I love it when my mom-in-law unearths a contraption like
the one below from somewhere deep in one of her cupboards, and I, unable to
contain my excitement, say something like, “Oh my gosh! What is that?
I’ve never seen anything like
that before!”
She usually gives me a certain “look,” and I can’t be
certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s
meant to convey respect. The utmost
respect for my thirst for knowledge.
Sometimes after receiving that look, I’ll mess with her
by pulling a really sad face. “Well,”
I’ll say, “I might have learned more about baking if my mom hadn’t left and my
dad had had time to teach me. As it
was,” I’ll add, wiping an imaginary tear off of my face, “he was lucky to pop a
family-sized frozen dinner into the oven before helping the five of us with our
homework every night.
“He worked 7 days a week to support us all, you know,” I’ll
continue. “And dessert? Dessert was a
luxury only afforded those from a two-parent home. Who had time for dessert? Dessert wasn’t an apple pie; dessert was a
popsicle in the bathtub after all of our math problems were finished.”
Oh my gosh, I LOVE hitting it home with the whole dessert
speech. I got that popsicle idea a
couple of years ago at a MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) meeting when I was a
stay-at-home mom. If you haven’t tried
it, it’s brilliant if you have young
kids. No mess, as all of that messy popsicle
sticky washes right off in the bathtub.
All of the rest of that divorce stuff really happened, but
you guys, if you’ve noticed anything about me, it’s that I kind of enjoy
laughing at life, and I’ve been majorly blessed to be able to put things in a
much greater perspective. The moral of
the story? The divorce was way dramatic,
but it could have been a hell of a lot worse in the grand scheme of what others
have to deal with in life.
Plus, my mom moved, like, 10 minutes away when she left,
which really put a damper on the plans that the five of us had had for being
children of a broken family. We’d seen
all of these after-school specials about kids from broken homes, and they made
it look so good.
“I’m pretty sure we’ll get to be latchkey kids now,” my
older sister breathed one day, soon after all of the divorce talk turned
serious.
“Really? Do you
think it’ll get that bad?” I’d asked.
“I hope so,” she’d responded. “Dad will be at work and Mom will be at her
new house, and nobody will be there to fix us dinner…”
“And we can have canned ravioli and lollipops for every
meal…”
“And eat it while we’re watching MTV…”
Really, besides the fact we’d now be home alone after
school, the rest of our dream wasn’t all that different from how we were
currently being raised. But the prospect
of having our very own shiny new keys—an actual something to put onto my keychain collection besides keychains—made
it all the more exciting to me.
But lo and be-damned-hold, my mom moved just down the
road, and she could pop over to Dad’s to heat up the ravioli and keep an eye on
us whenever she felt like it.
Our very own shiny new keys weren’t even necessary, which
I thought was really stupid. How could
we be latchkey kids from a broken home when our mom was there to let us in the
house every day?
We had also kind of thought that being kids of divorce
meant double the Christmas celebrations, double the birthday parties, and
double the parent guilt, meaning we could get away with murder at whichever
house we’d decided to grace with our presence on any given day.
But what did our parents do? They immediately set up and stuck with a very
regular schedule, as they believed that children benefited from rules and
consistency. And birthday parties and
Christmas celebrations? They did
all of that stuff together with us in
order to keep a sense of normalcy. Selfish bastards.
They still pull that shit to this day.
Anyway, my mother-in-law will catch on one of these days
to the fact that I totally play up the non-existent shortcomings in my
upbringing, but until then, I’ll just keep practicing my pouty face in the mirror.
Where was I going with this?
Oh, yes, a recipe.
This is supposed to be a recipe recommendation for apple
pie inspired by my fun canning experience with my mother-in-law last weekend,
but peeps, I’m not even going to pretend that I’ve ever attempted to make an
apple pie—or that I’ve gotten any further than figuring out what the hell that
1872-era illegal doctor-looking contraption pictured above was used for and
then fighting with my boys over whose turn it was to use it.
