My husband made me a lemon meringue pie once.

With meringue a mile high it was the most beautiful looking pie I had ever seen! I was so excited that he had baked it for me, because it is my favorite pie in the world.

Later that night after dinner, we served it up… took a bite, and for an instant we were in heaven…mmmmmm…

Then suddenly, and with a simultaneous “GaaaACK,” we spit it out. (You see, the pie tasted perfect at first, but then a vile and bitter taste burst into our mouth.) Both of us where prune faced, and he said, “I don’t know what I did wrong!” We looked over the recipe and talked through the steps together trying to discover his mistake. The instructions said to add the zest of one whole lemon. He had added the whole lemon peel!

Now you need a bit of back story here…

I loved my mother but she had a few bad habits. One of which was to help herself to anything good in the refrigerator. She would walk in and just go straight to the refrigerator and help herself! No “may I?” or “Is this for later?” or “Are you saving this for someone?” She just got it out and ate it!

So, after laughing heartily we decided to keep the pie, and placed it back into the refrigerator for mother’s visit the next day.

Do you think me evil? 😉

As predicted, Mom came the next day, walked in and put her purse down, chatted a bit, and then hit the refrigerator. From the living room we could hear her little squeak of delight at seeing that perfect looking pie in the fridge. The silverware tinkled, a desert plate clinked onto the counter, and all the while we were dying of stuffing back our guffaws in the living room.

Mom came back, pie in one hand, fork in the other, sporting a look of delicious anticipation, and sat gingerly onto the couch.

She took the first bite…

We soberly watched as a smile of perfect delight radiated across her face, which was suddenly replaced by one I can only describe as abject disgust. She swallowed, shuddered, and then meekly asked, “What’s wrong with this pie?”

By this time we were laughing so hard we had tears rolling down our cheeks. Quickly recovering we told her the whole story, with only a little fib at the end about not wanting to throw it away because it was so pretty. This got her to laughing too, and from then on the incident was spoken of more than once in the family, and was referred to as, “Bob’s Trick Pie.” Not surprisingly, for a long while afterward, she would always ask before eating pie at our house…