The World's Awesomest Applesauce

Today I made the World’s Awesomest Applesauce. Applesawsomest? Anyway, it was AWESOME. Seriously. I know I overuse that word because I can never think of words that mean the same thing (“fantastic” seems fake, “terrific” is so sticker-on-a-spelling-test, “fabulous” is just… lame, unless you are talking about curtains, “great” isn’t awesome enough, “rad” and “dope” people make fun of me for using…)

I’ve been sick for the past week. The sick food that I like is soup (don’t care what kind; if it’s from a can or envelope that’s just fine) and applesauce. TW & TJ went apple picking and brought home a big sack of apples, so whenever a various housemate would say “do you need anything at the store?” and I would say “applesauce,” they would laugh thinking I was joking. I was not. For whatever reason when I’m sick, I just want applesauce! I spent a good 2 days sleeping and generally feeling like crap. On the 3rd day, I stuffed myself full of cold meds and drove to Woburn (about 20 miles away in the ‘burbs) to go to jury duty. I got lost getting there. Woburn has this common in the middle of town the “bowling green” that I kept getting stuck in the wrong lane for and driving round and round. Plus, my directions were wrong to begin with.

I get downstairs in the courthouse to the lovely humming fluorescently lit room peppered with well thumbed copies of Popular Mechanics and Good Housekeeping and nobody tells me what to do. Everyone seems to have papers in hand that they had filled out ahead of time. I stand in line, filling out one that’s on the table. The lady in charge informs me that I’m at the wrong courthouse, that I should be at the district court instead of the city court or something, but it doesn’t matter since I live in the wrong county anyway. Wait, what? Whatever entity is responsible for sending you jury summonses thinks I still live in Cambridge, which is in… uh… Middlesex? Essex? Sussex? some county that isn’t Suffolk, which is where I live now. So really, why would a Somethingsex county send a jury summons to someone in another county? Wouldn’t they know something was amiss when they addressed the envelope? When I confirmed my attendance within 10 days after getting the summons? When they sent me the confirmation letter and then later on the reminder? This whole time I’m talking to the lady, I’m in a zombie-like state and I could barely croak out responses to her questions. The cool thing that I brought away from this experience is that “summonsed” is really a real word. You are apparently summonsed to be in a jury, not summoned. I don’t know why this word cracks me up so much. Summonsed. Hehe.

Anyway,  I drove home in a  massive traffic jam because half the Nawth Shaw was flooded. 95 was a parking lot and I spent 1/2 hour barely ever getting out of first gear… to discover that I was going North instead of South. What does this have to do with applesauce you ask? Because when I got home I was like, “I’M MAKING SOME GODDAMN APPLESAUCE IF IT KILLS ME!” So I did. It sucked. It was awful because I put no effort into it; I made it like I would make mashed potatoes, but then was too sick to even mash it properly. Boiling the apples took all the flavor out, so basically it was like eating slightly lumpy water. Ah me and my First World Problems.

Last night when I was searching to see if I could watch the PBS Prohibition mini-series on the innernets I happened to scroll past an applesauce recipe that looked interesting. I wrote it down and made it today and HOLY CRAP IT IS AWESOME!!! here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 4 apples
• 1 cup orange juice
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

Peel and core the apples. Cut the applies into bite size pieces. Heat a medium pot on medium heat. Add the orange juice, sugar, and cinnamon. Add the diced apples and give the mixture a stir. Cover the pot and reduce the heat to medium-low. All the apples to simmer in the liquid for 30 minutes. Remove the cooked apples from the heat. Allow the apples to cool and mash with a potato masher or in a food processor.

So yeah. A W E S O M E N E S S!!! I actually took out the sugar and instead put in 2 shakes of cinnamon sugar.  I figure you can never have enough cinnamon and I don’t like when things are too sweet. It totally erases all memories of Tuesday which sucked gangrenous, hairy wombat balls!