And you can bet your ass that I wasn’t going to ask my
mother-in-law anything else about the art of apple pies, as I didn’t want to
risk being on the receiving end of another “look” on an otherwise lovely day
that we were having together.
So here’s what I’m going to do instead. I’m going to give you a recipe for an
alcoholic drink called Apple Pie (because it tastes just like apple pie), a
drink with which I became very familiar during a couple of different occasions
in my early 20’s.
I once consumed so much of it that I made out with my
high school boyfriend on a float trip about 3 years after we’d broken up. That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad; for
once in my young life, I wasn’t a cheating whore because at the time, I was
single and so was he.
No, that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that he had a tendency to try
and be funny—and he was usually pretty successful. That time, he kept repeating “Sit on my face”
very loudly over and over again so that all of the people outside of our little
makeout pup tent heard.
For the record, I did NOT sit on his face. Even I
have a teensy bit of self-respect, and no matter how drunk I was on Apple Pie,
I decided to employ that self-respect that night. There were, after all, about 15 other people—mutual
friends from high school and college—also on the canoe trip who would have
borne witness to the face sitting, and I just couldn’t have that.
But apparently it didn’t matter, because no matter how
much I vehemently denied doing it and no matter how much I knew that they knew I
didn’t do it, the fact of the matter was that they’d heard the line and it was
funny. And they didn’t let me forget it
until THEY finally forgot it about it several years later. Until then, though, I had to endure “sit on
my face” taunts in the most random of places:
“Hey!” I’d say to one of them in the courtyard of church
after Mass on a Sunday when I was visiting my dad. “How’ve things been?”
“Well, hey, Shay!” he/she would respond. “Have you sat on a face lately?”
Assholes. I hate
my friends.
Sweet Jesus, how did a happy little story about a fall
weekend peeling apples with my boys turn into…this?
Ah, well, here’s the recipe.
Full disclosure: I
never actually made this, but I was present when my friends did, and I
certainly consumed a lot of it…which means that I was too drunk to pay
attention to what they were putting into it.
Honest to God, peeps, I don’t remember one single ingredient involved in
making this delicious drink, but I could guess that something apple-y played a
big part in it.
Anyhoo, I looked it up on allrecipes.com and found a
really easy recipe. I’m going to try it this weekend in the name
of “research for a piece that I’m working on.”
(I love saying shit like that to my husband. His eyes roll so far up into his head that I
always wonder if THIS will be the time that they get stuck up there, rendering
him blind.)
If the drink turns out bad, I'll come back and amend the recipe to the best of my abilities--which will probably make it worse, as I hardly have any abilities. But I don't think I'll need to do that, anyway. There are all kinds of positive reviews and really great tips for preparation from people who have tried it.
If the drink turns out bad, I'll come back and amend the recipe to the best of my abilities--which will probably make it worse, as I hardly have any abilities. But I don't think I'll need to do that, anyway. There are all kinds of positive reviews and really great tips for preparation from people who have tried it.
One quick tip from me: Make sure none of your ex-boyfriends OR their stupid faces are around while you’re drinking it.
You’ll need:
· 1 gallon apple juice
· 1 gallon apple cider
· 1 1/2 cups white sugar or to taste
· 6 cinnamon sticks
· 1 (1 liter) bottle 190 proof grain alcohol
Place the apple cider, apple juice, cinnamon sticks, and
sugar into a large pot. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring until
the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat, and discard the cinnamon sticks.
Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature, then stir in the grain alcohol.
If you want to save and drink later (this recipe says
that you can save it in your refrigerator for 6 months or more), pour into
quart-size canning jars, seal with the lids and rings, and refrigerate until
ready to serve.
*Can be served hot or cold
If this drink doesn't work out for you, I developed a recipe for something I call an Apple Pie Shotini last year, you can check that out.
ReplyDeleteOh, you had me until grain alcohol. The last time I had grain alcohol was mixed with lemonade in college - I'm not going back there. Well, okay, maybe I'll try.
ReplyDelete