Last weekend we had another excellent picnic and pie festival at my house. This event has been a tradition since my first summer in our REU program back in 2004. We have outdoor games, eat grilled veggie quesadillas and a variety of sides, and then we have the celebration of pie!
This year’s pie festival happened to fall on the 22nd of July, or 22/7 if you write the date in a European date/month format, or “European pi day” as Dr. Lindner likes to call it. Pi is of course an irrational number and thus cannot be represented by a fraction like 22/7, but it turns out that 22/7 is a reasonably good approximation of pi and has been widely used to simplify calculations, and so holding the pie festival on pi day is particularly sweet.
This year, we had a great assortment of pies, including pecan pie, strawberry-brownie pie, raspberry blueberry tart, chocolate peanut butter pie, pineapple pistachio pie, peach cream pie, sour cherry pie, and shoo-fly pie! I always make several pies (three this year), but the students contribute the rest!
Whew! I think we did have one noble soul attempt to take a slice of all the pies, but I believe he later regretted it. Of the pies that I had the room to try, the pineapple pistachio was my favorite because I hadn’t had a pie like it before, but they were all good!
