The Great Peach Experiment 1, Erin Downing [books to read romance .TXT] 📗

out of the truck was a must. A chocolate cream pie would also be a good addition, Lucy had pointed out, and Herb said that lemon meringue pie tasted like summer. To keep things exciting, Freddy thought they should test out some new recipes and add a special-feature pie or two into their rotation when things were going well.

“If we want to make real money,” Dad said, wiping his flour-covered hands on his bright yellow apron, “we need to sell a lot of slices of pie.”

“Duh,” Lucy muttered under her breath. Herb wrapped his arm around her, since it seemed like she could use a hug.

“To sell a lot of slices,” Dad went on, “we need to make a lot of pies. Which means everyone has to help with the baking each day.”

Dad taped Great Aunt Lucinda’s recipe card to the wall of the food truck and began his lesson. “Creating a perfect crust for your pie isn’t as easy as it looks,” he explained, as they each prepared a bowl full of crust ingredients. “It’s an art form, really.”

Herb gazed into his bowl as he mushed all the stuff together. He tried to think about his crust as art. It did remind him a little of the homemade play dough Lucy made for him sometimes. But this dough was crumbly and chunky and looked nothing like it was supposed to. He glanced over at his sister’s crust. Lucy had finished mixing and was now rolling her crust out on one of the shiny counters. It looked paper-thin in some spots, chewy-thick in others, and the round of dough ripped in half when she tried to lower it into her pie tin. Herb knew his brilliant, perfect sister wasn’t used to failing, but her crust experiment seemed to be a full-blown disaster.

Herb’s big brother didn’t seem to be faring any better. Every time Freddy tried to roll his dough into a flat disk, the whole pile of ingredients crumbled into buttery bits. Freddy finally gave up and started pressing pieces of his dough into the bottom of his pan, clearly hoping it would hold together after it was baked. The pan looked like a patchwork quilt of pressed-together dough. Freddy continued to pound at his crust dough, slamming his fist into the bottom of the pan to flatten and even it all out.

“Maybe we’d be better off buying ready-made crusts,” Lucy suggested. “It would be a lot easier.”

After trying and failing many times, Herb gave up on rolling out his crust the regular way. Instead, he was forming it into little balls that he then rolled in a sugar and cinnamon mixture. “Herb’s Cinnaballs!” he cried, holding one up proudly. “Like donut holes, but yummier.”

“Buy ready-made crust?” Dad scoffed, ignoring Herb. “Nonsense. That would be like buying a Pepperidge Farm cake from the grocery store and then selling it by the slice. Or buying McDonald’s burgers and putting them in your own wrappers. This family specializes in Peach creations, not other people’s stuff.” He gestured at the lumpy crusts on the counter. “We have the power to turn this mess into something truly delicious and beautiful.”

“But Pepperidge Farm cake is delicious,” Freddy blurted. He looked around at his family’s baking efforts. “And our homemade crusts look like—”

Dad cut him off. “Our crusts look like a first effort,” he said. “Practice makes perfect. If Mom’s team had given up on the solar window cling invention after their first effort, they never would have succeeded. Then we wouldn’t have gotten the chance to set off on this family adventure.” He pressed his own nearly perfect crust into a pan. “It’s worth spending a little extra time on the things that matter.”

Lucy snorted and shaped her dough into a ball again. “Like homemade crust?” she asked as she slammed the ball down on the counter and began to roll it out again. “That’s one of the things that matters most?”

“Obviously,” Dad answered. “A good crust is the cornerstone of the Great Peach Experiment. The foundation we must build on!”

“Obviously,” Lucy echoed. “When life gives you lemons,” she muttered, so quietly only Herb could hear, “make peach pie. That makes perfect sense.”

Herb grinned and thrust his pie tin full of dough balls toward his sister. “Can I interest you in one of Herb’s Cinnaballs?”

9

  PEOPLE-WATCHING

Freddy loved sleeping in tents. He liked having nothing more than a thin swatch of fabric separating him and his bed from the outside world. He also liked the way you could open the screened sides of a tent and let a gentle breeze settle over you while you slept surrounded by the natural world (or, in his limited travel experience, surrounded by the backyard).

But as the Peach family tucked into their campground on that first night, Freddy quickly realized that tent camping in an RV- and food truck–friendly campground was not the same thing as tent camping in nature or their backyard. This summer’s adventure was not shaping up to be quite what he’d expected…but he was certain it would be exciting in a different kind of way.

Because they’d driven into the campground in a food truck, the only spot the Peaches were permitted to set up was a big, dirt-crusted space right next to the bustling bathroom building. Which meant people walked past—and through—their campsite all evening long.

Freddy didn’t mind the lack of privacy. He discovered that people-watching in campgrounds was much better than most other places. There were campers with fun accents, quiet couples with yippy little dogs, old people who talked to themselves, chatty folks who talked to anyone who would listen, and one person who had decided it was entirely appropriate to wear nothing but a towel to travel from their own campsite to the showers!

Lucy had read Freddy and Herb a book called Harriet the Spy the previous summer, and in that story, Harriet liked to take notes about people she met and