America A La Mode

My house was stuffed with apples the day after Halloween. I’d bought apples, and I’d bought extra apples for bobbing, and someone else had bought apples too. I had more apples than candy when All Saints Day arrived.

Apples, apples everywhere and not a drop of cider.

How do you like them apples?

So I decided to cook them. What could be more American than apple pie?

Apple pie is not listed in the South Beach Diet, nor could I find it in the myriad of church lady cookbooks—kind of makes you wonder about the Communist affiliations of these culinary guides? Yet behold, JOY OF COOKING has apple pie, page six hundred of my hand-me-down edition. Easy as pie, except it took a solid hour of nothing but chopping apples!

Pie IS easy, and pie crust is fragile as a campaign promise—easily made, easily broken. The election is over, and we shall just have to see how the filling of the next four years turns out.

Meanwhile, I wonder can you eat apple pie with wooden dentures? Did George Washington like cheese on his pie, or was he lactose intolerant? Perhaps he preferred cherry pie; after all, he chopped down a whole dang tree of cherries!

I don’t think this is the America George Washington envisioned; however, he and the fellow founders did make provisions to change this country as appropriate for its citizens and by its citizens. If you don’t like America, you can always change it. That is the beauty of freedom.

“That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst posses it.”
This quote from Goethe’s FAUST is the opening inscription in JOY OF COOKING.


By the way, why does the National Mall NOT have a shoe store?