Apple of My Eye

Pure joy in the garden of eating.

We have been harvesting the ancient craggy apple tree that we inherited with the property.  Funny, we had no idea what and if it would fruit but I spent the better part of three weekends this winter pruning.  The reward was a bounty of apples that our neighbor calls "Golden Transparent".

The apples range in size from golf balls to softballs covered with a thin yellow skin.  There was no water core but on the larger apples the cores can be hollow and cavernous.  The flesh bruises easily and has a texture of a golden delicious.  The flavor on the greener apples is tart but sweet, like a granny smith only more intense.  Overripe apples can be mushy but still edible in the same way you can devour all of a perfectly ripe pear until only its seeds and stem remain.

How do you like them apples?

All in all, we were happily surprised that our magnificent tree produced such good produce. The tree produced about five large shopping bags of fruit with a lot of fruit still left on the tree, out of reach of our climbing and ladder efforts.

Being "food industrious" can be oppressive.  You feel as if you must process every piece of fruit even if after peeling and coring some of the smaller apples all you have is a bite. We gave a couple of bags away not wanting to have guilt of wasting food on our souls.  It is better to spread the oppression of being food misers.  

We ate as many ripe apples as we could manage in order to capitalize on our good fortune. After that we set out trying to preserve and store the apples.  The apples represent storage of the sun's energy just as all food does.  Animals are energy batteries in that they convert their feed into flesh. For farmers, being able to preserve or extend the energy saved in plants, fruits or livestock resulted in great inventions such as beer, jam and bacon.  (Yum, that sounds like the start of a good meal.)

The old-timers must have taken great satisfaction staving off starvation through the bleakness of winter with calories that they had grown and processed the summer before.  So when life gives you apples, then make apple sauce (among other goodies).

We added some ripe rose hips to coarsely chopped apples and boiled the essence out of them.  Rose hips incidentally are pretty delicious fresh picked too, almost plum like.

Life through rose hip glasses.  Isn't it grand?

After several hours, the remaining mash was taken off the heat and added to a cheese cloth lined colander where it dripped drop by drop overnight.  Add some sugar and the result was about seven small jars of apple rose hip jelly which tasted like floral honey.

Trade for two tickets to Jerry band?

Some of the apples were chopped and frozen for future fruit pies, more was made into apple sauce and canned.  The remainder was processed into slices and run through the food dehydrator.  We ran several loads and we got three quart baggies.  The kids love them and are chowing them constantly.  If we were in the olden days, we would have starved two weeks after autumn began.  We will have to plant at least ten more apple trees if we are to produce enough for a full year.