Sometimes life drops a lesson on you, figuratively and a little literally.

The other day, I realized we were out of sandwich bread, so I set about baking some. Nothing fancy, just two loaves of white bread. I have a stand mixer with a dough hook and everything! Easy peasy.

My husband went to Costco to pick up our monthly-ish bulk groceries and sundries. He came home with a not-unreasonable quantity of frozen items… unfortunately, that same week, he’d already stocked up on different frozen items from the regular grocery store.

Our freezer is not the TARDIS, alas. It is not bigger on the inside.

I played freezer Tetris long enough to lose feeling in my fingers, and eventually managed to fit everything. Almost everything. No matter what I did, how I smooshed and shoved and stacked, one thing could not be contained: a two-pack of frozen pie crusts.

The fastest solution would have been to throw them away and move on, but I hate waste. And so, because life gave me pie crusts, I decided to juggle bread making while also baking some pies.

At this point, I had already plopped the bread dough into a bowl and it was proving for the first time. This meant I had a timer going, and when time was up, I’d have to punch and knead and split the dough into two baking pans for the second rise.

And also bake two pies. No biggie.

As inconvenient as this was for me, as much work as it made, my family was naturally delighted by the prospect of both bread and pie. Well, my daughter wasn’t, because she doesn’t really like pie crust, but she does enjoy scraping out the filling. We even had leftover homemade whipped coconut cream, waiting to be dolloped on top.

The vegan brownie pie I make requires that I prebake the crusts for a bit, so I did that while I assembled the other ingredients and kept an eye on my rising bread dough. I had to make a double batch, and all the measurements were in metric, so there I was, converting and mathing and measuring and pouring, melting chocolate and sugar in my rigged double-boiler, a.k.a. a metal mixing bowl held with an oven mitt over a pot of boiling water.

Did I mention I have ADHD? Ah, well, nevertheless.

I was managing. I finished the chocolate filling as both the pie crust and bread alarms went off nearly simultaneously. Deciding the bread could wait, I set out trivets, put on my trusty oven mitts, and started taking out the crusts. One down, one to go, and then…

My daughter ran into the kitchen. With the oven wide open, me leaning inside pulling out a pie tin.

My husband shouted. I startled. Down went the pie crust I fumbled in my alarm. Splat. Floor pie.

I closed the oven and took a deep breath. Now what? I had two pies worth of filling solidifying in the bowl, and one crust. And the bread dough waiting for me to give it a hearty smack.

I also had an empty pie tin in my cabinet. So I got that out, greased it up, and poured in the filling sans crust. One brownie pie, one… Just brownies, I guess.

You may remember from a few paragraphs back that my daughter likes pie, but not crust.

So, let’s review. My husband interrupted my bread making with too many freezer things, which meant I had to bake pies. Happy husband and son! I dropped one of the pie crusts whose inability to fit in the freezer led to emergency baking, and had to make one “pie” without crust. Happy daughter!

The only one inconvenienced was me, and in the end, that’s all it really was: an inconvenience. No one was injured, one half-baked pie crust was lost to gravity.

There’s a life lesson in here somewhere. About not giving up. About being able to pivot when stuff happens, about being flexible, about plans going wrong sometimes leading to new plans going right in unexpected ways. About managing frustration and failure, and seeing opportunities in accidents and mistakes.

Maybe it’s just a story about bread and pie. That’s okay, too. When life gives you floor pie, make brownies.