Cat Friends & Apple Pie

I have never had more than a few close friends…it’s one of the effects of being an introvert. But it also means that the few friends I do have are of the highest quality.

One of these close friends coined the term “cat friends” … friends that are self-sufficient but always there if you need them. They could talk once a week or once a year…or sometimes once every five years. Yet whenever they reconnect, they can pick up right where they were as if no time has passed. These are my people.

One of my cat friends lives in my vicinity and, honestly, she’s much better at initiating get-togethers than I am, which I desperately need. Luckily, she forgives me for my (many) flaws. This weekend she mentioned that she had a bunch of extra apples and asked if Zoe and I wanted to make a pie with her and her daughter, who is a couple years younger than Zoe. Coincidentally, I had already bought some zucchinis to make zucchini bread and just so happened to be in possession of several bananas that were suffering a slow and painful death and begging to be made into something edible before they eventually made it into the trash. In possession of sacrificial fruit, we decided to meet the next afternoon for a small baking party.

Zoe loves baking, so I set up each girl with her own baking station. Of course, halfway through the first recipe, I realized I did not have any baking powder. Luckily, my friend’s sister had recently moved into the neighborhood and they ran over to borrow some. The girls enjoyed grating, measuring, and mixing their own concoctions with minimal(ish) supervision. They each made it through their own loaves of banana bread (chocolate chips optional, although they were definitely added to each batch) and, since I was out of loaf pans, they made zucchini bread muffins, some topped with brown sugar. We even had enough zucchini batter to make some mini-muffins, which turned out quite dangerous as they are the perfect size to pop in your mouth and eat like candy. I’m both relieved and disturbed that I did not count how many I ate as I’m sure it was more than the recommended serving.

We lost the attention of the younger munchkin to the appeal of the live action Aladdin, some crayons, and her dolls. However, Zoe was fascinated with the apple peeling & coring device and was content to be our head chef for the apple pie (luckily, we only made one). In the midst of our chatting, my friend informed me that, in her first semester of culinary school, she had gained 23 pounds without realizing it. Kudos to her for losing all the weight the following semester. I know that – aside from fruit – the other primary ingredients in our concoctions were sugar and flour, but there’s eggs in it, too! Rocky Balboa ate raw eggs and fruit is good for you…so logic tells me that our baking endeavors should be considered at least semi-healthy…shouldn’t they?

Anyhoo. With my family of three and my friend’s household of two, I knew we would have plenty of sugar-enhanced fruit to go around. I grabbed some Tupperware and filled it with half of my banana bread loaf and a few muffins, calling dibs on giving it to my friend’s sister, who had so graciously donated Baking Powder to the cause. I filled another Tupperware with my friend’s batch of zucchini muffins and told her she had to take those home; she quickly transferred them into a Ziplock bag and stuck them in my freezer for “on-the-go snacks” later.

I made my friend and her daughter stay for dinner and sample the apple pie for dessert…it was not poisonous, although I was tempted to test another helping just to be sure. Shortly before my friend left, I had a scheduled conference call and had to give her a hasty good-bye as it was a school night and Monday mornings should never start off with cranky children.

The next morning, I texted my friend telling her I had noticed she seemed to have conveniently forgotten her bag of muffins in my freezer. Not only did she leave them on purpose, but she left me with the entire apple pie. She did bring home her banana bread, but shared half of it with her other sister (and her family) … touché, my friend, touché. I told her we had done “half-sies” and I had been prepared to gain twelve and a half pounds for her because I was just that good of a friend…but if I gain twenty pounds, she has to gain the other three. I see sweatpants with elastic waistbands for the foreseeable future…and this is why I shouldn’t bake more often than I visit with my cat friends.

Original Post 10/2020