Lisa, your pie post reminded me of one of my mom s cooking disasters that is a family legend. We went for a drive in the country and saw a little stand in front of someone s house with blackberries for sale at a bargain price. After some blackberry shortcake that night, my mother announced that she was making the rest into jelly, although she had never made jam or jelly of any type before.

She got out her cookbook and mixed in the required amount of sugar and cooked the berries with it. Not sure how many quarts we got but they filled our largest soup pot. The next step called for straining the pulp through cheesecloth to extract the juice. Uh-oh. Not only didn t my mother have any, she didn t even know what it was. So she got one of my dad s softest, oldest, clean white t-shirts and sewed the bottom and sleeves shut on the sewing machine. Down the neck went the whole stockpot full of berry stuff. I remember laughing so hard because it looked like a man with a giant purple beer belly. She started to twist and squeeze it but only a few drops were coming out so she asked my dad to help. He was pushing on it, my mom was pulling on it when all of a sudden, it ruptured in about 5 or 6 places at once and berries were squirting just like fountains, onto the floor, up to the ceiling and on the walls and all over my parents.

That was the one and only time I heard my father use  The F Word and that s why we ended up being the only house in our neighborhood whose kitchen walls were painted lilac.