Well, last Sunday marked four weeks of drawing tasks from the Quarantine Task Jar. I'm pretty psyched at the accumulating stack of items that I've now tackled, while I suppose I should acknowledge that several of them are extensive and still, well, in process. (That's why a careful review of blog posts won't necessarily reveal an orderly task-a-day report.) Out of curiosity and as a bit of a status check, I took a moment with my Sunday morning coffee to do a quick tally of the drawn task slips:
- Chores/Onerous Tasks (purple slips) = 9
- Yard Tasks (green slips) = 7
- Recipes/Relaxing Tasks (blue slips) = 8
Given that the task jar is overwhelmingly filled with those purple slips, I'm definitely intrigued about the underrepresentation of the harder chores in this summary at the end of four weeks. I guess I might begin to dread even more the next month since I can harbor diminishing hopes for pleasant indulgences to be the "chore" for upcoming days during this pandemic shut-down...so many purple sit waiting to be drawn! Much as I may not be excited about some of the chores that lurk in the bottom of the jar, I will again acknowledge the good fortune of my reasonably happy shut-down life: none of those slips will be as bad as having coronavirus.
So what task was drawn on the final Sunday of April? "Apple Hand Pies." Yet another recipe that I'd wanted to try out sometime...but it concerns me that the last seven draws have included only one purple...and three each of the green and blue. Well, those green yard tasks are a great thing since there was a stretch of good weather days. But those blues are not good for my waistline!
I depended on two recipes to pull these off, and it took Sunday evening and also carried over to Monday to finish up. The pastry crust was based on Dorie Greenspan's recipe, tweaked a bit by Laura Bolton of ForkKnifeSwoon.com, but boy howdy! it did not turn out very well. Admittedly, with the exception of the much more forgiving crust one might put on a chicken pan pie, I don't remember messing with from-scratch pie crust before so I'm sure I don't know what I'm doing. Laura's approach to the sweet apple filling was disappointing and problematic as well, and it didn't hold together the way I'd imagined. So I fixed it by turning to Diana Rattray's approach, which I found much more satisfactory. And also probably sweeter!
"Homemade Apple Hand Pies," from Laura Bolton of ForkKnifeSwoon.com.[Published 23 October 2013]
"Hand-Held Apple Pies," by Diana Rattray of TheSpruceEats.com. [Updated 10 September 2019]
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