Right. I’ve made 10 lbs of blackberry and apple jam. Today I made 6 lbs of marrow and apple chutney. Mrs Gee says that there is a limit to the amount of apple crumble one can eat, and we have no freezer space for apple puree.
And yet the cooking apples rain down from our tree like bombs. Given that each one is as big as a baby’s head, the sudden conversion of potential to kinetic energy is something to behold, especially if you are standing beneath the tree at the time.
Last week I took a bag of apples into the Nature office where they were very well received, so much so that one of my colleagues (take a bow, Dr Therese Heemels) took a load home and came back next day with two fabulous apple pies for us all.
Tomorrow, Monday 22nd September, I’ll be bringing an even greater pile of apples into the office. So, if you just happen to be passing, do come by and help yourself.
If I were more of a marketing person than I am I’d offer you the chance to enter a free prize draw at the same time, as an inducement, to win
FIRST PRIZE
A night out with Richard P. Grant
SECOND PRIZE
Two nights out with Richard P. Grant
THIRD PRIZE
The Order of the Unicycling Girrafe a free subscription to Nature a voucher good for acceptance of one manuscrcipt at an NPG journal of your choice with no questions asked three nights out with Richard P. Grant.
FOURTH PRIZE
More apples, anyone?
I’m too far away to do much about it, but I wonder how well cookers freeze at -80.
When I was in Denmark I went to the departmental Christmas party, and at another table someone was handing around a Bramley apple. I looked across and thought “oh, it’s a Bramley”, and carried on eating/drinking. But the Danes were really impressed with the thing. It turned out that none of their apples grew to that size, and they considered it a really rare variety, with only about 3 trees in the country. Unfortunately, nobody tried to eat it there and then.
You could save the blemished apples for Oxonmoot, and have a “Hit the Bill Ferny scarecrow on the nose” contest.
I have a small food dehydrator that I use to dry fruit (mostly peaches), vegetables (peppers and tomatoes), and herbs every year. Dried apple pieces would be excellent in homemade granola.
Do the prizes include airfare? I wouldn’t mind a trip to Sydney.
Woohoo! I’ve pulled!
My apples are a bit green and bitter at present, picking season is October in the northern wastes of S. Manchester. However we have a glut of runner beans and that can’t be turned into chuthey.
Or even chutney (too confident to preview)
Piccalilli, however, is just crying out for runner beans.
@ Bob: the Danes are welcome to
invadevisit Cromer and have some of my apples anytime.@ Kristi: You could save the blemished apples for Oxonmoot, and have a “Hit the Bill Ferny scarecrow on the nose” contest.
Excellent idea. At the moment most of the apples end up on the compost heap.
I have a small food dehydrator that I use to dry fruit
Please tell me more. I’ve never heard of one of these things.
@ Eva? Were you at SciBlog08? If not, be careful what you wish for.
@ Brian: we don’t have enough runner beans to consitute a ‘glut’. I think ‘handful’ just about covers it. The summer here on the usually dry East Coast has been wet enough to rival a good year in Manchester, and virtually everything has been a washout. The apples are all that’s saved the day. I do have some butternut squahses, though. Lots. But they are at present all the size of golf balls, and presumably as tasty..
squahses. It’s only 05:27. So sue me.
I dunno Henry, I quite like ‘squahses’. Sounds like something the Apache might have hunted.
One day I’ll tell you the one about the squaw on the hippopotamus being equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides. Someday.
Please.
Don’t.
Oh all right, I won’t.
My friend Professor Trellis of North Wales writes:
“Cider: mash ’em up, squeeze the juice out, slap it into demijohns and bottle it when you can see through it… Should be ready for Christmas if you start now…”
I wonder if cooking apples make decent cider?
@ Henry-
Here is an article about food dehydrators; I have the Nesco model at 12:00 in the photo, and it cost about $40 several years ago. And here is a link to an Amazon page for one model, plus several alternatives (though none, of course, will work in the UK). Most people here in Texas use them to make beef or venison jerky, and I’m told that even the inexpensive dehydrators work quite well for that purpose. I first learned about them back in grad school days in Oregon, where most people used them to dry fruits and vegetables.
Because our “room temperature” here is so warm much of the year, and because I don’t add any preservatives to the produce, I store my dried fruits and veggies in the fridge, and they’re good for about a year (apparently). Fridge storage is probably not necessary in the UK. The dried tomatoes and peppers are fantastic on homemade pizza.
I bought a dehydrator off Craigslist a couple of years ago. It’s well worth the time spent slicing and blanching (pears, in my case) – I had dried pears in my oatmeal all winter and into the spring.
I’ll have the fifth prize. So long as a beard is involved. (The new picture is very handsome but dehydrated compared with the (far inferior) previous version).
By the way, I think one problem with these Bramelys is that, like buses, they all arrive at the same time. Are they (and blackberries) the last seasonal fruits? I do my online supermarket order week-in-week-out and never find strawberries, raspberries, et al. out of “stock”. Bramleys, now, seem only to be around over a very short span. So perhaps that is why you have so many in the past two weeks – so does everyone else. In another two weeks, we will be back to the baseline World Shortage of Bramleys Other Than That Which Is In Henry’s Freezer. So maybe you don’t need a competition at all. (Sighs of relief all round, not least from the prize.)
Bramleys seem to be available for a very long season in supermarkets – or maybe all cooking apples look the same to me. My apple tree, which is unidentified but may be a Kings Acre Pippin – is an expert in synchronised fruiting. The first windfalls have just happened and I know that I will have to pick them all in about 2 weeks before the local grey squirrels get them all.
All our sweet yellow plums ripen on pretty much the same day. It’s always a bit of a struggle to use them all up – I made 2 large batches of jam and 4 cakes this year, ate lots, and gave the rest away by the bagful. (They don’t respond well to the dehydrator despite much experimentation).
Folks, I certainly wish I had a big freezer, then I’d puree the lot and freeze them. But the Maison Des Girrafes is a somewhat bijou establishment, whose freezer is small and full of frozen peas and fih fingers.
This time next year, I hope, I’ll have laid an electricity cable down the garden to the shed and installed a freezer there, so I shall be more prepared.
Dehydrators. Yes, I have established that one can buy these in the UK: they are not purely symptoms of the colonies. Mrs Gee remains yet to be convinced, though.
In the meantime I shall pursue my new hobby of making jam and chutney. There’s something very relaxing about stirring a cauldron of gloop on a Sunday morning, the Archers omnibus on longwave (FM being a rare thing in Cromer), and then bottling the precious nectar in the prescribed Women’s Institute manner, with greaseproof paper circles, cellophane tops and rubber bands: and then, as a final flourish, writing the contents and date on an adhesive label. Middle-aged, I know, but complete bliss.
Please inform Mrs Gee that rpg reckons dehydrators are a Good Thing.
Mres Gee – are you reading this? Richard says they’re a good thing. Put any construction on that you desire, dear.
And my friend Professor Trellis of North Wales says that as cider apples are very sour, one ought to be able to make a decent brew with Bramleys. Do I have to take off my crocs when pressing them, though?
Prof Trellis writes in addition that
I do know that Mrs Gee is partial to a drop of cider…