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I’m pretty lucky when it comes to the Country Boy… as far as boys are concerned, he falls on the “fairly awesome” side of the scale. No housecleaning task is too girly for him; he was raised helping his mamma, so he does a lot of things (OK, most things) better than I do. (Yes, I got me a mamma’s boy. No, this poses no problem whatsoever.)
The Country Boy leaps into action when he knows what he’s supposed to be doing — or what could be done. When things are broken, he fixes them. When there are dishes in the sink, he does them. Sometimes, I come home to find him ankle-deep in cleaning products, rinsing off the shower. When I start to feel guilty and tell him he shouldn’t have, he just screws up his eyebrows, stares at me, and in the most adorable French accent with his nearly-correct English, he says, “Baby, how do you think I am?”
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He humors me, though whether it’s for my sake or his own sanity has yet to be confirmed. When I said I wanted to go apple picking a few days ago, not only did he tag along, but he carried the entire backpack — several kilos of apples, squash, tomatoes and carrots — the entire half-hour walk back to the train station. I prostested, but he wouldn’t hear it.
I love that boy.
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He doesn’t even complain when, especially as of late, pretty much everything that comes out of the kitchen is vegetarian. There have been risottos, pastas, roasted vegetables and fried eggs… but until the day of the apple picking adventure, no meat to speak of.
But then I met a woman at the morning market selling the most beautifully spiced, already cooked pork roast, and I know how well pork goes with freshly made applesauce… and how much TCB likes meat.
“Pour deux personnes, s’il vous plait,” I asked, because at the market, you tell the vendor how many you are, and they tell you how much you can eat. But as she made the move to slice a couple of meager tranches, I faltered.
“Au fait… mettez-en plutôt pour trois,” I corrected. TCB, while thin, can eat more than most people I’ve met. “Ou bien… tout ce morceau là.” I pointed to a large-ish chunk that she wrapped in butcher paper without slicing.
What can I say? I’m American.
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We ended up with enough pork for two meals; we ate the first few slices fried up quickly in a frying pan and accompanied by applesauce and roasted carrots and potatoes; TCB calls them “carrot fries.” He sneaks into the kitchen when they’re almost done and opens the oven to stir them, flicking one onto the counter deftly with a wooden spoon.
“Oh mince,” he says, pretending to be surprised and sorry as he eats it in one bite. “She fell.” Because carrots, as everyone knows, are female.
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I don’t have a recipe for the pork roast, and the carrot fries recipe is the same as this one.
Chunky Applesauce
Note: This applesauce is unsweetened, so it goes really well with savory foods.
10-12 apples of different types (I used Boskoop and Jonagold)
1 Tbsp. cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
Peel and core the apples, and cut into chunks. Place into a large, heavy bottomed pot with a lid, like a Dutch oven. Add the cider vinegar and water, and cook over medium-low heat, covered. Stir about every 10-15 minutes with a wooden spoon, smushing the apples against the bottom of the pot.
This applesauce can be cooked for anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on the firmness of the variety of apples you use and the texture you’re going for. I cooked mine for about 30 minutes, so that some of the apples had fallen apart, and others remained in larger chunks.