Tag Archives: apple

Burning My Fingers

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We are having a bunch of friends over tomorrow and i was planning to make them some soup.  I baked up a bunch of butternut squash, an hour and a quarter at 350 degrees, and let it sit for a while.  I thought it had cooled enough, but 350 degrees is pretty hot.  I toasted my fingertips.

I have done plenty of cooking.  I do most of the cooking in our house.  i try hard to come up with something wholesome and fresh and tasty, so we don’t end up eating reheated pasta with tater tots.  I have made soup a number of times this fall.  I have to use the pumpkins we grew.  This time I used something different.

I look forward to making soup tomorrow, but my fingertips are really sore.  In fact, typing this right now is uncomfortable.  What was I thinking?

Whatever.  Tomorrow I will whip up the soup.  And a couple of pies.  Crap, the oven is going to be busy all day.  So much for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.  Maybe it will balance out.  Local squash and apples instead of California squash and Washington apples.  A day of baking can’t pump out too much carbon compared to shipping food thousands of miles can it?

After a day of baking I am hoping my fingers will have cooled a bit.  I suppose even if they haven’t, some apple pie will distract me long enough to forget about it.

Apple Tree

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We inherited an old apple tree when we moved into this house.  The previous owner told us that it never bore fruit.  It blossomed each spring but no apples appeared.  The first fall we were here, a couple of years ago, I pruned that baby good.  I cut lots of wood from it and, behold, we had apples the next year.

We had a lot of apples this fall.  Too many, in fact.  I haven’t gotten the equipment to make applesauce or cider or to can what I might make.  Part of the challenge is that apples are Red Delicious.  They are tasty, but they do not ripen until October.  Maybe in September we will get a few, but we have a narrow window between ripe and hard frost to get to them.  It just doesn’t happen as well as I’d like.

Recently, I was listening to The Splendid Table, a program on Vermont Public Radio.  The hosts were talking about apples, since this is the season, and they dissed the Red Delicious.  Granted, I would agree with them if they were referring to the mushy and sort-of sweet Red Delicious that gets piled up in supermarkets and whose silhouette has become the symbol of appleness.  But the apples on our tree (once they finally get ripe) are way sweeter and juicier than those sad pretenders.  I was sorry to hear them put down a variety in its entirety.  Those fruitists!

We have a flock of wild turkeys that like to hang around here.  These days they can be found late in the day and early in the morning, those crepuscular hours when the light is muted, bobbing about under the apple tree, poking at the drops.  They have gotten a few meals there.  I don’t begrudge them, especially when they snack on the mealy ones taken over by worms.  They can have those.  Plus, those ugly drops keep them from flapping into the branches and taking the good ones.

I will take some time to prune the tree this fall or perhaps in the first days of spring.  We will get more apples next spring I am sure.  What I need to do is plant a couple more trees, give us some species variety, as well as an earlier crop.   It would be nice to count on having some apples in September.  And we should get our hands in a cider press, have a good old fashioned cider pressing party.

That would make those late apples, even the ones that might not offer their full flavor, well worth it.  I don’t care what reputation Red Delicious may have.