Apples

[Florence]

The new crop of apples is coming in and I am in Heaven. I bought 3 sweet Honeycrisps. They are so sweet and so crisp. So good. I think I will get some Granny Smiths and use them to bake a pie. What are your favorite apples and what do you make with them?

[Gardenarian]

Pies are one of the few things I enjoy cooking, and apple pies are heaven. I like to pile the apples up really high, and then kind of mold the crust over them and sprinkle with a little sugar. Beautiful.

Most of my favorite apples are random ones given by neighbors or picked at our community orchard - I don't even know the name of our little apple tree. Picked straight from the tree - I love that feeling that the life is still in the food. Makes me kind of a savage vegetarian :)

[iris lilies]

DH makes apple crisp 1X weekly throughout the year. He uses a variety of apples he has stored from our trees and from his dad's trees.

For the first time EVER, our Granny Smith tree of 20 years has a crop of apples! This year it has about a dozen apples. In past years we maybe got 1 or 2 apples every 5 years. I don't know what woke up the old girl to produce, but it may well be one of those "old girl" issues--she's getting ready to die and is following her genetic imperative to reproduce before she dies.

DH has a variety of apple trees here, I don't know what they are, but they are all cooking apples. He has been picking apples for a couple of weeks. now. And then, our "big" apple tree in the back of the lot is a November producing apple that won't ripen until fall.

[razz]

Love the start of apple season. Eating Ginger Gold and Silken varieties right now. My Cortland and Gala did not produce this year.

[catherine]

I discovered Honeycrisp a couple of years ago, and it's definitely my favorite, but it's expensive where I am. I learned from an apple grower that they are harder to grow. However, whoever named that apple got it just right.

I do like all kinds of apples, though. I'm not fussy. DH is stuck on Delicious, but I'll take any of them.


Edited to add: I just looked them up to see what makes them harder to grow, and learned honey crisps are patented under the University of Minnesota who developed them. So that's kind of a bummer since don't believe in patenting seeds. I know the university did the work and maybe they deserve something for that, but I think in general patenting seeds is a very bad idea. I have a lot of respect for the University of Minnesota, but I have to think about where I stand on buying a patented fruit.