I appreciate the rituals that keep life steadily rolling along. However, some rituals, like menu planning, are tedious to me. I work out who will eat what, check the calendar to see who will be around for dinner, and occasionally go through the freezer looking for meat that could be thawed and cooked later in the week. With all this information swirling in my head, I make a shopping list. I also check the whiteboard near the back door where Bill, Liam, and I write down things we are out of. In the end, the trip to the grocery store is the reward for successfully plodding through the menu planning stage. Putting groceries in a cart is the easy part of “menu planning.”
A ritual that’s more gratifying and straight forward is slicing apples. Since my now teenage boys were toddlers, I have sliced up apples for them as an afternoon snack, Granny Smith for one and Honeycrisp for the other. I go on autopilot with the prep: I wash and dry an apple then grab a small cutting board in one hand and my biggest chef’s knife in the other. With the cutting board anchored rubber side down near the sink, I hold the apple upright and slice it in half; plop the halves smooth side down and split each of them again. I line up my knife on a diagonal and slice out the core and stem then slide them into the garbage disposal. Finally, I cut each quarter in two again and plop them into small melamine bowls that we’ve had for over a decade. While those are the specific steps, they happen at triple the speed that my fingers took to type them out. As I sling the bowls across the counter, I feel like calling “Order up!”
You might wonder why I still do this. I have teens, and apples are the most convenient fruits to eat; they require no prep. A kid can grab an apple from the refrigerator and eat it as is. My sons don’t demand this; it’s usually me saying, “Would you like a sliced apple?” Part of my apple-babying stems from growing up: my grandma used to slice apples for me and my siblings whenever we ate popcorn at her house. Only, she peeled the apples as well. I don’t have many memories of Grandma in her house—maybe that’s why the apple memory is so ingrained. Grandma worked harder on the farm than many of her male counterparts. My most vivid memories are of her in the field pulling bales of hay off the back of the baler or carrying two five gallon buckets across the barnyard filled with corn to feed the cattle. She was a woman in motion who rarely sat still long enough for cuddles or hugs, but she took the time to peel and slice apples up for us kids. When I cut up apples for my sons, I feel her standing beside me at the kitchen counter—wondering why I don’t peel them.
Slicing Apples