilet paper and made for the trash. It was still warm. How charming, I thought, kitty pinched mommy a fresh loaf.
Perhaps she heard me say not too long ago how much I missed my mother's fresh baked bread in the morning. I don't think this was quite what I meant, but at least it wasn't a fresh platter of assberry pancakes.
Having been forced to get up and out of bed, I made my way to the kitchen for a half-opened bottle of Stella that I'd conveniently left in the fridge the night before - originally intended as a "road-soda" if you will, until I came to the unfortunate realization that I had to drive, and I was fresh out of brown paper bags. Tolerance notwithstanding, I can't help but feel somewhat paranoid these days, now that I only live a block and a half away from the cop shop - and I'm sure everyone here knows how I feel about cops (for those who don't - instead of saying "please call the cops" I tend to say "will someone call the pigs").
Upon opening the fridge, I happened upon a half-full box of rather wrinkly blueberries left over from roughly a month ago when I'd last had company over for sangria. As I saw this box, I thought to myself that now would be the perfect time to make a pie, what with being alone and all! I finally had the kitchen to myself, and no one to harrass me for it. Thus began the story of the Ghetto Pie.
I would be lying to myself if I denied my habitual reliance on my MIT background - thus, the place for me to look for a recipe for pie was, of course, the internet. In this day and age, this is not particularly strange - many people with personal home computers and internet access search for recipes on the internet. However, after looking up a recipe for a pie, I did what considerably fewer of those in the general populace would have done - I turned to literature about reverse osmosis. Indeed, much like Tammy Faye, the blueberries in my fridge were in sore need of rehydration. I figured that with proper water pressure, the porous skins of the soggy fruits would rehydrate the pulp within. Thus, I took it upon myself to fill a large bowl with hot water (to maximize the flow of water molecules by increasing Brownian motion), and purposefully dumped the semi-dry blueberries in to soak. Unfortunately, after an hour or so, rather than rejuvenating themselves into their former juicy selves, the blueberries looked a good bit worse than before. They were semi-hydrated, all right. But for some reason, I just didn't have the proper equipment to fully re-hydrate the berries to their original tautness of skin unfortunately resembling nothing so much as a bunch of saggy old man grapes. I think my wedding registry will include a centerfuge for the kitchen (in order to increase the ambient water pressure in my rehydration bowl).
Having failed at restoring the blueberries to a useable form, I decided to go to the store to purchase a new box, along with the rest of the ingredients I would need for a pie.

In a turn of good fortune, the local Stop and Shop was having a sale on blueberries with their card - a card for which I had been meaning to sign up for quite some time now. A savings of $6.00 was certainly motivation enough to force me to sign up. Unfortunately for me, this would not prove to be easy. Upon approaching the customer service counter, I noticed that two hags were making their way down the aisle towards the same aforementioned counter. Rather than barreling across with my cart, I figured I'd simply let them go first - I was in no rush for a card, and certainly they couldn't be doing any more than complaining bitterly about the firmness of the bananas in the produce aisle. Boy was I wrong. That will be the last time I ever make the mistake of allowing the elderly to go first. For, you see, I had not anticipated the one thing that is bound to annoy the everliving shit out of every last hard working taxpaying citizen of America - the Social Security Scratcher habit. That is correct my friends - consider yourselves forewarned: should you encounter ANY nasty old woman on a Sunday morning at the grocery store approaching the customer service counter with a wad of cash in her hands, you can bet your ass she's a Scratcher fiend, as these two dried-up old nags were. Make no mistake, these were nobody's grannies - or if they were, their grandsons were undoubtedly named Bubba and Al and furthermore grew up to marry their cousins, Lurna and Benquiesha and lived in the trailer park next door. They were reminiscent of a recent episode of the Jerry Springer Show - "Senior Strippers," I believe was the catch-line. I got in line behind the old coots, who began rattling off numbers upon numbers of different scratcher game cards. I figured this was fine - if that's what they wanted to do with their weekly checks from the government, that's their business. Unfortunately, the scratcher purchases didn't stop there. Oh no sir, there was no way I was that lucky. The crusty blue-hairs, one of whom I was pretty sure was wearing a plastic bag on her head, whipped out their coins and started scratching - right THERE on the countertop! I figured that was fine, but they began to hand the winning tickets back and cashing them in for more - and buying more tickets with their cash! After several rounds of this crap had gone on, I severely fought back the urge to pull the bag-hag's plastic hair wrap down over her head and throttle her to death with it, in so doing probably saving her from a fate of wallowing in sub-par intelligence before succumbing to a prolonged death by cancer contracted over the course of forty years spent smoking unfiltered Marlboros. Instead, I opted for the loud interjection and a surreptitious elbowing to the ribcage (unsurprisingly, had I applied myself to the task a little harder I might actually have broken something). The tactic seemed effective enough to eventually result in receiving my goddamn Stop & Shop card, but the unsettling thought remained: that's what my Social Security contribution is paying for?! Two ugly bag-hags standing in the way of my two-fucking-second transaction for savings on blueberries? Now you'll understand why I'll say after receiving every paycheck "old fuckers need to start paying for themselves - I'm not paying for your incontinent grandmother's adult diapers" Though in truth, I'd rather be paying for your Nana's Depends than feeding the scratch-habits of archaic porters of Soccer Chest*. I vowed to run them over in the parking lot if I saw them on the way out.

