Pie is good.

You cannot have too much pie.

Pie has made me look like a bloated piglet.

I have had a lot of pie in the past few days and am having a ball eating so much - now *this* is what the trip is all about!

We stopped in North Dakota and got free pie just for filling our van with petrol/gas which included corn-derived ethanol. How did we know about the free pie? From the billboards over the previous 60 miles on the Interstate, of course. If there is one thing more ubiquitous than pie, it’s billboards…

Anyway, we had some peach pie and some blueberry pie for free there.

Yesterday we went to the Heartland Sirloin Buffet in Alexandria and I got to sample all the different pies there as well.

• Pecan pie. Edible only to Americans perhaps - this is the worst pie flavour I’ve tasted.
• Chocolate bavarian pie. Believe it or not, it’s chocolate mousse on a chocolate cookie base, topped with KoolWhip and choc-chip bits). Incidentally, KoolWhip is what Americans use in place of whipped cream - but it is more like a light meringue liquid with the consistency of whipped cream. Sort of fluffy sugar that you can dollop with a spoon. Tastes foul to us. Americans love it.
• Peach pie again. Don’t understand why we do not have this in Australia - it is fantastic! Yum! Delicious! Whatever superlative you use, it still puzzles us to think we have peaches but no peach pie market back home.
• Blueberry pie again. Another good tasting pie, though not as fiercely fought for by us as peach pie is. Tastes very pleasant.
• Banana cream pie. Evil. Bad. Yuk. It’s just like a warm Barney Banana ice-cream, which, come to think of it, no longer exist back home anyway. I know why. They tasted bad too.
• Pumpkin pie. This one took a lot of guts to eat. Sounding bloody horrible, it actually does not taste anything like pumpkins. Very sweet, it has the stringy consistency of mashed pumpkin, and neither one of us eally thought it was good. Very different to what we’d both always thought it would taste like though.
• Baked cheesecake. Though not technically a pie, it was a crust with a filling, and tasted like an Aussie baked cheesecake. A little odd, since the cheese in the two countries tastes so vastly different.
• Apple pie. This one varies so much, it’s impossibe to really define. Sometimes they have so much cinnamon, you cannot taste the apple. Americans seem to love this version. Then, if you are not going to load it with cinnamon, you have to dump in at least 8 bags of sugar. Reserve another bag to sprinkle over the top. Today though, I tried an apple pie with not very much sugar at all - to the point where Clarence did not recognise it immediately as an apple pie due to the lack of sugar and different consistency.
• Gooseberry pie. With very little sugar in it, these berries are really tart and put quite a smile on the face when you are eating it. In the same way a lemon makes you smile. The first bite is the worst because you are expecting it to be sweet, even when warned it is tart, but as soon as you know what to expect with the next bite, it is a very nice flavour, we both agreed.

That’s for the past two days worth of sampling. Other pies we have tried in the past few months include:

• Key Lime pie. This one looked like a lemon meringue pie, and we bought it because it actually used egg whites for the meringue, not Kool Whip. Kind of tasted more like a lemon meringue pie too, as it did have some lemon in it, as well as lime. Quite a nice flavour and not anywhere near as evilly artificial as we were expecting.
• Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. Two fruits we never would have thought to put together, but these flavours really complimented one another. Would definitely buy it again. If only we could find it, since it seems to have vanished forever in supermarkets.

There are a few pies out there on the market that we are not really sure if we will ever try. Perhaps if we didn’t have a choice? And were in the desert? Dying? In any event, they do not sound great to us at all…

• Cherry pie. Knowing what US cherries taste like, this is just an evil sounding pie.
• Sweet potato pie. Neither of us really like the vegetable to begin with, so to put it in a pie does not make it appealing either.
• Peanut butter pie. Yes, it exists. No, we would not touch it with a forty-foot pole. It’s just one of those great mysteries - why do Americans need to put peanut butter in everything???
• Raisin pie. A “raisin” is actually a “sultana”, and we have no idea what they call raisins. Somehow they make it into a pie. Not sure how. Not sure why. Does not sound good at all.

We are sure there are plenty of other pies out there that we have not tried yet, nor found yet, and cannot give you details of right now. Still, we need to go have naps to get rid of this bloated feeling since our bodies are screaming “take us for a walk to get rid of the flab” but we can best avoid that by sleeping and not hearing the screams of protest…*grin*

Trav and Pie, er, Di.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001