A Duck Walked Up To A Lemonade Stand
Forgiveness. Can you imagine?
I know I certainly can’t. As I write this there is construction going on right outside my building and it is driving me absolutely batty. But let’s ignore that for now.
It’s time for the very second episode of VeggieTales, which is appropriately titled "God Wants Me to Forgive Them?!?" and deals with the theme of atonement, absolution, exoneration, whatever you feel like calling it.
Now, the past week or so has been A Lot, as anyone paying attention to the news should know. Normally I wouldn’t bring up real world events (maybe I would, this is literally the second week) but I felt the need to address it because the episode is literally about forgiveness, something I have no intention to feel towards certain political officials.
But enough of that. VeggieTales.
Act One is a faithful retelling of The Grapes of Wrath, a book I know very well because it was required reading for my my English 12 class in high school. I definitely read it. The story begins with four grapes driving a very old-fashioned jalopy and singing a song about how they’re the Grapes of Wrath. Hey, at least they’re self-aware.
After crashing into a tree stump, the Grapes step out of their car to inspect the damage when they see recurring character Junior Asparagus playing outside of his house and begin to relentlessly roast him. I’m talking absolute evisceration. Completely ruthless.
Junior’s dad (Mike) intervenes, telling the Grapes to stop annihilating his son, but also that Junior needs to forgive them for the things they said. And he does, and everything is fine, for a bit.
So far, this is all stuff that happened in Steinbeck’s original novel.
Shortly thereafter, the Grapes learn that Junior’s name is Junior and begin making fun of him all over again. This (rightfully) angers Junior and he begins charging toward them, but steps on a gardening hoe, smacking himself in the face. He then falls backward into a toy truck and rolls down the hill. The truck hits a sandbox, catapulting Junior vertically several feet upwards before he plummets into the sandbox. It is an amazing combination of terrible luck and defiance of physics.
Junior emerges, covered head to toe (…?) in sand, and the Grape children begin to laugh even harder, before being scolded by Ma and Pa Grape. The children apologize, but Junior is reluctant to forgive them a second time. (He should be, if you ask me.) Bob and Larry, the omniscient narrators, then tell Junior that God wants us to forgive everyone, no matter what. Junior asks how many times he needs to forgive someone, and Bob and Larry consult the Bible. They quote Matthew 18:22 "Jesus answered 'I tell you not seven times, but seventy times seven.’” The Daughter Grape, whose name escapes me, if it was said at all, answers that seventy times seven is 490. The Grapes then rename themselves The Grapes Of Math and drive off into the sunset and all is well.
490 is a weirdly specific number. Even weirder, in some translations the verse says “not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” and that number is significantly lower. Surely we would want the forgiveness limit to be as high as possible? I didn’t do any further digging into the context of the verse.
In Act Two, Bob and Larry recount the time they learned about forgiveness. They are giving a three hour tour (a three hour tour) on the ocean to a millionaire and his wife, and also a professor. This all seems very normal.
Along the way, Larry is piloting the boat and begins to daydream that he is a Russian icebreaker captain. We’ve all done this. Anyway he hits a rock and leaves the crew stranded on a deserted island. They very quickly adjust to their new life, building huts out of bamboo, but they’re all unhappy with Larry for wrecking the boat and leaving them stranded.
One morning, Bob awakes to find Larry has gone missing. Feeling they would be better off without him, Larry had built a raft (from bamboo) and attempted to leave. Bob then realized he needed to forgive Larry. A palm tree enters and sings a song about forgiveness, and the Professor reveals he has built a helicopter out of bamboo and the five of them fly off into the sunset and all is well.
I want to talk about this palm tree for a sec.
I promised myself I wouldn’t get into the weeds of canon or continuity or the implications of vegetables being able to talk. It’s a cartoon, it was the 90’s, none of that mattered then.
But that island was full of palm trees. Why was only one of them sentient?
The show left me with no answers, and I kind of hope that tree shows up again at some point in the future.
All in all, an okay episode. As a full-grown adult living in the 2020’s, I feel like the concept of apology and forgiveness are much more nuanced than they were made out to be here. BUT it was made for children, at a time in history when things were somewhat better, so maybe I shouldn’t criticize it too harshly.
Anyway. Food.
This was an asparagus heavy episode once again. But there were also a lot of grapes. I was sure that I wouldn’t find a recipe centered around both of them, so I just focused on the grapes.
