DMB Digest: The Candied Cranberry Affair, Part II
The Consequences of my Costco Shopping Tendencies
For those of you who are new to these parts, or in case you missed last week’s update, this week is the exciting conclusion of an explosive, two-part expose centered around fresh cranberries, shopping habits, and family holiday traditions. For the first half of the story, click here: https://davidmarkbrown.substack.com/p/dmb-digest-the-candied-cranberry
And now, the rest of the story.
In case you thought the most difficult trials were over in regards to the Candied Cranberry Affair, au contraire my friends. They had only just begun. Now that the fresh cranberries have been paid for and delivered to the Brown Family Sanctum, there is a sacred obligation to bring said controversial cranberries to completion—to prevent any semblance of wasteful behavior and validate the expenditure of financial resources and time.
The same afternoon as the shopping expedition, the wife peppers me with questions regarding the recipe. What’s the ratio for the simple syrup? What if we don’t have enough maple syrup? Do the berries need to be completely submerged? How long do we soak them? And how long before these berries spoil anyway?
I’m calm at this point. I currently have the leverage. The berries have been purchased. The wife will never let them spoil, even to prove the point that we shouldn’t have purchased them in the first place. She’s too pure for such vulgarities.
Knowing what I know, I use my “Let’s-all-calm-down-and-be-reasonable” voice that never fails to elevate everyones’s blood pressure. I’ll get the recipe from our friend. I’ll take care of it. We can google it. I’m sure we can do half maple and half sugar. It can’t be that hard. And I’ve no doubt the berries will last forever and a day.
The wife eyes me with justified suspicion before taking another tack. Are these even gonna taste good? I tried one, and it’s really bitter. The kids aren’t gonna like these.
This is where I would have said, “Alexa, shuffle music by Berry White” but I’m pretty sure that would have resulted in a kick to my nuts, and no cranberries are worth that. Instead, I simply restate my confidence. No baby, we got this. These berries are going to be the sweetest tarts ever.
The wife rolls her eyes and files the conversation in her mental trash receptacle. For the next several days, we do nothing in regards to the berries. The following Friday, the wife mentions in passing that we should soak the berries over the weekend so they don’t spoil. She’s testing me. I fail with flying colors. Three days later, I mention that we forgot to soak the berries over the weekend and add that maybe we should do it that night as a family activity. Okay. Sure, says the wife. This isn’t her first rodeo. At this point, she knows she’s on her own.
Fast forward to that evening, and I’m unavoidable detained with something important. (Who could have guessed that the Minecraft expedition with my younger son would have gone sideways after encountering a patrol of pillagers?) My older son predictably begins to twitch and spasm at the mention of any “family activity.” Knowing all of this, the wife concocts the simple syrup and starts the cranberries soaking without a word to any of the rest of us. It’s the best family activity ever. So far, my decision to buy these berries couldn’t be looking better.
Two days later, the berries are still soaking. The wife confronts me on one of my few working-hour-visitations to the main floor of our home. She holds out a berry. Are these supposed to get sweet? Because they still taste bitter. How do we know when they’ve soaked long enough?
I wave off the berry. I’m sure they’re fine. They just need to be rolled in sugar. The wife informs me that they’ve already been rolled in sugar. She challenges me to try the process, which I do. The sugar dissolves and glops around the berry irregularly. I hastily pop the berry in my mouth, chew, and swallow. I reassure her that it tastes great. Cranberries are, after all, tart.
“They’re bitter.”
“I believe the better descriptor is tart, honey.”
“I think they’re bitter.”
I transition to my nothing-to-see-here voice (which is very similar to my let’s-all-calm-down-and-be-reasonable voice, but with a little less intentionality and spacing between the words). Maybe we just need to soak them a little longer, or maybe there’s a technique to applying the sugar. Maybe they need to sit on the counter for a bit. I’ll look into it. No worries. Of course I immediately forget about the berries and wander off to complete whatever critical task I was on.
By this point in the process, I figure I’ve spent a solid five minutes puzzling over these candied cranberries, including the time it took me to buy them over a week ago. The wife, on the other hand, has probably invested a solid three hours attempting to salvage the impromptu, extravagant expenditure of precious resources. And she’s not done.
The next day, I meander through the kitchen after a schoolwork-related battle with my oldest son. I’m a bit twitchy as a result. There on the counter is a beautiful, yellow dish (from our trip to Turkey) filled with sparkling, crystalline cranberries thickly coated in sugar. They’re a collective thing of beauty, perfectly catching the mid-day, cloud-filtered, late-October, Northern Hemisphere sunlight.
No one is around, so I pop one in my mouth and honestly attempt to taste it for the first time. The berry crunches with the first bite. The sweet hits immediately. It’s followed by the tart along with a lingering maple flavor. It’s genuinely delicious, and I’m not a person for sweets. Sugar and I haven’t really gotten along ever since my teenage days of drinking 2-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper on a daily basis. I eat a second and then a third candied cranberry. At this point, the wife enters the kitchen. I indicate the berries.
“Wow, these are really good. How did you finally figure out the sugar?”
“I put them in a bag and shook them up.”
“So, what do you think?”
The wife eats a berry and shrugs.
“And?”
“I guess they’re growing on me.”
Four days later, the berries are all gone, and I’ll never make such a rash purchase again. Scout’s honor.
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At the Desk This Week
I’m still working on episode four of Season three of the Green Ones. This is the first time in the series that I’ve introduced how telekinesis might work in tandem with an artificial neural network for generating a virtual reality that impacts humans without them wearing any virtual reality device/goggles. So the virtual reality is conducted via energy along the EM spectrum directly to the brain. And when a human host with specific telekinetic abilities is integrated with the network, the host is able to control the virtual reality in real time. It’s been fun to think about and implement.
I have no idea if this kind of technology is theoretically possible. Or course, such a thing would definitely be abused with terrible results. But, that’s not really my realm. I just play around with the possibilities!
If You Wish to Start Reading The Green Ones…
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