Issue #25 Of Apples And Allergies
And…
I like fruit.
Fruit is healthy.
I should eat more fruit.
Here’s my problem with fruit.
No matter how hard I try, the only fruit I seem to be able to eat regularly in its original form is a banana. Everything else seems to get turned into a pie or a muffin or jam or an ice cream topping.
And you know what? Even the bananas frequently find their way into a quick bread because I only like them when they are very underripe. A couple of brown spots and that banana is on its way to the oven.
I especially have trouble eating fresh apples. I used to think it was because I have sensitive teeth. (I do but it turns out that is beside the point.)
Now I think it is because I have so rarely met a good eating apple.
When I was a kid, fresh produce of any kind was expensive and only available in season. So our house saw a lot of canned fruit. Which was lovely but entirely unhealthy because it always came in a sugar syrup. (I’m pretty sure sugar syrup was not one of the four food groups my teachers were always banging on about when they tried to lure us into healthy eating habits.)
The only fresh, and I use the term loosely, apples that came my way were part of something called “satellite lunches”. These were presented to us compliments of the school cafeteria. I have no idea where the “satellite” part came in unless it was because the lunch came in two parts – a hot part and a cold part - and looked like something you could convince school kids was being eaten in space by astronauts. (It wasn’t.)
The hot part was like a foil TV dinner tray and the cold part was a clear plastic compartmentalized thing that generally tried to include fruit. More often than not, this fruit was the same canned peach or canned pear or canned “mixed fruit medley” that I got at home.
But, every so often it was half an apple.
Half a mealy apple.
Half a VERY mealy apple.
And, on one occasion, half a very mealy apple with half a WORM in it.
And, on one occasion, half a very mealy apple with half a WORM in it.
Actually, forget the sensitive teeth and the poor quality of the apples. I’m pretty confident the worm was the tipping point.
And the real reason that, now - even though I have access to incredible eating apples - I spend my time peeling and slicing them very thinly to make sure they are worm free.
Before popping them into a pie.
During Covid lockdown, I did a deep dive into the old Betty Crocker cookbook and made several of the apple pie recipes. The recipes, my reviews of them, and my own recipe for pie crust can all be found at the end of this link.
And, if you like to make apple pie, now is the perfect time of year.
Copyright© 2023 Anne Morse Hambrock All rights reserved.
Speaking Of Apples
Once upon a time, our daughter saved some seeds from a grocery store apple and germinated them. They turned into tiny saplings of which, two went to my parents, and one we planted in our front yard.
You are not supposed to be able to successfully grow apples this way. No one does. They do complicated things like grafting trees.
But all three of her trees are doing fine and producing an abundance of delicious apples.
The batch in this basket will be carefully processed to be worm and bug free and turned into a wide variety of delicious, and moderately unhealthy, recipes :-)
LIke I said, I’m addicted…
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