If you've been on Twitter recently, you've probably seen the hashtag #apieformikey, even if you have no idea what it's about.You see, the food blogging community is a weird and wonderful ... uh, ... community. Of strangers. Something unfortunate happens, and pretty soon everyone knows about it and wants to do something.
In this case, food writer and blogger Jennifer Perillo's husband died suddenly at a young age and the food community sent out hugs and kind thoughts and asked what could be done. People who didn't know Jennifer or her husband, Mikey, were caught up in the sadness.
And then Jennifer wrote a post and included a recipe for peanut butter pie and suddenly the food community had something they could do. They would all bake the same pie on Friday as a tribute. And now there are pies being made and lists of links being compiled ...
... and I'm torn. I don't know Jennifer Perillo in any real sense of the word. I follow her on Twitter. I know of her. I know people who know her. I feel sympathy for her loss. But she doesn't know me and I don't believe that my in-real-life baking and consumption of pie would help her cope with her loss. It's the thought that counts, and I'm thinking about pie. And her. Right now.
But I'm not going to bake a pie today, for a variety of reasons. All of which have to do with what's going on here, in real life, and have nothing to do with my level of sympathy towards a fellow blogger who has suffered a tremendous loss. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person.
On the other hand, given the rather tenuous connection I have with Jennifer and her family, I also feel it would be just a little bit self-serving to bake the pie today, to get a link to my blog on someone else's list of pie-bakers, and to generate traffic to my site. So I'll post this without fanfare, and if anyone stumbles upon it and goes to Jennifer's site and is inspired to bake a pie or hug a loved one, that's good enough for me.
Meanwhile, I will bake a virtual pie today, probably the chocolate hazelnut tart pictured above. The recipe is here. It's not Jennifer's pie, because I haven't baked that one. Yet. But I will, I promise. And when I do, I will think of her.
