Pie in the Sky (The One Where Sparky, Expat, and the Cooking Junkie Go Apple Picking)

(This post was created yesterday, but for various reasons that shall go unnamed *cough, crappy internet connection, cough, cough* could not be posted . . . )

October 31, 2006

This last day of October is sunny and windy and deceptively cold: an appropriate bookend to the beginning of the month, and especially to that first weekend when Expat and I and our friend, the Cooking Junkie (CJ), drove out to rolling Cross Plains, Wisconsin, to go Apple Picking.

The people who pick their own apples in October are the same people who cut their own Christmas trees in December and pick their own blueberries and strawberries in the summer. These are Family Traditions. We like Family Traditions. We like knowing that once a year, we’ll blow off the laundry and the vacuuming and the college football, and tromp out into the day to chop or pick living things and drag them back to our houses to remind ourselves of what it’s like outside the next time we’re stuck at home vacuuming and doing laundry. People like us also tend to grind their own coffee, change their own brake pads, knit their own scarves, and make their own birthday cakes from scratch, but these do not fall into the larger Family Tradition category, they are instead Small Habits of Which We Are Proud.

But as far as Family Traditions go, I think I love Apple Picking best. I had been planning this trip for months—really, since Expat and I went apple picking last October. In my own lived experience, prior to the Apple Picking, there was the Apple Getting, in which my little Massachusetts Family Unit drove an hour and a half to this one particular apple stand in Woodstock, Connecticut to bring home bushels upon bushels of apples for cooking and eating and saucing, and gallons upon gallons of unpasteurized cider for mulling or for drinking cold straight out of the jug. Apple Getting was perhaps more on the scale of a Grand Family Tradition; it happened every year from the time I was old enough to form memories until I was eleven, when we moved from apply New England across the country to the Land of Cotton-Not-Apples.

Returning again to an apple-friendly climate meant again finding an orchard to love and prize above all others, and last October, I fell hard for the first one I visited. I loved Appleberry Farm from the moment I saw the hand painted apple sign stuck into the median at that intersection out by Target—nothing fancy, just a bright red apple and an arrow pointing out into the country. The big wooden sign at the first turn off had 5 small pumpkins balanced along the top. “Look!” I said, “Pumpkins!”

Expat grunted.

We drove on. A few turns later and wide, neatly mown orchard spread out around us and the small store building stood uprightly in front of us, red and rustic looking, as an apple orchard store should be, and I knew that this was the beginning of something good. Case in point: we went back this year.

This October I invited out new friend CJ to tag along because CJ (as you might have guessed by her aforementioned full blognomer) has a thing for food and is also a Believer in Family Traditions, which is a very important quality to look for in a fellow Apple Picker. We met at 10AM. We donned out hats and scarves and mittens and gloves, but not our big jackets, as it was really Just Fall, and beguilingly bright and sunny. We piled into the Subaru and Subarued our way across the city, past the now-familiar signs and down the gravel drive. We piled out of the car, trooped into the store, and picked up our peck-sized pick-your-own bags. And then, we went to consult the Map.

Orchards, of course, usually provide a map that shows where patrons can pick and where they can’t and which apples are where, etc. Some orchards give them to you to take with you on your picking adventure, but at Appleberry Farm, there is only one Map, hand-dawn on hot pink paper, laminated and staple-gunned to the post right outside the little store’s front door. Having one central Map must certainly cut down on the amount of paper trash that may or may not get dropped out in the orchard, but it does lend itself to a few problems. For patrons who forget to read it altogether, it means two things: A) you’re blissfully unaware of the picking boundaries and which trees you can and can’t pick from, and B) you have no idea what kind of apples you are picking. For those who, like us, give the Map a brief read-through and then charge fearlessly like seven-year-olds out into the orchard, it means two slightly different things: A) you know that there are apples you can’t pick, you just can’t quite remember where they are, and B) you know approximately where different kinds of apples start and stop, but only just enough to be angsty about whether you’re picking cooking apples or eating apples, and for some of us, this distinction is crucial.

But for some of us, this is not.

Take, for example, my husband. Expat’s favorite thing about this whole endeavor isn’t that he gets to choose the very apples with which we will bake tasty desserts, or that he gets to spend a whole morning outside in a rustling orchard. For him, the fact that he gets to try the apples before he picks them trumps all other potential excitements. While I circle tree after tree looking for the perfect pie-making specimen, Expat yanks any old thing off the nearest branch and commences chomping. And on this trip, he had chomping competition. Whereas I seem to feel some inexplicable Catholic guilt about eating apples for which I’m not technically paying, CJ and Expat tried every kind in the orchard (sometimes twice) and—since none of us could remember anything from the Map—loudly declared their preferences for “this grapey-red one over here,” or “the big ones from this tree over here.”

By the end of it, of course, we had all eaten more apples than we could really hold—more apples, probably, than any of us had eaten in months. We took our heavy bags back to the store, pulled gallons of dark, thick unpasteurized cider from the cooler, and lined up with all the parents and 10-year-olds paying for their respective bags and gallons. On the way out, we bought Styrofoam cups of hot mulled cider for 50 cents, and apple cider doughnuts, and one caramel apple for yours truly. We ate and drank and felt decadent. Not Corporately Decadent, but Honestly Decadent—rich in Good Things from Good Earth and Good Hands. Rich in Good Traditions shared by Good People.

And already, I cannot wait for Apple Picking next year.

Sparky’s Favorite Apples (for the record)

• Empire (eating)—always crunchy, nice and small, sweet-tart
• Honeycrisp (eating)—always crisp, oddly pear-sweet, pretty pink skin
• Macintosh (eating and baking)—classic “apple” taste, does double-duty with class
• Courtland (baking)—big, hearty, hold their shape like no other, great