Cookie's Kitchen

Halloween is kind of weird for me these days. I think somewhere deep down inside, I desperately want to skip ahead to the part where I have grandkids. I want to go to their house on Halloween, hang out, have a drink, and sit around a fire pit that I am in no way responsible for maintaining. Someone else can deal with the fire. Someone else can buy the candy. Someone else can make sure nobody falls into anything. I just want to show up and enjoy myself. I picture a neighborhood crawling with kids, everybody outside, people coming and going, and me sitting there thinking, This is nice. But we’re not there yet. We’re in this weird in-between stage. There was a time when Halloween meant people coming over. I’d spend the afternoon making homemade crab rangoons, we’d sit outside around the fire pit, eat entirely too many of them, hand out candy, have a few drinks, and enjoy the evening. It was work, but it was fun work. Now the kids and young adults that were part of our crew have lives and adventures of their own, our neighborhood doesn’t get that many trick-or-treaters, and Jen and I mostly look at each other and wonder exactly how much effort two middle-aged people should put into Halloween when nobody is coming over.

But here’s the thing about homemade crab rangoons: they are delicious. They are also kind of a pain. So this year we compromised.

Crab rangoons? Yes please.

Fire pit, outside setup, candy distribution, playlist fine-tuning while removing any non-family friendly songs, and the full middle-aged Halloween experience? No thanks.

We were going to make dinner, turn off the lights, hide from America’s children, and watch Agatha All Along. It was a good plan. Saturday afternoon I took some stuff to Savers. On the way home, I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I stopped at Subway. While I was sitting there, I had what surely was a brilliant idea. Instacart. We hadn’t been grocery shopping in a couple of weeks, so I needed quite a bit of stuff anyway. I could put in a big grocery order and have someone deliver everything I need to make crab rangoons and chicken fried rice. There was only one thing that I wasn’t going to trust Instacart with: wonton wrappers. Instacart shoppers cannot find wonton wrappers. I don’t know why. Maybe they exist in some sort of grocery-store Bermuda Triangle. Maybe only certain people can see them. Maybe you have to believe in wonton wrappers before the wonton wrappers reveal themselves to you. Whatever the reason, I knew better than to place the fate of my wonton wrappers in the hands of my Instacart shopper. I’d been burned before. It wasn’t going to happen again.

So I placed my Instacart order and headed to Schnucks myself for the wrappers. The app said my groceries would arrive later that afternoon. Perfect. I’d get the wonton wrappers, go home, watch some football, maybe clean and organize a little more, and then groceries would magically appear at my door. I’d start cooking and we’d eat at a respectable hour. Then we’d turn off all the lights so children would assume nobody was home and spend the rest of Halloween eating crab rangoons and watching television. It was a great plan.

I’m sorry, what?

Apparently, if you’re stuck on the wrong side of the store and just need to leave, you can wait until somebody walks in and sneak out through the entrance. I had always felt guilty doing this. Not anymore. It had now been officially blessed by the Schnucks floral department. I walked out of that store feeling fantastic. I had beaten the system. Everything was going my way. At that moment, the Lord’s grace was resting upon me. That feeling would last approximately two hours.

I got home. I watched some football and waited without a care in the world. Eventually, I started getting just a touch nervous. I hadn’t heard anything from Instacart, even though the 4:00pm – 5:00pm window was getting close. Then the message arrived: Your Instacart order has been delayed. The new time was now four hours later than the original one. This was unacceptable! At least apparently it was unacceptable to me. I mean, they just moved the time? Can you do that? That doesn’t seem fair. They said it would be 4PM. Isn’t there some code or something that they have to stick to? I went from being the grateful recipient of undeserved Schnucks grace to a man consumed with self-righteous indignation in the blink of an eye.

So I did what anyone would do when faced with a minor inconvenience in the great scheme of things. I began furiously messaging the Instacart robot. I couldn’t believe this aggravation. I had plans! There were crab rangoons to make! My wife had to eat! Halloween was being ruined! Eventually, after I had sufficiently explained the great injustice that had been committed against me to an artificial intelligence customer-service representative, another message appeared. My groceries would arrive sooner now. That’s more like it. Justice had been served.

