Pen Pineapple Apple Pen (Pie)

Hello and welcome to a Thanksgiving Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is November 29th.

This year, the Thanksgiving holiday is like a gift that keeps on giving. We rented a house in the Brainerd Lakes Area for the long weekend. "Why do we need to be gone so long?" my husband griped last Sunday. "Because it's a vacation!" the WAKWIR 2.0* yelled on my behalf.

I love it when the kids do that; state the obvious on my behalf. What's that expression? *Googling* Ah, yes, "truth from the mouths of babes." That's the one. It always sounds so much better coming from them. Google also gave me a great explanation as to why it's especially impactful: "Children, with their innocence and lack of filters, often speak blunt, unvarnished truths that adults may overlook or find uncomfortable."

We got here Wednesday night, and the first thing the kids did was yell, "Hello, home!" Actually, that was me. The first thing the kids did was run downstairs and rack up the balls on the small pool table. We stayed at this little blue house last Easter and loved it so much we booked it again.

There are so many nice things about staying at a vacation home. It's already clean. The furniture is super comfortable and gorgeous. There's no excessive crap lying around. Nothing screams, "Fix me!" or "Clean me!" Well, except the kitchen faucet, but after being so charmed by all the other qualities, we happily tolerate the cold-only water from the tap.

And let me tell you about the dishwasher.

After two years of patiently enduring my husband's determination to nurse our on-the-fritz dishwasher back to health,  it is so immensely luxurious to enjoy a dishwasher that heats the water and washes the dishes so beautifully and then dries them. The heat coming from this working dishwasher was as welcome as the heat coming from the gas fireplace. (An aside: My husband refuses to let the dishwasher die a dignified death. When I'm in a good mood, his tenacity is actually admirable. I wonder if he missed his calling as a doctor instead of an engineer. "If it's not working after I replace the motor, THEN we'll get a new dishwasher." Maybe an engineer is a doctor for stuff.  In the meantime, I'm washing dishes by hand. Another reason to skip town for the long, food-filled weekend.)

In Thanksgivings past, I've bah-humbugged cooking a big meal and wooed hard for pizza. After all, I'm on vacation! The kitchen here, however, is outfitted with almost all the requisite kitchen gadgetry for a home-away-from-home cooking extravaganza. (More on that later.) Cheered by the sparse, white cupboards and the clean, white empty counters, I was inspired to cook a Thanksgiving meal after all. 

I baked a ham because my cousin made smoked turkey for today's extended family Thanksgiving meal. Thanks to all the Kids Baking Championship episodes we've been watching on Disney+, all kinds of creativity surfaced. When the directions said to put the ham on a rack inside the pan, I fashioned a bed of onions and carrots. When I couldn't find tinfoil to cover the ham, I basted it with a maple syrup-orange juice mixture to keep it from drying out. (A hat tip to all of those fabulous cooking blogs.) When I was ready to cook the cute little trio potatoes I bought, I added the onions, carrots, and juices from the bottom of the ham pan to the potatoes and reduced the liquids, throwing in the last of the maple-orange juice at the end. "Look, kids! I'm making a reduction!" I said, experimenting with the Food Network lingo.

Thanksgiving nostalgia urged me to plop a can of jellied cranberries into a shallow dish. Jellied cranberries were my absolute childhood favorite. Half the fun was successfully sliding the cranberries out of the can into a perfect tower of firm, can-shaped, tangy deliciousness. The other half of the fun was methodically slicing each bite with my spoon, then savoring that jellied tartness on my tongue before enjoying a satisfyingly smooth swallow.

I felt so triumphant about our Thanksgiving dinner, I announced, "Goldarnit. If 10-year-olds can make a pie crust from scratch, so can I." 

The Oldest sent me a pie crust recipe she has used. "I've made it twice and made four crusts," she said. Good enough for me. With her on video chat, she supervised while I cautiously added a little bit of cold water at a time until the dough could hold together. (Insert hashtag here: If you know, you know, aka #IYKYK)

Then I had a Eureka moment. "Let's make a Pineapple Apple Pen Pie!" Kids have been singing the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen song for a few weeks. I had apples. I had crushed pineapple. So, we gave it a whirl.

It was only after I started mixing the pie dough that I realized I didn't have a rolling pin. (Vacation homes can't have everything!) Never fear! I was so totally jonesing on creativity and vacation energy, I quickly devised a solution. I rolled a summer sausage tube into a tea towel, tying the ends of the towel like a Christmas cracker.

Christmas music poured forth from Spotify while kids and I rolled dough, peeled and sliced the apples, mixed the apple-pineapple filling, dumped it in, then pinched it all together. The youngest made the slits on top, and into the oven it went.

I think it turned out pretty well. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

*Wannaskan Kid Writer-in-Residence, part deux.