National Pie Day

January 23 was National Pie Day. Hopefully you celebrated accordingly.

I caught wind of a pie baking contest being hosted by a local pie shop the day before Pie Day proper (as a Sunday afternoon is much better suited for a pie contest over a Monday afternoon). I thought this was a perfect opportunity to test my pies abilities at the next level.

There were two judging categories, sweet and savory, so clearly having 800% more experience baking sweet pies, I wisely decided that going sweet was my best option. I elected to go with an apple pie because I knew I could make an apple pie blindfolded, with one arm tied behind my back, hungover, and in a blizzard.

Some assembly still required.

To make my apple pie a bit sexier though, I ground up some slivered almonds into flour to add into the crust and incorporated sliced almonds in my crumble topping.

It truly turned out exactly as I envisioned:

It is a winner in my book.

The pie contest was scheduled at the same time as the NFC Championship in which my 49ers were trying to get to the Super Bowl for the first time in 17 years, so I wasn't present for the judging or the announcing of the results. When I didn't get a congratulatory phone call by 6pm that night (4 hours after judging), I deduced that I did not win.

And then the Niners lost. Lame.

Mary and I drove back to the pie shop to pick up my pie dish and eat some of their sausage rolls and other various meat-cheese-herb stuffed savory pies.  I was very pleasantly surprised to see that some of my pie survived the judging process:

Just need a fork now.

I gave a chunk of my pie to one of the workers at the pie shop who didn't get to sample any of the pies previously during judging, and almost asked for a fork so I could eat my pie on the car ride home to hopefully ease the pain of a pie contest loss and a championship game loss in the same day.

While I did not place in the pie contest, I did win a raffle of sorts by commenting on the pie-centric blog maintained by one of the judges (www.makemesomepie.com). The pie shop used a nifty product called "Pie Contest in a Box" to run the contest, and afterwards, a second copy was raffled off to those who submitted comments on the judge's results roundup blog entry. So now I should be all set to host my own pie contest! Booyah.

I've got to think that I would be the early favorite to win this next pie contest if I am the one hosting it...

-Isaac.