Cooperative Living

(A cheeky bunch, the deer; or maybe they just have a special appreciation for Ed when he comes by with his camera.)

Here is the deer thinking; here is the deer eating. She and her friends have consumed all the still-very-small fruits and leaves off the lower branches of our (remaining) apple tree and off of all our neighbors’ apple trees. In the same way that she and her friends ate the leaves and not the flowers from the hydrangeas, she and her friends have found a way to share by leaving the fruits on the higher branches for us. I am hoping that she is discussing this effective strategy with the bears. As well as pointing out that if you break the tree down to the ground, as he did, there are no fruits after that for anybody.

But quite apart from that, this is the first year the deer have paid any attention to our apple tree, either early or late. Must be something going on with this big change in eating behaviors.

Juice!

Early last week, we went over to the houses of a couple of absent friends—one gone for the winter, the other gone for the week—and cleaned up their apple trees (with prior permission, of course) to prepare for the Fall Juice Event. Many years ago, good friends of ours on the Point managed to barter a quilt for a home apple press. It’s not a terribly big machine, as the picture shows, and only the hopper part is electrical--the small motor is there on the left of the flat top. The rest of it operates by hand. We had picked about a 100 pounds of apples for the event, and others had brought as much again. An evening’s worth of diligent work lay ahead with the promise of an excellent product from our efforts.

Our friends got the press 8 years ago or so and they juice on several nights in October and November, every fall. We usually manage to get to at least one of these occasions. There are five or six discrete jobs involved in this process, so it’s good to have at least that many people, although if you have more than that, everyone can take a brief rest now and then. It’s not hard work, but it does involve standing on a concrete floor for three or four hours. The floor leads to a certain need for respite among the older crowd, especially.

On Saturday night, we went over early with apron in tow. It’s a sticky business, this apple juicing. There were five of us working. Here are the six jobs: washer, cutter/culler, plopper, barrel changer, presser, and bottler. The barrel changer can also double as bottler. First the apples are washed in warm water; then they are cleaned up (the bad parts cut out) . Next they are cut into reasonably-sized pieces. Finally they are plopped into the hopper of the machine. (There are pictures here of the process and the workers.) At that point, the serious pressing begins.

I always work as a plopper. This means I take the cut apple pieces and drop them one piece at a time into the hopper. If you get them in the hopper too fast, they will clog and then the whole process gets slowed down as the grinding has to stop to unclog the machinery. I throw them gracefully into the hopper. I like to throw things, generally. However, I don’t get much opportunity to throw in this life because I can’t catch anything. I can’t catch because when an object comes at me, I close my eyes. So I never get to throw because virtually all throwing also requires one to be willing/able to catch. I toss the apple pieces into the hopper with the intent of hitting a particular spot and then they get crunched up, and I never have to catch them because they don’t come back to me.

I don’t know that it’s the best job, but it’s the best one for me. Of course my co-workers may also think it’s the best and may think of me as a terrible plopper-hog. The plopper also has to sense when the small barrel under the machine is almost full of smooshed apples. You can visually check this, but it isn’t easy to see and you don’t want to keep checking because it requires you to get in other people’s way. Once that barrel is full, you turn the motor off, and the barrel is moved forward so that the presser can take over. He turns a handle with a screw mechanism that presses the juice out. The juice flows down into a bucket. The bottler takes the bucket and fills and labels the bottles (ie, date and to whom the juice belongs). The barrel changer is the person who disposes of the apple mass that remains in the small barrel after the juice has been pressed out. This mass is called ‘pomace’ and it can be fed to chickens or composted. The barrel changer replaces the once-again empty mesh bag into the small barrel and puts it back under the hopper. And then you repeat the whole process. (This is beginning to seem like a Wiki-How.)

By 10:30, we were done with many, but not all the apples, and we called it a night. There’ll be another juicing yet to come with different workers, different apples. We made maybe 15 gallons over the course of the evening. Could have been more, but I wasn’t counting. Some of it will go to the P.R. Food Bank, some will go to one of the descendants of the first Icelandic families (who remembers when some of those strange, now wild, old apple trees were planted), some will go to us, some to the press owners, some to people who come around and long for a draft of fresh apple juice. You bring apples, you work the press: you’re guaranteed juice like nothing that comes from a grocery store, not even Whole Foods.

It’s not only different from what stores offer, but it’s also different from itself. Each small lot tastes different than the next one because each lot uses different kinds of apples or has a different mix of apples in it. Some juice is very sweet; some is spicy, some tastes more fruity, some is slightly astringent. We all have little sips, little tasting glasses of each lot, and note that they are different, but we still have no language for the experience. The wonder of apples: we are rendered speechless.

