Into the Woods

Ugly apples = good apples

If you want good apples, the best way is to grow them yourself, I’m sure. But my young apples trees probably won’t produce for two more years or so. The summer heat is hard on the appetite and the urge to cook. I haven’t made sourdough bread for over a month. But the craving for apple pie never goes away, and I expect the craving for apple pie to get even worse as fall approaches.

Anywhere in the country one drives during the summer, one sees old apple trees hanging full of apples, but how to get them? I fantasize about an apple raid. In the local grocery stores, all the apples are from Washington. All of them. The same thing is true at Whole Foods in Winston-Salem — nothing but Washington apples. I refuse to buy them. There are local apples everywhere, going to waste, but there’s no system for getting them to someone who might use them. We did ask a neighbor if they’d sell us some apples, and they said sure, they’d give us all we want. But those apples aren’t quite ripe.

On Friday at the Danbury farmer’s market, the farmer couple who I now refer to as our favorite farmers had some apples for 50 cents a pound. I bought enough for a pie. These apples look the way apples are supposed to look — all sorts of colors, with spots and even the occasional worm hole. No problem. Cut around it. To me, those perfectly shaped things in the grocery store that they call apples are not apples. They’re more like cardboard, usually.

The best apples I ever had were from old, abandoned apple trees.

Today’s pie from ugly apples