I have this apple pie recipe. It is almost as good as my brownie recipe, perhaps a bit better, because it is so time-consumingly tedious to make that its appearance on our table occurs twice, perhaps three times (for extra-special people or occasions), a year. The recipe begins with a crust that is both sweet, flaky, and crispy. The bottom of the pie is lined with a pastry cream so thick and delicious you’d wish you had a bowl to scoop it out and eat it with a spoon. Of course there are apples, the apples of my youth, Granny Smiths grown on the Western Slope of Colorado.
I think about this recipe today as I lay out the refrigerated pie crust on my small Spanish counter. The recipe sits in the room in the basement of my house back in Colorado, the room that hovers like a ghost in the attic of my mind. Ten by ten. Green carpet. One tiny window. All the junk, from sleeping bags, toys, a television that’s not even ours, to cups, magnets, and recipes, that we couldn’t bring to Spain.
Here we are, three months later, living our lives without these things. Without the books I’ve collected for my girls in my ten years of being a parent. Without the tent we would never use. Without my favorite coffee mug, fifteen years back bought at Christmas from Starbucks, Van Gogh’s Starry Night a blur of beauty on my early mornings. Without my recipes.
We have had a functioning oven for two days. I was planning, until now, to let slide my favorite holiday, to give in to the holidays of Spain–the next saint’s day, school break, or puente, and forget that I look forward to Thanksgiving for the whole year. After all, how could I bake a pie without an oven? Without my recipe?
As all things seem to work out in 2012, life of Karen Vittetoe, the oven arrived in our lives just in time. I could make my pie, we could make our Thanksgiving dinner, but at what cost? Moving here, our kitchen contained many items, but not a pie pan, a roasting dish, or a 9×13 baking dish for brownies or candied yams. They don’t sell pure vanilla extract in stores; rather, aroma of vanilla and pure vanilla bean; the combination of buying cocoa, the varieties of vanilla, and chocolate chips, of buying two baking dishes and a pie pan? Our spending money for the week is demolished. Not one penny left for a rolling pin that, perhaps, will never be used again.
So this is why I’m crying now as I lay out the rectangular, store-bought pie crust, as I cut it into strips to make my lattice top, hopefully creating the appearance of beauty for my sub-par pie. The crust is malleable, easy to stretch, more perfect than I could ever have mixed together myself, and yet I despise it. It will not be mine, just as the holiday that has already past is not mine.
Yet, somehow, as my girls will in a moment burst in from their school day, see the piles of leftover crust and take them into their small hands, scrubbing the bottom of the apple-cinnamon-sugar bowl with delicious bits of crust, just as I did when I was a girl, I know that my pie will be fine. It may have an imperfect crust, but it will be just as beautiful, taste just as amazing with its lining of pastry cream, the Spanish apples brought down from the north, and the sweetness carried across the sea to Europe for a holiday that is the same in every language.
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