Another 'brilliant plan'

Today, the church RE families get to meet with the minister who's our candidate for the church's next minister. It's a potluck. My repertoire of side dishes is limited, but I'm an OK baker.

Blackberries were on sale, $1 for 6 oz. Blackberry pie is a family tradition! And even if I usually use a store-bought bottom crust, I always make a butter top-crust that is pretty good.

I use a basic recipe from Betty Crocker: berries, a little sugar, a little flour. But I couldn't remember how many berries, so I Googled 'blackberry pie' to get a rough cut. (4-5 c.) But I also encountered a recipe for blackberry-sour cream pie.

That sounded really good. "I'll make that!" I thought, because of course making a recipe you've never tried before is a great idea for a potluck.

I imagined the sour cream part would be very drippy and work its way all around the berries. No. It was 1.25 c sugar, 1 c. flour, 1 c. sour cream. Very thick. It appears to be sitting on top of the berries and getting attractively browned. I'm glad I smoothed it over with a spatula, just in case it didn't ooze like I thought it would.

Well, it's a giant pile of sweet blackberries* with some sweetened dairy on top. It can't be awful, so I'm not going to worry too much. Hopefully it will be actually good and I'll have a new recipe in the file.

*As a kid, I frequently ate frozen wild blackberries that my grandfather picked for us (and then froze). Blackberries, milk and a little sugar was breakfast when we didn't have "eggs, just the way you like them."** They were tiny and mostly very flavorful and sweet. The fresh ones in the store, I've found, are too big and watery, no flavor at all. (The frozen ones are oddly often better.) But these ones on sale are actually great! They taste like blackberries. Must be that they're only good in season, and the season is this week. I've bought 18 containers of the things so far; six went into the pie and we've eaten four or so.

**Grandpa cooked fried eggs. That was how you liked them. Much like how you could have a Model T in any color, as long as it was black.

Well, that was mostly pointless

Today was the Religious Education meet-n-greet with the minister candidate. It was an outdoor cookout, which was a very nice idea. It started at noon, which is just about when Spud goes down for a nap.

That should have been Clue 1 that maybe giving the Dear Spouse a clear ticket to go into DC today was not a Bright Idea. I thought that an outdoor lunch, geared to kids and families, would not be a big deal to solo.

I just chased him constantly. He grabbed food on the tables, markers on the tables, stuck his hand in the dog's water dish, and so on. Typical toddler stuff, but so stressful when I was trying to get something to eat and it was so unseasonably hot. I do not do heat well.

I tried to leave him with one of the sitters (when I went to go fix the car seat) and she had to bring him to me because he was crying that hard. I turned down the offer of a nap room for the same reason - putting him in a strange room in a crib is right now roughly the equivalent of dropping him off in the middle of the Australian desert as the dingoes begin to howl. He threw a fit when I wouldn't let him scribble on the tablecloth with a marker. I decided it was time to go. We had been there an hour.

Sum total interaction with the candidate minister:

telerib (at the drink station, trying to stay hydrated and keep Spud from making off with a stack of cups at the same time and bumping into people as a result): "Oh, sorry."

Rev: "No, pardon me."

Yeah. So. I have absolutely no further insight into the nature of Rev Olsen than I did when I started. Which was the alleged point of the 45-min one-way drive. I said a few fond hellos to some of the other parents and our RE director, but it's hard to have a conversation when your child is trying to wander into the middle of a badminton game.

On the plus side, I had some good mac-n-cheese, some great cookies, and a little boy was very sweet and kept trying to make friends with Spud. And I got the car seat fixed. And the car didn't run out of gas on the way home.

Verdict on the pie: Meh. The berries are quite tart with no sugar on them and the sour cream topping tastes a bit of flour. It's not inedible or anything, but I'd be further ahead to stick with Pie Classic, or find a berries-n-cream recipe that melds the two together better.