Shut your pie hole

Last week I drove past a pie place with a big sign out front that read "Fill Your Pie Hole!"

Now, I know it's a completely innocent phrase (though it's always sounded vaguely dirty.) But it got my attention and stuck in my brain and now I'm hungry for pie. Or maybe it's just that it's the end of summer, which seems like such a pie time of year.

People don't make pies very often anymore. I miss pie.

My grandmother's generation made a lot of pies. And, man, that woman could bake. (She's still alive. Just doesn't bake anymore.) She probably ate desert every day of her life and in the time I knew her, she was never overweight. She just moved that much and ate enough good stuff to balance it out. Oh, and she never drank sodas. When we would visit, she'd send grandpa down to the basement to bring up a couple of bottles of "pop." They kept some generic brand of 7 up for when we were there, but they never drank it.

But back to the pie ....

She made amazing cherry pies and rhubarb crunchs. My other grandmother made fantastic lemon pies, that were so tart, you almost couldn't eat them without the meringue. To this day my dad won't eat anyone else's lemon meringue pie.

Baking a desert every other day is something that seems to have gotten lost between my grandmother's generation and my own, not just in my family, but all over. My mother always had gallons of ice cream in the house and store bought cookies. Now I have pints of Ben and Jerry's and Ghirardelli chocolate carmel squares. But not fresh pie.

Despite my craving for pie, I probably won't make one. We all try to eat healthier now. But I wonder sometimes if Cherry Garcia is any healthier than cherry pie. It probably isn't. It just stores better in the freezer.

So what's your favorite kind of pie?n