What is a grape? A miserable little pile of secrets. It’s a fruit that grows in clusters and is often very sweet. So I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find any savory recipes that heavily featured them, and that I would have to improvise. And I’m not great at improvising when it comes to food.
Luckily, I didn’t have to do that. I found a recipe for a roasted cauliflower and grape salad that I thought would be very nice. Obviously I substituted the cauliflower with asparagus, and the original recipe calls for red grapes, but as the titular Grapes are green, I figured I could use green grapes.
Do I have high hopes that the grapes and the asparagus will pair well? No. But do I have faith that the original recipe, pairing cauliflower and grapes, would have worked? Also no. To be honest I wasn’t too keen on the idea of roasted grapes at all. Thankfully I’m usually wrong about things like this, so I wasn’t too worried.
I also subbed out the hazelnuts for pumpkin seeds, because hazelnuts are very expensive and also I couldn’t find them at any of the stores in my neighborhood. But the pumpkin seeds were three dollars. Also, feel free to give me money.
Final verdict: Not Great!
The asparagus was good. As I said last week, add enough oil and salt and it’s probably gonna be pretty great. And the cumin added an extra layer to it that I was pleasantly surprised by, given that I typically don’t like cumin.
The roasted grapes, shockingly, pretty great. Not sure if I’d ever do that of my own accord, but an interesting experience nonetheless.
The combination of the two was not great, as predicted. Would the original recipe have been better? Would cauliflower and red grapes have been a better pairing? I may never know.
And the dressing was the final nail in the coffin. I generally don’t like buttermilk, and the whole thing just had a weird tang to it that I didn’t care for. And it didn’t add anything to the asparagus-grape combo that already wasn’t good.
So not a great dish, but that doesn’t mean this week was a failure. The goal for me is not to make good food, it’s to make any food at all, and nobody can say I didn’t do that.
All was not lost, though. While doing my recipe search this week, I also stumbled upon a very simple-seeming recipe for red wine sorbet, so I decided to also do that as a fun bonus that also kept with the tropical theme of Act Two. I don’t really drink, but I decided to make an exception due to the sheer absurdity of it all.
This recipe has only three ingredients: caster sugar, red grapes, and Shiraz. In order to continue staying on theme, I subbed white grapes and Moscato.
Now, I’m no scientist, but I know for a fact that grapes and alcohol don’t freeze. So, how exactly do you make a sorbet out of it? No idea. I’d also never made a sorbet before, so I figured a lot of weird stuff was probably about to happen.
And I was right.
First of all, I needed to juice 750 grams of grapes, according to the recipe. Imagine what 750 grams of grapes looks like. You’re probably wrong.
Next, I had to juice the 750 grams of grapes. I don’t own a juicer, but really, who does? So the process involved pureeing the grapes in a blender and then straining them. I didn’t assume that would be a simple process, and I was right.
And yet, somehow, I persisted.
With the grapes juiced, I put the mixture into the freezer and began what - according to the recipe - would end up being a seven-hour process, which I began at 2 in the afternoon. Whoops.
In short, it would require freezing for two hours, mixing in the ice crystals, refreezing, remixing every 30 minutes for another two hours, and then letting freeze for three hours. So yeah. Seven hours total.
After the first two hours, nothing even resembling freezing had begun to happen. Was this a result of me using different grapes/wine? Had I done something wrong when I dissolved the sugar (i.e. simmered it for too long/not enough)? Was the container I used too deep? Is the recipe inherently flawed because alcohol doesn’t freeze? Any one of these could have been true. I decided to let it freeze for a bit longer.
Another hour and it was starting to freeze! Good. It is sort of a sickly greenish-brownish color, but that’s just life sometimes. Also the construction has stopped for now, so that’s good.
After a couple of hours, churning every 30 minutes, it was starting to look like an actual sorbet. Well, because of the color it looked like gravy, but I know it’s sorbet.
By 11pm, progress was being made, but the sorbet had not yet fully solidified. At this point I decided my initial issue was using a container that was too deep. I still don’t fully understand how it froze at all, given that there is literal alcohol in it, but I decided not to question it. I decided to let it sit overnight to fully freeze.
The next morning, I was greeted by an actual, solid sorbet. And it was good, especially for me, who had never made one before. It tasted like, well, wine. Which is weird, actually, because I used Moscato, which categorically does not taste like wine. Even better, the gravy color had almost completely gone away.
I do recommend using an ice cream maker if you’re gonna do this. It’s way too much effort otherwise.
At some point I’ll get better at taking food photos. Or maybe I won’t, who cares?