Fail and success

Had not one, but three nightmares last night--one in which I was taking a test and discovered that the second page was already filled in in someone else's handwriting but the substitute teacher refused to talk to me about what to do until it was too late to finish the test, one involving horribly complicated deathtraps in a flooded room full of pipes, and one in which my father died in a plane crash and I was trying to comfort my mother at the funeral but just ended up on kneeling on the floor wailing. Good times.

But I taught myself how to make spaetzle today. It's kind of between a crepe and an egg noodle, tastewise. Success!

Insufficient pie

So usually Thanksgiving at my inlaws' involves far, far too much dessert. (One year, we had half a pie per person.) But through several different factors, I arrived this year with two pies to discover that only one more pie was coming. We would have my Tollhouse pie and my chocolate caramel nut pie and DG's pumpkin pie. Which is a completely rational amount of pie for fourteen people, but shockingly low compared to previous years. There was some worrying about perhaps insufficient pie. And then I spoke to my parents, who revealed that they had three pies, the exact same number, but for only four people.

That did it, DG and I decided. We needed more pie.

So I made a fourth pie on the fly with what happened to be in my mother-in-law's freezer. We ended up with cranberry-blueberry. I popped it in the oven as soon as dinner came out, and since my inlaws believe in a lengthy pause between dinner and dessert (to give you time to rally), there was enough time to bake and cool the Emergency Pie before they all hit the table.

Pie emergency! Time for emergency pie!