When someone yells “FIRE!!” from your walk-in closet, one of two things can happen: You’ll either respond in ways that would make a ninja press his hands together and bow, or you’ll trip, faceplant, and yell back something totally unintelligible. How do I know?

So I’m in my kitchen measuring ingredients for a friend’s wedding cake (full rundown next week), elbows deep in cake flour and with a 38-pound tub of high-ratio shortening at my feet. I had hired Robert the Repairman to hook up the stackable gas washer/dryer I bought off of Craigslist (which by the way: not recommended.)

It was a totally uneventful evening until that frantic call-to-action of “FIRE!!” was put into place. I dropped my sifter and in an effort to bypass 38-pounds of fat, I tripped over my own toes and faceplanted slow-motion style into the speckled Berber carpet, rug-burning my lips in the process.

But I got up! I got up and as slowly as I seemed to fall, I yelled a stretched “WHAAAAT?” in the general direction of where smoke was now wafting from.

Robert the Repairman came running into the kitchen and together we filled glasses of tap water and ran back to the closet, where flames and ashes were shooting out of the dryer’s drum. And all the while I’m thinking, I’ve owned this home for a week and already it’s burning down?

Luckily, it only took a few minutes to put the fire out. Then we moved the behemoth appliance outta my house and waited for the Craiglist guy to pick it up. I got my money back (thank goodness), but I’m still working on my sanity.

So how do you go back to sifting flour after something like that? Well, you don’t.

Catastrophes give me the munchies, and all I wanted to do was eat away the buzz that was coming from my nerves. After that debacle, the question wasn’t “how long are my clothes going to smell like burning lint,” but rather “what am I going to stuff my wounded lips with?”

The answer was pie. Pie heals all wounds.

One of the first things I did on the day I moved into this place was make an apple pie for the sole purpose of watching it cool on my very first pie window. At various times of the week, I would be a geek and take it out of the fridge to place it on the pie window – just so I could see it there again. The whole pie was still sitting in the fridge, so I pulled it onto the counter and ravaged most of it like it was the last time I’d ever eat pie. Crisis-driven hunger solved. Lack of sanity, however, is another story. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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I had the pleasure of touring the Berkeley Scharffen Berger factory before it closed and moved operations to some Hershey plants in Illinois. I haven’t noticed a change in the quality of chocolate, but I have noticed a change in me. Since I’ve learned that production halted in that tiny little Berkeley building, there’s some small void that exists when I reach for my stash of Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate. I’m reminded that it comes from a seemingly soulless megabrand that adds heaps of sugar to mask its lack of quality in chocolate. The connection I once had with it has vanished, and I often wonder if it shows in my baking.

Again, I haven’t noticed a change in its quality, but the romantic in me says I should go and look for another chocolate to use in my cookies and chocolate banana cream pies (any recommendations besides the lovely Valrhona?). But I can’t seem to let go. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

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