I love her with all my heart, but my mom puts the "nary" in "culinary," as in, "Nary a good pie shall she make."

It's almost a knack. She can follow a recipe to the letter and something will still go wrong. A delicate touch of mint will, in her hands, somehow produce frosting with the taste and consistency of toothpaste.

So, in the grand tradition of such dishes as The Tasty Abomination (a very special Jell-o salad) and Rustic Peasant Bread (which started off as quiche), I give you the Tale of the Great Blueberry Pie Debacle.

The last time my mom entered a pie in a contest, she came in fifth out of six contestants, beating out a four year-old who mixed together her own pie under her mother's supervision.

So this time, when asked to contribute a pie for the contest at this year's Blueberry Bash, Mom and I scoured her cookbook collection for a tasty blueberry pie recipe that would also be easy to make.

And boom - we hit the jackpot with Blueberry Sour Cream Pie. A layer of sour cream filling, a layer of blueberries, another layer of sour cream filling. A refreshing take on the traditional blueberry pie and so simple that there was no way to mess it up.

Unless, of course, you decide that plain white sour cream filling is boring and add blue food coloring to the mix. Because then you're going to have to mix in that egg and, as any four year-old can tell you, blue and yellow make green.

And as we also discovered, the middle layer of blueberries doesn't stay in place. As the pie is baked, they make their way to the surface, bursting and oozing in inconvenient places.

Mom put her hopes and dreams into that oven, and what came out rather resembled a baked toad.     

We laughed so hard we cried. It looked *awful*. We tried to think up a creative name for it, in hopes that a good name would give the impression that it was supposed to look like that.

Here's what we came up with:

Hinden-berry Pie ("It's a disaster!")

Which led to

Sweet Disaster 

Polka Dot Pie

And my personal favorite,  Frankenberry Pie.

Now that I'm thinking about it, You Have To Kiss A Lot Of Frogs Before You Find Your Prince Pie would also have been fun. 

Mom eventually went with the much tamer Greenberry Pie, which I imagine was less off-putting for the contest judges.

Brave gourmets we are, Mom and I sampled the pie. To our surprise, it tasted great in spite of its color and consistency.

See, the brown sugar had made the berries more brown than blue and since the pie was fresh out of the oven and hadn't been able to chill for the recommended amount of time, it was decidedly soupy.

So I ate my plate of green, brown, and purple mush with my eyes closed and gave Mom an honest compliment, which also happens to be the title of this post.

You can see the final product in this picture from the Sunday Telegraph. It's the green pie towards the top of the frame sitting in a Tupperware container of ice. It doesn't look very green in this picture but trust me, it was.

My own culinary skills, I should mention, are nothing to brag about. I've destroyed two pots trying to cook rice and when my parents tell me not to use the stove while they're gone, they're not kidding. I am the queen of grocery store sushi-to-go.

But I am encouraged by my mom's tenacity when it comes to cooking, for in cooking, as in life, the only true disaster is giving up. Or starting a very small fire contained entirely to the microwave, depending on who you ask. In which case, don't ask my dad - I still owe him a metal coffee mug.