An Apple a Day

“Pickles, come here, quick! These apples are…. Gracious! What’s going on…?” I took off like a shot when I heard Grannie yell. As I entered the kitchen, she was standing by the sink with her hair all messy, smudges of flour on her cheeks and a very surprised look on her face. I thought to myself, what on earth could be going on in here? Some really strange things have been happening lately in Grannie’s kitchen. What now? But the apples were just lying there on the counter, cool as cucumbers: peeled, sliced and looking anything but troublesome. The only thing I could see that was unusual was Grannie’s cookbook lying upside down on the floor. “What’s wrong Grannie?” I asked. “Those apples look pretty tame, but why’s that crazy cookbook on the floor?” “I could have sworn I heard the apples crying ‘Help us!’ when I started slicing them,” she said. She still looked pretty surprised—and puzzled at the same time. “They’ve certainly never done that before. They’re just regular baking apples. And then the cookbook just flew off the counter onto the floor!” I guess I need to tell you about a couple of things. Can you keep a secret? Cross your heart and promise not to tell anyone. First, this cookbook is weird. It’s ancient and nobody seems to know where it came from. Listen to this: A long time ago, Grannie Annie’s Great-Great Grandmother Paula Red started using this cookbook. Nobody seems to know where it came from or how old it was—it just appeared one day on her kitchen counter. It was already old. Even the red cover and the gold, swirly lettering look old and faded. As the story goes, after the cookbook showed up, strange stuff started happening in Grandma Paula’s kitchen. And then she would disappear on what she called a ‘Cooking Mission.’” Everyone thinks the cookbook was the cause of it all. Then guess what? That cookbook just vanished one day! No one knew where it went—it was just gone. Nobody saw it for years and years. Until one day it appeared on Grannie’s kitchen counter. And strange stuff started happening here, too. But here’s the biggest secret of all—Grannie’s a spy! She says she’s an Agent but that’s just a grown-up word for ‘spy,’ right? (Now remember, you can’t tell anyone.) Like I said, strange things have been happening in Grannie’s kitchen, too. Sometimes when she’s cooking something, using a recipe from the cookbook, all-of-a-sudden we just sort of wind up someplace else, like in someone’s garden helping pick tomatoes, or in someone else’s kitchen baking bread, or somewhere else. It’s really pretty freaky. But wait’ll you hear what happened this time….