A tale of a broken toe and a broken pie.

Nearly a month ago, I broke my toe walking around on Foster Island. Our motivation for that walk was purely to pick the yummy wild blackberries that grow everywhere here. The following weekend, we kept to ourselves waiting for news about S's dad. In an effort to keep our moods positive, we decided to turn the 4+ cups of blackberries into a delicious pie. That would surely bring a smile to our faces.

We cleaned the berries, purchased the ingredients, and drooled as we watched our creation burbling in the oven. When the timer buzzed, I took the pie out and laughed as I watched it spin in its glass dish. Oops! I guess I must have over-greased the dish. When the spinning stopped, I held the dish up to see if the bottom had browned. When I did this, the entire pie literally FLEW right out of the dish and smashed all over the floor and interior of our oven. The dish was still in my hands! In a desperate move, S declared that we needed to scrape some of the pie off of the oven so we could have just a taste that night. This plan worked to some degree, but we were pretty much left pie-less. All that plus the broken toe left me a little disenchanted.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending. We took a walk in Magnuson Park the following week and ran across a huge, largely unpicked batch of berries (see photos above). We grabbed a bag out of the car and went nuts--scraping our arms, snagging our shirts--desperate to eat a blackberry pie. We headed straight to the grocery and baked one helluva pie that evening. I very carefully took it out of the oven this time, and my... was it ever yummy. =)