Jail Escape Pie
I’m told that even while Martha Stewart was in jail, she couldn’t stop cooking. She and the other inmates were limited to using a microwave, but she did her best with the materials provided to enhance the reportedly dismal jail food.
Apparently, she even harvested dandelion greens from the prison yard. I don’t know how she prepared them, but I know my family would rather eat prison food than anything that green.
Speaking of my family, if I were in her shoes, I’d view my incarceration as a lovely opportunity to not cook. I’d sit back, read my “Living” magazine, graciously accept my three squares a day, and revel in not having to think about what to make for dinner.
Come to think of it, I might consider committing a wee misdemeanor, just to grab a few weeks in jail, so I can get a break from daily food prep.
My family would miss me terribly, because they would be chef-less, living on peanut butter and takeout for the duration. But the traditional method of facilitating my escape would be beyond them: they are way too culinarily challenged to bake a file into a pie.
If you are the type who would actually desire to escape from jail, here’s a recipe for Jail Escape Pie even your family can make. They smuggle it in to you, you eat the pie and use the cleverly enclosed tool to file your way through the iron bars to freedom. (That is, if you consider cooking three meals a day for picky people some perverse form of freedom.)
If you like the pie a lot, or if you just enjoy having your family prepare food for you, a thing that only happens once in a millennium, pretend it was confiscated and tell your family to bring you another one. Keep this up until you grow either suspiciously fat or sick of eating pie.
JAIL ESCAPE PIE
Pillsbury ready-made pie crusts
One jar Triple-Cherry Pie&Cobbler Filling (at Williams-Sonoma)
One file suitable for jail escapes (ask at your hardware store)
2 Tbls. milk
1 Tbls. sugar
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
On the package of pie crusts there are directions for making a cherry pie. Follow them exactly. When you come to the part about adding the cherry filling, slip in the file along with the Triple-Cherry stuff.
When the pie is assembled, brush the top of it lightly with milk and then sprinkle with sugar. Take a knife and stab the crust in a few places to provide vents for steam.
Bake for ten minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake for another forty minutes or so, until the crust is golden and looks, you know, done.
P.S. While your pie is baking, click here to read about how Martha Stewart failed to win the prize at her prison’s Christmas decorating contest.
Tags: jail, martha stewart, pie
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:44 am
A favorite memory from my early childhood (5 or 6) is picking dandelion greens with my Greek Yia Yia Lula. Bitter taste? You bet. But, apparently, they’re really good for you, so the Greeks eat them anyway, which tells you a lot about growing up Greek. : )
Sofia