Coconut Cream Pie Day: How I Fell In Love With a Pie

Tuesday (May 8) is National Coconut Cream Pie Day and so I just had to share how I fell in love with this delectable dessert.

I remember so clearly the time  in my life when I would not touch coconut cream pie with a ten- foot pole. I would rather have eaten live spiders, scorpions, or snails.

It had to be a texture thing because as a kid I enjoyed eating plain coconut. But, when it came to coconut pie or German Chocolate Cake,  forget it, sister. No way, no how, not ever!

I'm in high school, working as a dishwasher at Crane's Cafe on Main Street in downtown Brush, Colorado. Every day Crane's would feature homemade pies. Some days it might be cherry pie or apple pie, and maybe a couple of days each week the featured pie would be coconut - not coconut cream pie, mind you, just coconut.

The filling was very firm, and it was topped with meringue. I'm not really sure to this day what compelled me to try a piece of that coconut pie one fateful day, but, boy, howdy, I did. To my shock and amazement, it wasn't gross. It wasn't disgusting. In fact, it was quite good - and I was hooked.

I believe the key to success was in convincing myself those crunchy morsels were, in fact, pieces of coconut and not fingernails. I told myself there is nothing to fear and nothing not to like. There are no foreign, unidentifiable objects in the pie and there is absolutely no reason to be alarmed.

Well, as it turned out, I fell in love with coconut pie, and I came to love going in to work at Crane's Cafe in hopes the pie of the day would be coconut. Today, I do prefer my pies with cream topping rather than meringue, but, either way, it's definitely true love. I totally want to celebrate National Coconut Cream Pie Day.

I don't know all the places in town you can find coconut cream pie, but I know Grand Valley Pie Company makes them, as does Village Inn. If you go with store bought, Marie Callender's is tough to beat.