Harvesting

Yesterday was devoted to cleaning up the almost-end of the apple harvest: making and freezing applesauce, making yet one more apple pie from our own apples. I’ve finally decided that an apple pie with only a top crust is just as good as (and maybe better than in some ways) an apple pie with two crusts. First, the bottom crust doesn’t get soggy if the apples are very moist; second, you don’t have to make two crusts; third, you cut the fat portion of the crust in half. Of course, I make up for that with having whipped cream with the apple one-crust pie, but whipped cream (like chocolates) is one of life’s small necessities. Or at least can be considered so if one is willing to use it in moderation.

I am still among the cooks that whip cream themselves because the stuff that comes in cans tastes funny to me. I used to think that people bought the canned stuff because they didn’t want to be committed to using an entire cup of whipping cream. But that can’t be the case because an entire can of pre-whipped cream (I know, it’s not really pre-whipped but is 'whipped' in the process of extruding it) also would have to be a commitment to the whole thing. I can only conclude that it is a trade-off: higher price and less good taste in exchange for not putting the 4 minutes into whipping it yourself. Seems like a bad bargain to me.

But, I was not meaning to talk about whipped cream. It was about the apples. There have been a lot of them, although not as abundant a year as most. My friends who press apple juice each fall usually have boxes of apples all over the cool parts of their house—brought in by friends and neighbors with excess—but the other day, I saw only a half dozen boxes at their house. So, less juice this year, maybe. Our Jonagold harvest has been the best of our 6 or 7 varieties this year: exquisite taste, juicy, crisp. I try to save them for eating, but we are now down to the last ten or so, so we will, sadly, soon have to shift to grocery store apples for eating. Within the next 6 weeks they start becoming noticeably stored apples. One of our trees has a few red delicious still considering ripening. The fall raspberry crop is also still thinking about ripening (no chance), but is settling for molding on the canes; the last red delicious will probably make it.) We’re all pretty conscientious about using up these apples. My neighbors, going away for a week or so, called us from the ferry to urge us to pick the end of the harvest from their tree while they are gone if we need apples. The apple harvest lasts for two months, at least, and it may be my favorite time of year just because it goes on and on and because apples are so shareable.

It is also time for the pecan harvest in New Mexico where my older daughter lives. She has a highly productive pecan tree and each year she ships us a couple of boxes, about twenty pounds each, of pecans in the shell. The first year she sent them, she also sent a pecan nutcracker of great ingenuity, called an ‘inertia nutcracker.’ It is sort of like a small log splitter, but only a picture will do, so you can see one here. (I am particularly fond of the fact that they advertise it as having been ‘invented by a medical doctor.’ Is that what they do in their spare time?) The inertia nutcracker, I believe, works only with pecans, but it really works. Even 80 pounds later, I still find the process entertaining. A truly fresh pecan is a wonder indeed; a fresh, toasted pecan even more splendid

When I get these boxes of pecans, I crack and use some and freeze the rest in the shell. Then, I take them out over the following year as I need them. Having twenty-thirty pounds of shelled pecans is one of life’s great riches, and when you combine it with those fresh apples? Why so much inclination to complain about life’s inadequacies? Today, I cracked the last of last year’s pecans because this year’s will soon be upon us. (At least I hope so.) I think of this as a day of thanksgiving: for the apples and the pecans. The Pilgrims landed in the wrong part of the country perhaps. Pecan pie: so much more everything than pumpkin could ever even dream of.

Apples, Pies, Now, Then

Our apple trees are overflowing with apples now that September is winding down. Or, no, how about: We have no apples on our apple trees as September winds down. The first is true of our apple trees in Point Roberts where, as we drove away this past week, I was still trying to figure out whom I could call to come over and use up plums and apples that would otherwise just fall on the ground and rot while we were gone. The second sentence, however (and sadly), is true of our apple trees in Roberts Creek, B.C. So that’s a problem because September is when one really needs apple pie quite frequently.

Our trees are bare because one of them is dead, slain by our local bear who several years ago tried to climb it while engaged in apple collection work, and broke it off sort of at the base. Ed applied emergency ICU care (mostly duct tape and a stick), and it did manage to survive another couple of years, but then this spring it bloomed and every part of it subsequently died. The other one (a Cox’s orange pippin) did bear this year but the fruits were not yet ripe when we left at the end of August. I’m willing to pick them a little short of fully ripe, but these were yet short of even mostly ripe. They were hard, green little apples. They might well have ripened during the three weeks we were away. And if so, the bear might well have eaten them all. He needs quite a bit of food and he does like apples. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence of bear in the yard, although most of the evidence suggests that what he’s eating is blackberries.

Once I found we had no apples, I walked up to our uphill neighbor who has several trees and she generously responded to my plea. This week, I have had apple pie and, if not enough to sustain me for a year, it has been very satisfying. Apple pie is good on its own terms, but it is also a family thing for me. Most of the cooking I ever learned, I taught myself. My mother taught me baking (cakes, cookies, bread), but pies I learned from my grandmother.