The rest of the grocery trip proved thankfully uneventful - the only singular other problem encountered being my inability to find a useable pie pan without a pre-filled graham cracker crust. I was rather close to purchasing a pre-filled Oreo shell and eating the cookie crust right out for the pan, but opted for a disposable 9-inch roasting round I happened across instead.
After procuring the required ingredients, I figured there would be no further obstacles ready to derail my plan of pie. Of course, as we all know, were that the case, there would be no entry entitled The Ghetto Pie.
I combined all the dry ingredients for the crust into the bowl - no problem. "Cutting" the shortening into the recipe, however, proved somewhat difficult, as, well, "cutting" shortening is rather tricky in 85 degree humid weather. "Smearing" would have been a more appropriate description. As I was handling the shortening "cubes" and transferring them into the bowl, however, I noticed that my kitten had chosen that moment to help herself into one of my lower cabinets (she has been doing this as of late, much to my great annoyance - probably to get attention. I've basically had to baby-proof anything below knee-height that I didn't want that nosey little shit to get herself into). Before actually allowing myself to think it through completely, I immediately reached down and peeled my kitten out from behind the pots on the bottom shelf. However, this unfortunate action could be described as essentially buttering my cat who, alarmed and aided by the grease, managed to wriggle her way out of my arms, and back onto the ground, taking some flour down with her. Disgusted as I watched her plow around my house leaving little white paw prints wherever she went, I attempted to wash the cat hair from my hands. As many of you know, cat hair never comes off, and this became more than evident as I continued to knead out the pie dough and found tiny black hairs embedded in the white. I figured it would all bake out in the end, and no one would notice after all, since it was a purple pie. It was unfortunately at this point that I came to the irritating realization that I had no rolling pin for my pie. Goddamnit! Why didn't I ever put two and two together when I was taught that the rolling pin was essentially iconic for bakers and pie?
Well, fair enough. I had no way of getting the dough into the roasting pan short of mashing it in by hand. It was at this point, however, that I noticed several sturdy rolls of contact paper that my landlord had left behind while he was renovating my house. The engineering mind took over, and I soon found myself happily rolling out my pie with a roll of touch paper covered in plastic wrap.
The story would end here... but for the fact that as I began to fill the pie, I noticed that there was simply more sugar than there were berries to fill the pie. Not being one to leave a pie only partway filled, I spied the Jacksonberries to my right. Yes, they were still floating in the bowl of water by the sink, several hours into this endeavor for pie. Taking a good hard look at them, I figured that while they might look bad trying to pass for wholesome fresh blueberries, no one would ever notice if they were mashed and went into the jelly filling for a pie. With that, I drained them, took out a fork, and mashed and mixed the remaining sugar and threw them in with the rest of the pie, and set that sucker in to bake.

As I write to you now, dear readers, you might wonder what has become of me, now that I have eaten no less than 1/8 of this "dingleberry pie." I can assure you now, that I am certain it wouldn't have passed the SafeServ standards for pie, but damn if I couldn't proudly and loudly declare, "that pie was great."

Further bulletins as events warrant.

P.S. For those of you who are interested in making a Ghetto Pie of your very own, here is the recipe I used.
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*Soccer Chest - n. A pair of breasts that hang so low that everywhere the owner walks she is playing soccer. See also Soccer Boobs.