What fascinated me last week was the incredible reaction to my inability to cook breakfast. I had lots of advice, and I’m actually looking forward to trying out several of the suggestions. Currently I’m cooking bacon. Wish me luck.

If you know me, you know my obsession with pie. I am not someone who overeats - when I’m done eating, my body flatly tells me. And when I’m upset or excited, my appetite dwindles. (For example, last spring when my friend Joe was dying and I was at a new job, I lost the last 10 lbs of pregnancy fat simply by not eating.) So I don’t gorge on food. But I do love it, so very much. And I love pie.

I was reading John Scalzi’s blog and came across the instructions on how to make schadenfreude pie (thank you Avenue Q for letting me spell that with confidence). So there’s his pie, which tastes like the bitter happiness of watching others fail. And there’s humble pie, which, as far as I can tell, has no recipe. Whoops, my bad. Apparently it does. Dree, you need to read this recipe…

But for people like me. People who have spent 34 and a half years building up some semblance of fragile ego, that maybe they don’t suck, that maybe they’re not as ugly as a sack of rocks, that maybe they have a smidge of talent (only to have all of it crashing down by a careless comment that meant no harm), there needs to be something else. There needs to be EGO PIE.

So yesterday the Pink Tornado and I made EGO PIE. I can’t post the recipe, not yet. Because I took a copyrighted recipe and simply added one ingredient. And when I tasted it, ohhh….. yes. Sweet. With a bite. And a lingering awesomness. Like you feel when you’re confident.

My goal now is to alter the recipe enough to where I can’t get sued by Food TV by posting a recipe here. Does anyone know how to do that? I mean, what makes my flour, sugar, butter, vanilla and chocolate chips recipe different enough from yours to make each a copyrightable cookie recipe?

Ohhhh. And I just realized. When I release it, I’m releasing it BY-NC-SA. I want people to remix the recipe to taste like their own ego should.

[NOTE: Thank you Internets!

Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.

From "Copyright: Recipes"]