By Veterans Day and Sean has the day off and we did something I've been meaning to do: we drove to Quincy and looked at houses. Not seriously—not with an agent, not with paperwork—but just drove the neighborhoods on the map and looked at what was there, what a house might be, what the streets were like for a four-person family with a toddler and an incoming baby.
Quincy is what we can actually afford when we can eventually afford a house. It's ten minutes from the Southie streets I've known my whole life. It has the same water, different angle. I grew up here in a sense—my father's family is from Adams Shore—and it doesn't feel like leaving. It feels like the next address.
We're not buying anything now. We don't have the down payment and we have a baby coming in April and a toddler who's nineteen months old and the bandwidth is occupied. But we drove the streets and looked at the three-bedroom colonials and the capes with the fenced yards and the elementary schools one block from the park, and Sean was quiet in the way he's quiet when he's mapping something, and I watched him look out the car window at the yards and thought: this is the next thing.
Twenty-one weeks. I made Thanksgiving pie crusts on Sunday to get ahead of the holiday—two crusts in the freezer, ready, so that Thanksgiving week itself is just the filling. The logistics of cooking with a toddler and a second-trimester pregnancy require this kind of advance planning. Past-me invests. Present-me gets the dividends. I said this to Liam while we made the crusts. He ate some of the raw dough. He seemed uninterested in the philosophical dimension.
The same Sunday I made those two pie crusts for the freezer, I had a little applesauce left over in the jar and the oven was already warm—and that’s how these cookies happened. They fit the whole philosophy: simple ingredients, forgiving technique, something Liam could be involved in without disaster. He ate some of the dough here too. I’ve stopped trying to prevent this.
Applesauce Cookies
Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 12 minutes | Total Time: 22 minutes | Servings: 36 cookies
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1 cup raisins (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
- Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, about 2–3 minutes.
- Add wet ingredients. Beat in the egg, then stir in the applesauce until combined. The mixture may look slightly curdled—that’s fine.
- Combine dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
- Mix. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until just combined. Fold in raisins if using.
- Portion and bake. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart. Bake for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are set and the tops look just dry.
- Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to 4 days, or freeze in a single layer.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 78 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 3g | Carbs: 13g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 65mg