And with autumn comes….

Apples- Our home smells like apples today…and cinnamon and cloves and cardamom. We went apple picking on Wednesday, at an abandoned orchard. That night I filled my huge crockpot with apples to bake and let the scent seep into our walls and our dreams in the night. And today before our play date at the pond, we made apple crumbles. Two large platefuls went to B the Builder, a whole one accompanied me to the first gathering of a knitting group and the remainder was cleared out by us over lunch.

In a field full of fallen apples, sitting next to piles of bags full of apples, there is nothing quite like the one apple that happens to be in your brother’s hands!

While the “pie birds” aren’t necissarrily required for this dish, they are absolutely essential to the ritual…

Acorns-We did finally get around to making our acorn muffins. I was pleasantly surprised by how tasty they were. Admittedly, we used a fair bit of hazelnut flour to make up the difference between the amount of acorn flour we produced, and the amount the recipe called for! We added fresh apples (what else?) and dates to the batter and ate them outside, for breakfast, in the garden. We left two of the littler ones as a treat for Reddy the squirrel.

We saved all of the hulls from flour preparation and used them to dye a bit of wool. We used cast iron for the dye pot and let it act as the mordant as well.

Age/Aging- I don’t think I’m doing it well. Which is rather a pity because I hope I still have a long ways to go! Looking back at old pictures like these ones of Elijah and I, picking apples in 2003, sometimes startles me a bit. I find myself taken aback by how young I look.

Apple picking 2007