Just Desserts

Sometimes I don’t listen to myself very well. I’m great at handing out pearls of wisdom and then forgetting to wear them. Take yesterday. Hubby and I were surfing through the TV channels when he stopped briefly on one of those infomercials. It was the one where the short woman with the curly hair makes 16,000 kinds of dishes out of a piece of bread, a tablespoon of apples and a sandwich maker for just two easy payments of $19.99. She pulled two tasty looking tostada cups out of the gizmo, and I looked at Hubby and said, “You know, that stuff always looks good, but when you get right down to it, it still tastes just like a piece of bread and a hunk of meat”. Insert smug laughter here. And flash forward to two hours later.

Mama J. called and said she had made two banana cream pies and we could have one of them if we wanted it. Since it was dessert we naturally wanted it. Not to mention the fact that we should take advantage of the fact that Mama J. cooked, because that won’t happen again for another six months. Hubby loves banana cream pie, especially his mama’s banana cream pie. It was also his one day of the week when he relaxes his diet and eats dessert…if you don’t count that vanilla shake he has on Tuesdays that he thinks I don’t know about. He was positively salivating over that pie and told Teen Angel to hop over and get it since fetching is the reason we birthed her. She went next door, brought it home and promptly dropped it on the back step. Upside down. It splattered in nine directions and wasn’t salvageable in any way. Trust me, I considered scooping up the parts that landed where I thought the dog hadn’t walked recently but didn’t think my weakened immune system could stand it. Teen Angel cleaned it up, and I broke the news to the Man on a Diet. I thought for a moment he was going to cry. He looked like I did the other night when Missouri beat Memphis and screwed up my NCAA bracket. He whined about that pie for an hour.

I thought I’d make it up to him by making the closest thing to banana cream pie I could with the ingredients I had on hand. Now, before you laugh, you should know I’m pretty good at this kind of trick. I can usually open the cabinets and whip up something tasty with the stuff that’s sitting there. I’m not braggin’, I’m just sayin’ I could do a little Iron Chef sumpin’ sumpin’ if I had to, and no one would walk away hungry. I kind of like the challenge, which is why I didn’t just make a regular pie crust out of some flour, water and shortening. Instead, I grabbed a package of refrigerated crescent rolls, a small box of instant pudding, some bananas and some whipped cream. I lined a muffin tin with the crescent rolls and baked them up like puffed pastry cups. I let them cool, filled them with pudding and bananas, topped them with whipped cream and proudly handed one to Hubby after dinner. Insert more smugness here. He gratefully thanked me, gobbled it up and said, “Mmhmm”, when I asked him if it was good. He didn’t elaborate, but I thought he was still mourning his mama’s pie. I was too full to eat my concoction. When Teen Angel came home from church youth group she foraged around in the fridge for something sweet, and I told her about the pudding cups. Her reply? “Yeah, I tried one but it tasted like a big roll in the middle of some pudding.”

Would someone please hold my pearls?