And almost immediately, I realized what jerk I was being. There I was, telling Jen a couple of hours earlier about the unexpected gift I’d received at Schnucks. And now I suddenly felt like the guy in Jesus’ parable whose enormous debt gets forgiven, only to turn around and throttle the guy who owes him a few bucks. It was almost comical how on the nose it was. Apparently, my reservoir of thankfulness and grace had about a two-hour shelf life. The revised delivery window came and went. Eventually the message arrived that my shopper had started sopping, and that’s when I realized something. She was in that Schnucks. The Schnucks that I had just escaped from. The same Schnucks that I knew was absolutely packed. The Schnucks where I had stood earlier and thought, Thank God some poor Instacart sucker has to deal with this instead of me. And now I knew who that sucker was by name.

She started sending me messages.

They were out of this, something happened with that, could she substitute this? I could practically feel the choas through the phone, and this woman was now in the middle of it, and I started feeling terrible for her. Eventually around 8:00pm our groceries arrived. The poor woman looked like she had seen some things. “Honey, I’m sorry I’m so late,” she told me. “It was just terrible there.” All I could think was: I know, I knew exactly how terrible it was, and I sent you in there anyway. A few hours earlier, I’d been congratulating myself because I’d gotten out of that store with my two packages of wonton wrappers with plenty of time to spare. Meanwhile, she had spent her evening fighting through the Halloween grocery apocalypse so I could stay home, watch football, and complain to a robot about being inconvenienced.

Grace for me, judgement for you. Funny how quickly that happens.

We got all the groceries put away around 8:30pm and even though Jen suggested that we wait and make the crab rangoons the next night like reasonable people, I was bound and determined to get them made that night, like I had planned. She was gracious enough to help me and together we knocked them out pretty quick, and even had fun doing it together. Eventually we popped those first crab rangoons into our mouths around 9:30pm and they were indeed delicious. Not long after that, we went to bed. So much for our relaxing Halloween evening of crab rangoons, chicken fried rice and television. Instead, I had spent most of the evening nervously checking my phone and worrying about whether I should turn the porch light on for the Instacart driver and risk attracting trick-or-treaters. And we did wait until the next day for the chicken fried rice. But dinner was good, everything was fine. And I suppose I learned something, or more accurately, I was reminded of something I will undoubtedly need to learn again next week. I really like grace when I’m the one receiving it. I’m considerably less enthusiastic about it when I’m the one being asked to give it. Maybe that’s why grace is grace. It’s easy to be gracious when your groceries arrive on time, the line moves quickly, dinner goes according to plan, and the floral lady secretly lets you out the wrong door. The harder kind shows up when things don’t go according to plan. When somebody inconveniences you. When you’re hungry. When it’s late. That’s when you find out whether grace is something you believe in or just something you enjoy receiving. And if I’m being honest? I’m still working on that one.

As a bonus, here’s the crab rangoon recipe for those of you that I just made hungry. Sorry. The keys to good ones are putting about a teaspoon of filling in each one and sealing them very tightly. Also, I’m an oil guy, even though I know there are versions that can be made in the air fryer.

Prep Time: 30 min Cook Time: 30 min Servings: 50-60 individual appetizers Source: Food.com

INGREDIENTS
1⁄4 cup sour cream
2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, at room temp
3⁄4-1 cup crabmeat, picked
2 green onions, sliced thin
1 clove garlic, minced (large clove)
1 teaspoon ginger, minced
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
wonton wrapper (I buy 2 packages as I’m never quite sure how many I’ll end up with)
oil (for frying)

DIRECTIONS

1. Whip together the sour cream, cream cheese, and soy sauce and sugar until smooth.
2. Fold in remaining ingredients (except wrappers) Heat oil to med-high and you want it around 1 1/2-2 inches deep.
3. Place a small bowl of water on your work surface and lay out 6 wrappers, and place around 1 to 1 and a half teaspoons in the center of each wrapper.
4. Moisten edges, bring up corners and pinch together, along with sides-you dont want filling to float away.
5. Place all 6 in the hot oil and repeat process.
6. By the time you have the next set of 6 ready to crimp it should be time to turn the rangoon’s.
7. You want them a nice golden color.
8. When done remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels.
9. Repeat until done.