A Sad Day For Pie

I know I've told you all about the ugly pie...but have you ever heard the story of the sad pies? No? Well, pull up a chair and grab a tissue...you'll need it. It happened on a very regular Saturday. I was feeling very ambitious...which is rare for a Saturday. I jumped right out of bed at the crack of 7:45 and cleaned my bathroom and hit the shower. I even dried and straightened my hair instead of the lazy curlyish route that usually guides my Saturday morning routine. Then I hit a couple of stores to pick up some last minute (hahahaha) Christmas gifts. After I guided the then cranky hubby to the football game and the big comfy couch...I headed to the kitchen to begin baking the pumpkin pies I had signed up to bring to the pot luck at church the following day. I decided that since I signed up to bring 3 pies I would make 4 since Kevin LOVES pumpkin pie. Well, my crust recipe makes enough dough for 4 small pies. It's kind of a stretch to get enough crust for my bigger pie plates so I decided to make an apple pie also and double the crust recipe (I can't really half the recipe because it calls for 1 egg). So I got out everything I would need and jumped in. I put the first pan of P.C. cookies in to bake and continue mixing and stirring and singing...actually I was kind of bent about something so I was venting to Jo...but I wished I was singing. I took the cookies out of the oven and didn't notice anything too strange about their appearance. Maybe a little uneven in color is all. They tasted ba-lish so I trudged on. The pies went in next and all was well. I cleaned up the mess and waited for the first batch of pies to come out. The warm yummy smell was noticeable absent when I pulled the first 2 pies out of the oven. Hey...something is weird about these pies...the top is burnt and they don't smell fabulous. hhhhmmmm. Well, with no time to waste I threw the next batch in the oven. Same result...creepy. Fast forward to Sunday at pot luck. My pies tasted TERRIBLE!!! They looked like crap and they tasted worse with a burnt top and a soggy bottom (there is nothing I hate more than a soggy bottom). I was so embarrassed. And believe me...they noticed. I wanted to crawl into a hole. The poor guys at my table (well, some of them anyway) tried to hide their sour faces. I wracked my brain for all the explanations for why my best pie recipe failed. AH HA! The milk. It had to be the evaporated milk. Dang...Mom always told me to check the milk before adding it to the pumpkin. Man...good advice. So as I was in bed last night trying to sleep, Kev came in and announced he knew why the pies had burned on the top and not cooked on the bottom. The oven had been set on the broil setting.
HUH? No way...oh yes it had. The genius man who designed my stove screwed up on the knobs.
My last stove had one knob to turn it on to bake, broil or the cleanning option. If you turned this knob on you controlled which set of burners was going to get hot. The other knob determined how hot the oven was going to get. Well, this oven is a little more tricksy. If the oven is set to broil, it will broil something at 350*...and leave you with a soggy bottom pie. So, the moral of the story is if you're going to vent to your daughter while baking...have someone else turn on the oven, or you'll have a tale of sad pies.