Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: Finish this sentence with your favourite food: "The holidays are not complete without..."

My answer is: springerle. They are German cookies that have cool patterns and I never liked them until my mom made them a different way about ten years ago and suddenly they were fluffy instead of hard and I fell in endless love with them. I remember we had both the embossed rolling pin and the little wooden blocks. I have yet to make them myself because my mother is still making them for me, but she bought me my own rolling pin for when the day comes I have to fend for myself. Which I will, because even though I'm the one in the family who rarely eats the sweets but hoovers the Chex mix, springerle is important to me. Here's my rolling pin.

The weather finally turned cold last week in Kansas City. (Cold in Kansas City not being what cold in Iowa is.) It made me crave cooking smells.

Beloved usually does most of the cooking in our house. My cooking is best if you are drunk.

This week while at the grocery store I spied a package of apple crisp mix. (Did you think this was going to be from scratch? Are you KIDDING ME?)

The box said I needed 6-8 cooking apples and some butter. I spent maybe a full two minutes trying to decide what a cooking apple is. I went with Granny Smith.

Then I went to the butter aisle and spent maybe two more minutes trying to decide if low-fat or low-salt butter would taste worse than regular butter. I gambled on the low-salt.

(Note: See this guesswork? This is how most of my recipes go off the rails.)

I brought all the stuff home and started peeling the apples. Of course, I started peeling them vertically instead of horizontally. Just as I figured out how really stupid that is, Beloved noticed what I was doing. I could see his face straining not to make a suggestion, because I always bite his head off when he makes a suggestion.

Beloved: "Can I make a suggestion?"

But at that moment, I figured it out and turned the apple sideways. When it came to coring, though, I just handed the apples to him. I didn't need to lose a thumb to prove a point. He is way better with knives than I am.

I put the apples in a round bowl. They towered over the top. Clearly too tall. I knew there would be a suggestion. We went to a 9 x 13 rectangular glass pan.

When the apples were all in, I mixed the butter with the apple crisp mix and sprinkled it over the top. It ended up needing to cook about fifteen minutes longer than the box said because of all those apples. Mounds of apples. Probably too damn many apples.

But it smelled really good. If they're not snowed in, Ma, Pa and Blondie are coming down on Friday to watch the little angel in The Nutcracker. And I want there to be apple crisp.

Just don't ask me about the time I tried to make Baked Alaska for a party.