Part III...
Lessons learned during Jeanne's third vacation Tuesday...
- Asking for her thoughts on offering all pies with a "special solid crust top" on Tuesdays instead of the lattice top will just result in Jeanne shutting down the whole plan.
- Asking for my thoughts on offering all pies with lattice top instead of the "special solid crust top" will just result in me swearing a lot.
- Opening our doors at 10:30 with a sense of accomplishment for having the American Apple, Dutch Apple, and Caramel Apple completely finished will quickly evaporate when one person buys all three big pies at 10:31 am and puts the PJP in-stock 9-inch pie count back to zero within 60 seconds of unlocking our front door.
- Trying to outwit, outlast, and outplay the baking schedule by doing all pies that don't require a lattice top first will just make you sweat, curse, and regret the decision to lump one succession of lattice top pies after another into the final baking category.
- Mentally composing an #AngryTweet at the company that bags flour into 50 pound bags, thereby making it damn near impossible to pick up and fill the flour container while alone is therapeutic. #MyBackHurtsNow #ShouldHaveLiftedWithTheKneesAndNotTheBack
- Dry-heaving into the commercial sink as you fish out random pieces of peaches and applies and cherries from the drain with your hand makes your college kid employee double over with laughter.
- Having any sense of time is completely impossible when working from the back dough-rolling table. By 11:30 am, I would have bet $20 that it was 1:15 in the afternoon.
- That said, slamming the rolling-pin down on a massive slab of dough to keep rolling strips and envisioning something that is really bothering you is free therapy and oddly satisfying. Since Jeanne does it on the regular, I think this must be why she is more zen than I am.
- Because I didn't really leave the fruit pie prep/dough-rolling table, I had no concept of what pies Sydney had sold or what people were requesting. And when Sydney cheerfully announced she had sold all the big fruit pies and kindly asked if I would be making any more, I wanted to beat her up. Whole new perspective, indeed.
- After three more Tuesdays have passed us by and Jeanne is back to a regular schedule, it is possible that the dough-rolling table and I will have become besties and have tons of inside jokes together and our own secret code language and then we won't even need Jeanne and I'll end up as the lattice making queen of the world. Except...
