My friend Marylin alias SoftThistle on http://twitter.com/ announced yesterday (or should I say, screamed with joy?) that she was moving. To be exact, she said she was moving to a house with ‘a deck in the garden and an apple tree’.
Now that made me smile because, when we bought our house (after living in various appartments), the first thing I said to people was ‘…and it has apple trees!’ On closer inspection, one tree was cookers, the other eating apples.
I’m not sure why I was so excited about the apple trees – probably because it’s that little girls’ dream of getting a real house, with garden, white fence, the whole package.
Anyway, we moved in. DS9 was nine months old at the time (DD7 was just a lovely figment of our imagination) and I eagerly collected the apples and made apple pie, apple crumble, apple turnovers and apple strΓΌdel. The next year I chopped up the apples, cooked them in the biggest pot I had and made jar upon jar of apple jelly (it’s like a clear jam).
Then, of course, DD7 came along. My excitement with our apple trees wore off. They grew bigger and bigger – or at least, that’s how I saw them in my head π – and they became a chore… Everyday I would look out and see the windfall apples lying on the lawn. Sighed and thought, oh, that’s going to take me ages to pick them all up. So didn’t bother and, of course, you can see where all this is going. Lawn was filled with apples, which rotted at a rate of knots and the whole thing turned into a sorry mess. Then I spent what seemed like the whole of Sunday picking them up (yuck!) before DH could cut the grass.
Fast forward to 2009. We’re now doing Flylady, aren’t we? π So every day, normally on my return from taking the DKs to school, I go and pick up the windfall apples. Takes me a couple of minutes tops. We have 3 green garden refuse bins which are emptied every 14 days (how lucky is that), so there is no excuse.
I also try and pick a bag a day to give to friends, school, scouts, anyone who will take them off my hands!
Still looking for ways to use them up. The cake recipe I posted the other day (‘Note(lets) from a small island) was fantastic, so I’ll be baking plenty of those – in different baking tins to confuse the family…
But if you can think of some other good uses for them, I’d be happy to hear from you! Marylin and I will thank you for it π
Oooh there's some great ideas! Apple strudel… mmm lovely!
I'm going tomorrow for a proper look around it with my camera in hand, so you can guarantee there will be photos up on the blog by the end of the weekend! π
I love apple season. Every year we go to a u-pick apple orchard and we pick many bags of apples. Then I spend many hours in the kitchen, making apple muffins, apple pancakes, applesauce, apple crisp (but I leave the oats out of the topping and replace with crushed ginger snap cookies mmm), plus many other things ( I freeze a lot of these things for enjoying over the winter).
Thinking we'll have to make it a priority to go next weekend & I'll post some recipes on my blog w/pics of our fun at the orchard.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Do you have applebutter in Denmark? My grandmother always had homemade applebutter on her shelves -there are even slow cooker recipes for it!