chocolate pie and love

The part about baking…

Holiday season has finally arrived. Or it has in my house at least. I celebrated my first Thanksgiving over the weekend. My parents just celebrate when it’s convenient for all of us. I made pies. My sisters are still under the impression that I can’t or don’t cook. The funny thing is that I’m definitely a better cook than at least two of the three. I love new recipes and I love cooking for other people.

I’m celebrating Thanksgiving with my boyfriend’s family on the actual day. He requested that I make chocolate pie. I asked him about a million questions to make sure I got the pie exactly right. First I pulled out my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook. When I had no luck there the second choice is always google. I found about a million chocolate pie recipes.

I tried the first of my pie recipes on my family for our Thanksgiving. I didn’t want to take a bad pie to someone else’s house. It had homemade pudding, as all of my recipes did. This particular recipe had cocoa, cornstarch, sugar, and milk. I always forget that I hate the texture cornstarch gives things. Those foods always seem slightly gelatinous and gross, kind of like old Chinese food. So the pie tasted delicious other than the texture, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that was bothered by it.

I’m going to try a second chocolate pie this week. It’s pretty much just chocolate chips and evaporated milk. I have more faith in it. So here’s hoping for more chocolate pie success. I’m going to top it with whipped cream and chocolate curls. I had my sister make extra pie crust for me the other day. That is one thing I haven’t mastered yet, I cannot make a good pie crust.

I’m ready for more holiday cooking. I also can’t wait to put up the tree and be festive for Christmas. Traditionally I put up the tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. We’re going to a wedding that weekend though so it will have to wait. I’m trying a new color scheme with my tree this year. I’m a little nervous. For the past five years or so I’ve had a gold and burgundy tree. I keep seeing all these cute bright colorful trees and wanting to do that. Last year after Christmas I bought pink, turquoise and silver ornaments and trimmings for my tree. I think it’ll be good, I’m just not sure about the change. And I don’t have a tree skirt that will match yet.

The part about relationships….

Relationships are funny. I’m usually a reasonably well adjusted person, fairly level headed. But, add my boyfriend to any equation and I automatically over think it. For some reason every word spoken must be analyzed, every tone, every background noise, pretty much anything that can succeed in making me crazy. Once every few weeks I succeed in making myself absolutely crazy over something.

Let me preface this by sharing the information that this is a long distance relationship. We live about two and a half hours apart. I haven’t seen him for two weeks. We also have different days off so it takes some finagling to get our schedules to work. Anyway, I assumed he was coming to visit me this week. But he went on a hunting trip last week and hasn’t really gotten lots of rest lately so he’s not coming to see me. That means I won’t see him until Thanksgiving. Yeah, I’ll get to see him that day and then we’ll be together the whole weekend. Three weeks is a long time not to see my boyfriend though. I know I’m being a baby about it. And I told him it was fine. It is and I totally understand it’s just hard not to be a little disappointed. And I know it will be better eventually.