Easy as Pie

Julian eyed the potatoes with suspicion, not being clear on how to get from raw vegetable to mashed goodness and equally unsure about the source of gravy, something he was certain to need in the not too distant future.

The clock said noon which gave him a good six hours to complete the masterpiece he had promised his new girlfriend, the one he had just acquired after having followed her into a cooking exhibition at the mall without realizing that he was doing anything more than chasing a skirt.

“Do you cook?” she had asked after noticing him standing innocently in her field of vision.

“It’s my passion,” he said without hesitation.

The cookbooks had seemed the obvious solution, all four of which had been purchased based on the covers where each had some variation of “Cooking Made Easy” as the lure for the novice eye in search of unearned culinary perfection.

With a flash of brilliance, Julian transferred the frozen lasagna into the microwave safe pot-like thing which he purchased a mere five minutes after his collection of kitchen literature, the two-fold assumption being that microwave food was the same as food from scratch and that lasagna goes well with mashed potatoes and gravy.

The fire had caused an unexpected delay due mostly to the significant and sudden smoke-induced drop in visibility. The men from the department had been good sports about the event, even providing him some valuable tips such as mashed potatoes are not cooked in a deep fryer, whatever that was. Julian assumed it was a reference to the inch deep oil bath which had inexplicably burst into flames as he was warming up his potatoes in preparation for eventual mashing.

The night ultimately turned out fine thanks to the Applebee’s take-out from around the corner.

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