I think the things one learns from a grandparent are things that stay with you. Not only stay, but may not be adjusted, if my piecrust making is any indication. My grandfather never taught me to do anything, so I don’t know whether the same would be true of his educational work. In any case, whenever somebody tells me that pie crust is so much better if you make it with half butter, or with ice water, or if stored in the refrigerator for awhile, my inner grandmother says, ‘I don’t think so.’ Piecrust is to be made just as she told me to do it. That means you use shortening or lard, that you use one of those circular blade things with a wooden handle to cut the shortening into the flour, that you use cold water from the tap, that you don't handle it any more than you absolutely have to, and that you roll it out with a marble rolling pin. (I do use saran wrap to roll it out on, though. My grandmother would have included that if she had lived long enough to use saran wrap, is my belief.) There was a time when I didn’t have a marble rolling pin and it never worked as well with those wooden ones covered with knit sleeves. When my 18-year-old granddaughter, Gianna, was here this summer, piecrust making was one of the things she wanted to learn, so I passed on my grandmother’s methods. Of course they are also Gianna's grandmother's methods. I hope they’ll stick.

My grandmother was born in 1889, and her father fought in the Civil War, although I never knew him. Still it seems an enormous bunch of history between her awareness of the world before her birth and today, history that I, somehow, having known her well somehow have a purchase on or a place in. The piecrust is part of it. And the apple, something else that has a big part in our common history: see, e.g., Garden of Eden. Even more interesting, see Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, a book that will help you to understand why apples are so quintessentially American and what Johnny Appleseed was really doing in his travels.

Good advice from me and my grandmother: the month is almost over, so remember to have some apple pie. It won't be the same in October.

Fair Warning

Time for the State Fair. Perhaps that’s what we really need in Point Roberts, assuming we need something else. I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this morning and he was singing the praises not only of the actual Minnesota State Fair but also of his memories of that fair. I wonder if people ever have memories of fairs that they attended as adults? They seem, to me, to always be about being a child in that wonderful maze of events and animals and food. As an adult, I once read an essay by Calvin Trillin that advised me to eat as much as I possibly could when attending a state fair because none of the goods on offer would ever taste as good anywhere else. It was good advice, but not memorable advice, insofar as I don’t remember much of anything I ever ate at a state fair.

Garrison Keillor, however, would have different memories, perhaps. This morning, he was checking out blue ribbon corn relish and plum jam from the canning competition and, memorably, chocolate-covered bacon as well as macaroni and cheese on a stick. I’ve been to fairs in Minnesota and eaten deep fried curds and the like, but never MC on a stick. I’m sorry to have missed that. Not so sorry about the chocolate-covered bacon, though, but if I’d been there I would have tried it.

Still, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever have a fair here. Too small, too hard to get to, no organizing body. Also no animals crossing the border, willy nilly. So we will just have to do with the apple harvest as a stand-in. We have a bunch of apple trees. Pretty much everybody in Point Roberts has a bunch of apple trees. The early Icelandic settlers, I believe, are responsible for many of these apple orchards whose remnants, even now, are ripening on long abandoned properties. Our own apple trees were planted by someone else, not us, not Icelandic folks. They came with the house and without labels. One of them has three or four grafts, producing transparents, which ripen in August; what I think are Jonagolds, which ripen in early September; and a truly undistinguished variety of red delicious, which ripens some other time, or not at all. In addition, there are three other trees whose variety I have no clear ideas about. Two ripen in September—one might be some variety of golden delicious-- and the third in November and none of them is a spectacular apple, though they are certainly pretty enough and adequate for eating, given that they are above all fresh.

The Jonagolds are the really the most exquisite of apples. We missed the transparents--which are very fine cooking apples--this year because they started to ripen just as we left for B.C., so we left them to our neighbors and when we returned that part of the crop was finished. The Jonagolds are stepping up now and, last night, we had the first apple pie of the season. That is truly like going to the state fair and eating gastronomic splendors. We have had the pie both with and without ice cream, and either way it is toothsome, tart, sweet, spicy, crisp and crumbly, even though it is made with slightly under-ripe Jonagolds. They will be riper soon and more pies and tarts and eventually apple sauce will follow.

The first apple pie is the big treat: three or four pies after that, we begin to be inundated with apples and soon we are dumping them into our friends’ cider press, running them through an applesauce press by the bucket, and finally, at the end, when we are having dozens of apples a day, letting them just fall under the tree where they serve as delights for the slugs and sow bugs or are moved over into the compost.

Early fall in Point Roberts belongs to the apples; to be followed, in equal abundance, by plums and pears. What Eden this? No snakes in sight.