Why I hate Chopped

**Warning.  Enormous Self-Pity Party follows.  You may just want to click away and come back later.**

Everyone is a critic these days. And my family seems to think I'm some kind of gourmet chef hopeful that they need to guide in the right direction.  

At the dinner table last night, this is what I heard: 

I didn't really like the apple pie; the apples were too chewy.

Seriously? I just made 100% from scratch apple pie with apples I picked from a tree myself, whole wheat flour & butter in the crust, and the ONLY thing that can be said for it is "the apples were too chewy"?

Why didn't they just say:  

You know how you spent all day on your feet today cutting up apples and blanching them and canning them in glass jars in all their beautiful caramel brown glory? And you know how you got all hot and sweaty because there isn't even a fan in the kitchen, let alone A/C, and your back aches and your shoulders ache and your neck aches from stirring apples & sugar & spices together?

Yeah, that was all wasted.

And those 11 quarts of apple pie filling on the shelf? Don't want them.



  If your family isn't as picky as mine and you like apple pie and want to can your own filling, there is a wonderful tutorial here that will take you step by step through the process.  May you have better luck than I.  Maybe I've set the bar too high for myself and that is why my family is hard to please.  Maybe if we ate HamburgerHelper  and Spaghetti O's every night and the only pie they ever got was made by Walmart, they'd appreciate food more. I'm off to read out of my The Joy of Cooking cookbook because I've lost the joy and I need to find it again.