So the other day I’m heading to our local grocery store with Charlotte and like many other times Melissa needs me to pick up a few things. This time around it’s ingredients for a recipe that she found on you guessed it...Pinterest. Nowadays when Melissa is looking for a new recipe she doesn’t head to recipes.com or even food network’s site...no she heads first and foremost to Pinterest. The place to go to discover, compare and in this case, the place to go in order to find something to do on a Saturday night. Let me tell you what I mean.
So I pick up the ingredients. A little butter, light corn syrup, brown sugar and a few more odds and ends. Couple this with the fresh apples we picked last weekend and you’ve got a wife who is interested in making carmel covered apples. And not just the regular kind mind you. Melissa wants to first slice the apples insert toothpicks and make carmel apple slices, because, “everything is better when it’s miniature.” After consulting with both of our mom’s she doesn’t receive a good report. Her mom tells her to call my mom, so not a whole lot of help there. My mom says first of all, “carmel is very difficult to make.” And secondly, if you accomplish in heating it to exactly 248 degrees, “you probably won’t be able to get it stick to the apple flesh” due to something about pectin. But one thing I love about Melissa is that she’s not afraid to try and she always wants to prove people wrong (I hope Charlotte inherits some of that). So what would have been a fairly relaxing and lazy Saturday night at the Hess house suddenly turned into Willy Wonka’s candy shop.
Melissa bathed Charlotte and I put her down for the night, but before I went upstairs to put Charlotte down Melissa let me know that we needed to make the carmel apple slices tonight because tomorrow was going to be busy. Now I could have declined this candy making apple extravaganza completely, but I have to admit that after we shared a delicious carmel apple in Seattle a few months ago I was interested to see if we could really replicate something so delicious in our very own home. So I melted some butter, Melissa measured the brown sugar and corn syrup and I began to stir over medium until it boiled. While I stirred, Melissa cut apples and pierced the slices with toothpicks. Remember, “everything is better when it’s miniature.”
I stirred for a long time and that’s when Melissa broke out the white wine and man she hit it hard...just kidding, but the photo is funny. We slowly got the temperature up to 248. I kind of felt like Marty from Back to the Future trying to get the car up to 88mph while trying to produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to to make things happen. Eventually it boiled we added some sweet condensed milk and eventually some vanilla and voila, carmel.
Now for the moment of truth. Would it stick to the apple flesh? Come back next week to find out
Just kidding!!!
It did stick! Pretty well at least. It definitely stuck better to the skin than the flesh, but I think we were pretty pleased with the results. We chopped up some peanuts and sprinkled the slices with the nuts and some mini m&m’s.
Overall it was a pretty fun project. We both got a little bit of hot carmel on our hands but survived and what would have been a dull night sitting on the couch was a fun moment where once again, as much as I make fun of Pinterest, it has some great content and has produced some great food, home decor and general humor in my life. So the next time Melissa starts talking about the next big idea she found and wants to try I’ll probably respond by saying, “Yes, that sounds ‘pinteresting’ to me."
-jay
Of course a tricky little play on words for the fifth grades. These will be given with a lollipop that has a fake mustache attached on the stick!
And last but not least, I want to make sure that the other teachers on my team at school do not feel forgotten. I always want them to know that I think we are “mint” to be, no matter how crazy the school year gets!
