In less than three weeks I’m headed to the bright lights and bustle of New York Citeeee, yee haw!  Ok, in my head that line made much more sense than it does on the page, you have to hear the drawled out vowels and hick-like voice for it to resonate.  Anyway, I’m headed there because the lovely peeps at Foodbuzz and Electrolux are sponsoring 15 bloggers to attend a cake decorating workshop in order to raise awareness for ovarian cancer research.  I’m pretty excited, but a couple days ago trepidation set in.  Sure, I know my way around a pastry bag and can kind of sort out what piping tip produces what whirligig, but a master pastry chef will be in the hizouse- I’ve gotta step up my game! Not to mention the fact that many of the other bloggers chosen to attend have blogs specifically about pastries, cakes, sweet things and the like.  I don’t wanna get kicked out of school for having an unsteady hand, so I better get baking, right?

Cue the key lime pie.  The key limes have been calling to me from the market stalls the past couple of weeks. “Eat me, Linda, take me home!”  Not one to resist the high-pitched wails of tiny green produce, I carted home a couple pounds a few days back.  Then yesterday Martin Luther King Day rolled around. I was doing some research on his favorite foods so I could theme dinner that evening, and I discovered his favorite pie. Wait for it- pecan pie.  What does that have to do with key lime pie, Linda? Well you see I don’t really like pecan that much, plus I wanted to do something that would help me practice piping, spreading and decorating and pecan pie is kind of a bake it then eat it dessert.  I was at least in the neighborhood with pie though, and I think Dr. King would have approved since he was so saint-like and I’m fairly good at key lime pie whereas I suck at pecan.  I also read that he liked cornbread, and I love cornbread with chicken so I made braised greens, cornbread, buttermilk chicken and key lime pie. 

The dinner itself was so comfortingly rich and good there wasn’t much we could do productively afterward, so as a family we settled onto the lounge to watch a rare hour of television.  Well, Netflix actually, since we don’t technically own a TV, just a DVD player and a projector screen.  The few shows we do watch are always one season back because of this, and inevitably someone says something at a party like “Did you see Jim ask Pam to blah blah blah on The Office the other night?” and we’re screwed for the next season.  We happen to be into Dexter at the moment which we thought was safe from water cooler chit chat, but alas more people are into serial killers than let on, because Michael C. Hall just won a well-deserved Golden Globe. 

Anyway, the episode we happened to watch is called “Easy as Pie.” I thought it was a strange parallel to our dessert that was chilling in the fridge, but I was even more surprised when I realized the entire episode was about Dexter’s hunt for the perfect key lime pie.  He was hoping to find the perfect pie to give to his friend who is dying of lung cancer so that she could move on to the other realm.  In real life, Michael C. Hall is in remission from cancer.  This entire post is indirectly brought about by cancer since it’s about me baking in NYC in order to raise awareness for ovarian cancer research.  If this is not a serendipitous coincidence about how cancer is all around us and we all need to do what we can to help battle it, I don’t know what is.  In any case, despite my food coma from such a filling dinner, I managed to lug the pie out of the fridge and cut just a big enough slice that it lasted me through the episode- what a sweet deal!