please eat pie

When I was in my first year of college, my best friend Sharon and I sat in my bedroom on a hot summer day and wrote letters to David Letterman. Not love letters, although we did adore him with a certain fervor. No, we wrote pithy messages, brief missives, hoping to make it onto the viewer mail segment.

They were ridiculous, of course. “Dear Dave, it’s 102° here today. What do we do?“
“Dear Dave, would you like a hat?“
“Dear Dave, have a bitching summer. Stay as sweet as you are. Love, Sandra Day O’Connor.”

(The saddest part of that one is that we were merely repeating a joke from his show. oh no.)

Perhaps my favorite — and Sharon’s too, for how often we have said it to one another — was the shortest: “Dear Dave, please eat pie!”

Please eat pie. This isn’t a sentence uttered to folks who have to eat gluten-free, mostly. But when our cookbook comes out next fall, that’s what we will be saying to those of you reading.

Please, eat pie. How about some blackberry peach pie?

Have some pizza dough, rising by the window, soft and supple, ready to be shaped into whatever you want to make.

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And have some pizza, crisp with a hint of chewiness in the middle. A pizza with flavor, that holds its shape, even when you put a creamy sheep’s milk cheese, roasted tomatoes, and a farm fresh egg in the middle. Even when you put the pizza under the broiler at the last moment, to get a bit of char on the edge.

Please, have some bread. Some crusty bread with olive oil and sea salt on the top. A bread that bends and doesn’t dry up overnight. A bread made with whole grains, and so tastes healthy, but doesn’t taste healthy, you know? Instead, it just tastes like bread.

Have some fettucine noodles, piled on a plate, ready to be cooked. Five minutes before, I started mixing the flours. Five minutes after taking this photograph, I had the pasta in boiling water. Two minutes later, it was a perfect al dente.

Have pasta for lunch. Make up your mind in the moment that you want some. Sauté up some peppers, tomatoes, shallots and yellow squash. Mix in some homemade pesto and stir it up. Eat while laughing with your love.

Have some pasta.

Feeling peckish? How about some crackers? Homemade crackers that might go well with curried red lentil puree.

Have some apple bread for breakfast. Warm from the oven, with the smell of Gravensteins, and a faint caramel taste on the crust, because it’s finally baked correctly, without that line of dense moisture in the middle. It just tastes good.

I wish that I could share these with you now.

Sadly, I’ll have to wait a year, when our book comes out. And that gives us time to tweak and bake again and have our friends make them too, to make sure they are foolproof for you.

We have been happily enmeshed in the final edits for our book these past two weeks, and will be for another few weeks beyond that. I might not be posting as much as I would like. And I cannot promise many new recipes, since we are so busy baking the ones for the book.

But I’d like to share with you, in pithy messages, as much as I can.

Please eat pie.