3.14

Once upon a time, two Thanksgivings ago, I decided I was going to overcome my fear of baking pies.

A lot of the fear has come from the fact that I'm known as a good baker. This is mostly because I bake amazing cookies, and occasionally make my own bread without a bread machine, and everyone assumes these skills translate into everything else. Which is not true. In fact, for the first couple years of my bread-making career, the chance of a given loaf rising seemed entirely random to me. And when I first started making cookies, they almost always turned out flat, or overdone, or flat and overdone. But for both of these endeavors, I powered through those rough early years, and now I no longer worry about whether my bread will rise (even if I do have the occasionally disaster, like the Great Christmas Roll Fiasco of '08, to keep me humble), and I can whip up a batch of the best chocolate chip cookies in the world with hardly a thought.

But while you can safely get away with making cookies or bread every week or two, and thereby get lots of practice, there aren't as many occasions that call for a pie. And many of the occasions that might call for a pie could also reasonably call for, say, cookies, or a loaf of bread, which are a lot safer. So my pie-making has been limited to approximately two a year. It doesn't do much for my pie-crust-making abilities.

Here is a picture of my attempt to roll out a crust for Thanksgiving in 2007. Since that attempt, I have not even hoped for beautiful. I just go for halfway decent.


But sometimes, it turns out, all you need is a little bit of the right kind of motivation.

Here are some of my favorite things: Summer, mathematics, music, teaching, NPR, my dog, running, earrings, chocolate, baking, books, Lost, patterns, words, steamed vegetables, blogging, and watermelon.

Some of these things go together very nicely, like mathematics and teaching, or summer and watermelon, or baking and chocolate. Some of them could be put together, but there's not much reason to, like Lost and steamed vegetables, or my dog and music (Jin just doesn't really react much when I sing to him). But you know how occasionally you pair two things that you just normally wouldn't think of pairing, and the result is life-changing?

I give you baking and mathematics.


Okay, I'm still not a master pie baker, but based on my previous pie-making experiences, I'm pretty darn impressed with myself. Oh, and it's apple, by the way. 

And for the record, those 12 digits of pi were written in by memory. Maybe I should be self-conscious that I have pi memorized to twenty-five decimal places, but I'm actually kind of proud of that fact.

Happy Pi Day everyone!