apple pie help from my toddler

Another fond memory I have sharing life with my daughter was all her help in the kitchen. 

She began helping me by sitting in her high chair and listening to me.  I talked about everything I did. I also shared many, even most, of whatever thoughts happened to float through my mind.

"I have all the things I need to make this pie crust in this cupboard. This is a cupboard. See me open the cupboard."  I was a homemade version of Mr. Rogers, the mommy version. 

"You are strapped into the high chair, safe,  and I need to go into the next room to get my pie plates. You are safe and I'll be right back."  Then I might step outside her field of vision for a few moments, get what I needed and pop back into view.  Sometimes I would voice exaggerated relief that she had survived four seconds with me out of view. Other times I laughed aloud at myself, for her benefit. Anything I did was okay. We were happy. I know I did not imagine that.

Rosie helped me make just about everything. Sometimes her help was adding the cut carrots into my stew pot and munching on a carrot while I did the other work of preparing beef stew.  When she was able, I let her add ingredients into whatever I was making.

She helped me immeasurably on all things that I did.

One of my favorite examples of her generous help was the help she provided when I baked apple pies.

I used to bake lots of apple pies. We'd go to an arboretrum, harvest an entire basket of apples and then I'd bake as dozen, sometimes even more pies, all in one day. I'd have an open house the next day, inviting everyone we knew over.  I also was known, in this era of our lives, for bringing apple pie when going to friends' homes for dinner. Everytime, and this was in the mid-eighties, when I first brought a piece, the host would voice concern about the calories. I would say "We can cut very thin slices." A host often remarked that she did not like pie. I would say "I bet you have never had a homemade apple pie. Do you think you can buy an apple pie in the freezer section?  Trust me, you will like this pie."

Now, in 2015, with pie shops all over the place and foodies crawling all over the San Francisco Bay Area, many people know what real fruit pies taste like, In 1984, not so much.

Most commercial pie back in the eighties were drowned in sugar and one did not taste much fruit. I used almost no sugar with my pies, choosing half tart apples, half sweet ones. I added tiny amounts of cinnamon-laced sugar.

Like most apple pie makers, I tossed my apple slices with cinnamon sugar before putting the apple slices on top of the bottom crust.  Over time, Rosie learned to lay out the apple slices in patterns, any patterns she chose, to maximize how many slices we could cram into our always deep dish apple pies. We always cut out an apple shape from the pie crust to put in the center of the top crust, signaling the contents. Once we tried a peach but our pie-dough peach looked like apple. That was fun. When we gifted her Waldorf teacher's family a peach pie, they thought the pie-dough symbol represented apple and were happily surprised to bite into a peach pie.

Mainly, we were known for our apple pies.

And now the best part:  when she was one, two and three, Rosie helped me make apple pies by, yes, adding cinnamon to the sugar, stirring the flour, even cutting lard into the flour. She excelled, however, at sucking on cinnamon-sugar covered apple slices until the slices turned to mush and she would eat it. Then she'd cajole me, although she did not need to cajole me, into letting her suck on another cinnamon-sugar apple slice.

As she sucked on those cinnamon apple slices, I did my chatter thing. "What do you prefer, Rose, a regular pie or a deep dish?"  "Ah, so you like both. I myself, my dolly delight, is the deep dish. I eat pie for the fruit. I use as little sugar as possible because for me pie is all about baked fruit.  Heck, keep your pie crust on the top. Or just feed me apple crumble, stinting on the flour and sugar. It's baked apple slices covered in cinnamon sugar that I am all about here."

"Yum yum, my little plum. Want another apple slice?"

That's it. I loved and still love, how my toddler loves to help me by keeping me company as I prepared food and sucking on cinnamon apple slices. She always came into the kitchen for a few cinnamon apple slices, longer after she stopped helping me cook. The apple slices covered in cinnamon sugar were a family thing.

My Rosie was always very tidy, even as a baby. She didn't get that from me. Fastidious, oh my.