Murphy’s Law Strikes Again

I’ve never been much of a cook.

I can make a mean pot of mashed potatoes, but that’s about as sophisticated as I get in the kitchen. If something comes in a box that has directions, I like to think that I’m usually competent enough to manage that task. I can also navigate most recipes, as long as the directions are clear, concise and complete. None of this “cook it until it looks done” nonsense for me.

The catch sometimes is that you need to read the directions first.

A few weeks ago, a local grocery store was clearing out their stock of frozen whole wheat pie crusts. We use those to make homemade potpies, and so we bought quite a few of the two-crust packages.

Last weekend, my wife decided that quiche sounded good, so she thawed one of the pie crust packages and used one of them for her quiche – it was quite good actually. She’s a very talented and resourceful cook.

No one could decide what to use the second crust for – my wife didn’t want to make a second quiche, but also didn’t want to make the chocolate pie our daughter was begging for. It went into the kitchen refrigerator for later use.

Fast forward to Thursday, which is usually my night to make dinner. My wife suggested I make another quiche, but that sounded far too complicated for my basic cooking skills, so I declined. I spent the morning trying to figure out how I could incorporate the unused crust into dinner somehow, then it hit me. I could lure our daughter home from her dorm room for a midweek dinner featuring her favorite garlic bread and – drum roll, please! – the chocolate pie she wanted!

At lunch, I rushed to the grocery store – time was of the essence, since I had a meeting scheduled for immediately after lunch that I couldn’t afford to miss. I went directly to the baking aisle, looking for chocolate pie filling. This is apparently not a thing. I worked my way down the aisle to the pudding, casting about for alternative solutions, and that is where I found it – a box of no-bake chocolate cheesecake. That would work perfectly!

I rushed home and pulled out a glass bowl and the hand mixer. I put the powder and milk into the bowl and mixed it per the directions. When it looked ready, I retrieved the pie crust from the refrigerator and prepared to pour the chocolate mixture into the pie crust.

The crust looked a bit funny, so I put everything down and grabbed the plastic cover that had been on the pie crust and looked at the printing on the back of the label. There were clear directions printed there concerning using the crust for a no-bake pie, and that’s when I discovered that the pie crust needed to be cooked first!

Trying not to panic, I set the oven to 400 degrees and put the crust in. I set the timer for 20 minutes – the directions said to cook the crust for 15 minutes at 400 – then grabbed the bowl of chocolate and went into the den. The cheesecake filling was beginning to set already, so I spent the next 20 minutes occasionally stirring the mixture while watching the local midday news as the crust cooked.

The oven timer started buzzing twenty minutes later, so I returned to the kitchen, took the crust out of the oven and quickly moved it to the refrigerator to cool. I was starting to really panic at this point, so I took the it back out of the fridge seven minutes later and slopped the nearly-set cheesecake mix into the still-warm crust, trying to smooth it out as best I could…

Having finished and put the whole thing back in the fridge to properly set, I returned to work – in time for my meeting. Thankfully, I live less than two miles from the office, so made it back for my meeting with time to spare.

When I got home after work, I pulled the chocolate cheesecake pie out of the fridge. The top looked like a lake during a particularly rough summer storm, so I decorated it with whipped cream and graham cracker crumbles and served it with dinner – all three kids seemed to enjoy it, my daughter included!

I may not be much of a cook OR a baker, but when it comes to whipping things up straight out of a box or a can, I’ve got it covered. Usually.