Food Friday: Appealing Apples!

Apples are not just for the lunch boxes!

I have a big blue and white ceramic bowl of green apples sitting on the kitchen counter. I tend to buy green apples because the Tall One prefers them, and no one else has expressed a desire for another variety.  And that is the way I think of them, “green apples,”  when I should be thinking “Granny Smith.”  Granny Smith apples are popular for eating raw (a lunchbox staple) and also for baking in pies. Which is about the extent of my apple repertoire. The smart folks at Saveur magazine have a more novel approach, apples for every dinner course; “An All-Apple Dinner.”

https://www.saveur.com/article/Menu/An-All-Apple-Dinner

Our grocery store has a limited number of apple varieties. One holiday season I went nuts because I was trying to make a Martha Stewart wreath, but I could not find the prescribed “Lady” apples anywhere. Though I think Martha would be the only person on earth who would have noticed that I cleverly substituted McIntoshes.

And Martha wouldn’t have tolerated the Thanksgiving dinner we had one year, long before children, and before the ritual requirement that the table and menu be identical from year to year. We had decorated the table with Granny Smith apples, one at each place, with a long white taper inserted into each piece of fruit. It was lovely. We would enjoy sophisticated, flattering candlelight while being homespun and unique. Until about an hour into the meal, when I suppose the wax dripped down into the cores, which caused the apples to belch the candles out onto the table. They weren’t hissing projectiles, but eventually each candle released itself from apple bondage and dripped wax on the ancestral china. Luckily, there was more wine, and we moved gracefully onto dessert. (Not apple pie, luckily enough.)

Last week on Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor waxed poetical about a fictional variety of apples his character had bred on his farm outside of Lake Woebegone. It was appealingly named “Julia.” After you had eaten one Julia apple, you hungered to eat another. It had a sweet, yet tart, taste and was slightly effervescent. And one felt elated and giddy. Delightful. I sat in the parking lot at Home Depot and had my driveway moment as he finished telling the story.

The “Honeycrisp” apple also hails from Minnesota. I have to track one down, because it is the closest, I think, that I will get to a “Julia” apple. Here are some other Minnesotan kinds of apples: SnowSweet, Zestar!®, FrostbiteTM. Atmospheric.

The Maryland Apple Board lists quite a few charmers, too: Empire, Fuji, Staymen, York, Jonagold (a combination of Jonathan and Golden Delicious) and the Mutsu. I would love to be a fly on the wall of an apple naming party, wouldn’t you?

You can pick your own apples at Lockbriar Farm  in Kent County. Lockbriar grows, among several varieties, “Pink Lady.”  I think that those will be lovely in my next Martha project.

https://www.lockbriarfarms.com

There are lots of places in Queen Anne’s and Talbot Counties for picking your own apples. And you should think about stocking up on pumpkins, too. I just flipped through a decorating-on-a-dime library book and noted the suggestion that little bursts of seasonal color will refresh my décor. I will be clustering some pumpkins in the front hall. Perhaps they will distract from the scatterings of the dog’s chew toys and the slipcovers artfully shredded by the evil cat.

Fall arrives on Saturday!

https://pickyourown.org/MDeast.htm#listings

“With an apple I will astonish Paris.”
-Paul Cezanne

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