Apples....

We’ve got apples.  Oh my days. as the youngest, Jenny, would say, do we have apples.  I suppose, if you plant apple trees, that’s what you can expect.  The thing is, we’ve only got two trees, a Worcester Pearmain and a Granny Smiths, and neither tree is that old, so I wasn’t really ready for the influx of apples the other week.

Even if you were as devoted to apples as Steve Jobs, you’d have a job to munch your way through this much of nature’s bounty.  Indeed, I don’t think it could be done.  So, obviously, I had to make something out of them.  Faced with pounds of the things, I bought an apple peeler, slicer and corer.  I got it from Amazon and it’s the most amazing gadget ever. (For dealing with apples, I mean; if you want to make a quilt or play the violin, it wouldn’t do you much good.)

Put the apple on the prongs on one end, turn the handle, and bingo!  One perfectly peeled apple with no core.  The apple itself is in a sort of spiral which looks really attractive.  Now, what I really wanted to make was apple jam, but, judging from the fact I couldn’t find any recipes, I don’t think apples jam very well.  (It sounds as if they’re failed jazz musicians, but you know what I mean.)

Chutney, yes; we now have pots of it in the cellar. Dried apples; yep.  Apple sauce?  Fine.  That’s in the freezer.  Hunting round the internet I came across something called apple butter, which is a sort of concentrated apple sauce that you can spread on toast;  fine.  Got it.  But apple jam?  No.  However, in an old cook book, I came across apple and rosemary jelly.  Now that sounded really nice, so it was out with the apple slicer and off we went.

You know when things just won’t work?  Why this lovingly slaved over substance wouldn’t turn into jelly, despite being boiled and adding pectin, I just don’t know.  It remained stubbornly as apple syrup.  But, as it turns out, apple syrup is rather nice.  So that’s a good few pots of apple syrup, then.

I was just congratulating myself on having dealt with the Gordon-Smith apple mountain, when I bumped into Jez, the caretaker at the local school.  He was lugging an immense bin bag.  What have you got there? I innocently asked.    Apples, he said.  The kids had sorted through the apple trees on the school grounds and chosen the best.  What was left – about forty pounds of Cox’s Orange Pippins – was going in the bin.

I couldn’t let him do it.  The apples were fine.  Yes, they might not have been supermarket standard, but their failings were definitely skin deep.  So it was out with the trusty slicer and off we went again.

And, d’you know, I’d just finished turning all the poor little reject Coxs into jars of stuff, when my pal, Jane Finnis rang.  She was coming to stay, but they had a bumper harvest of guess what.  And would I like a bag?  I must be mental, but, with the thought of the apple slicer in the cupboard, what could I say?