I may seem the queen of domesticity, but under my calm demeanor (ha!) beats the heart of a competitor. I picked some apples to make a bit of applesauce to freeze yesterday. No problem so far. Spoke to a friend on the phone last night. She also had an abundance of apples and was canning her sauce. In addition she was going to can pie filling. I laughed, thinking of all the work and said have fun.
Some time during my sleep, my brain short circuited and got hooked like a broken record. Can, can, can. And I am not talking about the dance. I woke up and made a beeline to the garage. Buried under a fifty cup coffee maker (I keep in the event Starbucks goes under) and stuck in a corner that was practically plastered under cobwebs was my goal, the largest canning pot ever produced for home use. Cartons of jars and lids were mined from the from the castoff appliance corner like nuggets of gold from the mother lode.
For some inexplicable reason I had decided that if my friend was canning, so should I. Why? Applesauce is fairly inexpensive to buy year round. Here in California apples can be had most of the year if the craving for a pie arose. Certainly bakeries abound in my suburban locale. I would like to tell you it is my frugality, or my creative cooking streak, or even a seizure. The truth is I just got a wee bit competitive. It is purely a subconscious thing. I didn't actively set out to keep up with the Joneses or want to one up a friend.
I had so many justifications for the flurry of activity that was about to happen. I was using natures bounty, waste not want not, there are children starving in China (well if not China, somewhere), couldn't buy more local and fresh than my own yard, I probably will need an apple pie per week for the next entire year, my husband will want applesauce in his lunch every single day this year, and so on.
Every few years I forget the trauma, the burnt blistered fingers, the sticky kitchen floor, the bits of apple everywhere, and that I don't have a housekeeper on call. What I do remember is the fragrance of apples simmering with nutmeg and cinnamon and it calls to me like a siren.
Canning is not for the faint of heart. The canning and preserving cookbooks go along happily instructing you through 2.5 million little steps for one can of pie filling. At the end they all say the same thing, do it correctly or die, literally. Keeping this in mind, I did all the right things, boiling my jars as if they were to be used in a heart transplant operation, tossing my apple slices in lemon to save them the embarrassment a tan would bring, caramelizing my sugar to the correct temperature so that when it hardened in my hair it would require surgical removal.
Pots of one thing or another were cooking for 7 straight hours. The sink filled with green and red spaghetti like peels. The floor magically took on extra gravitational pull, sucking sugar, flour, and liquids together until a gummy substance covered it.
As with knitting for me, I get into the rhythm of the activity. Suddenly I needed three kinds of applesauce. Every large jar I owned was filed with pie filling. An apple crisp sounded yummy to go with dinner after all the canning. Why not, I was in the zone. It felt as if I was living on a farm surrounded by the early autumn bounty. Then I looked around the kitchen. I was living on a farm alright, the funny farm.
My friend and I don't really compete. We just enjoy many of the same activities like cooking and knitting. Although it may look like we try to out do our peers we are just enhancing our family's lives through our creativity. We once took a chef's class on souffles, that's right a whole day on making only souffle's. We are not show offs, rather we are just good hostesses. Or that's what we would have you think.
My apple canning is done for this year. The remaining apples will be picked and given to friends. The tree bears the scars of today's frenzy (grabbed a branch to balance on the ladder and it snapped off, consider it early pruning), as does my kitchen. Now that the project is over I am admiring the gleaming jars lined up in the pantry waiting their turn to be used. The apple crisp is warm and inviting next to my cup of tea. Aah... Oh, and I win.
:-)
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