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There’s a glut of apples at the moment. People are bringing boxes and bags of them to give away.
Red, golden, yellow, green. Cookers and eaters, full of sugar and fibre. Crisp and juicy. I like them stewed with custard.
And you can’t beat an apple pie or crumble, just the mouth watering and warming dessert for this time of year. Sitting watching the rain and wind blowing horizontally past the windows, I want that bowl of flavour!
Stewing some apples for tea. There red one has red flesh like a beetroot! Just got to mix up some custard.
Each year we have cherries and pears on our trees. The birds get most of the cherries but we get good pears, that is until this year.
We had a lovely display of blossom. The cherry and the pear tree blossomed first. Early in spring. Lots of flowers, pink and white. But I was worried because it was cold and wet and windy and I didn’t see many insects (and we don’t seem to have had birds nesting either). A couple of weeks later the blossom had faded and petals showered the ground. Then the apple tree came into blossom. The sun shone and bees arrived. Now I have no cherries, I saw the little stalks with tiny pips all over the ground, and no discernable baby pears. It’s so sad. It’s like they have given up now hubby is gone.
My only consolation is that there are lots of apples on the tree. But it hangs over into my neighbours yard and I am worried they will cut it back, and as there is a trellis fence in the way I can’t access the fruit. Drat!
List your top 5 favorite fruits.
Bananas, with custard or on toast, my number 1.
Apples, sliced or in a tart with cinnamon.
Blueberries, stirred into my morning porridge.
Oranges, freshly peeled, or squeezed for their juice.
Finally strawberries. Either with cream or ice-cream. Or mixed into an Eton Mess.. Cream, meringue and strawberry all smashed together.
Well that was a boring list! It must be hard to try and think of a prompt to get people to write. Finding a specific idea, and then trying to find out everyone’s opinions. Maybe I should have chosen some less well known fruits, but I don’t know exotic ones. I’ve seen jackfruit on the TV but I’ve never tasted it.
And what is classed as a fruit? Some things are more like vegetables, some berries, do you have to have the seeds on the inside? I should have looked up a definition.
The thing I have to remember is that not everyone can afford fresh fruit. When I was a child, Sunday afternoon tea was canned peaches with evaporated milk and white bread and butter. We didn’t know, but our parents could not afford much. To us it was a treat and when we got maraschino cherries in our orange squash at Christmas it was so delicious. Now, with the cost of living crisis people cannot get the food they need, and that’s in the 6th most rich country in the world. If you look at the rest of the world, there is so much poverty that it must be a dream to get fresh fruit. What a strange world we live in.
Slightly late for Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt sour. My sour is really gentle, crab apples. You can add lots of sugar to calm them down and make crab apple jelly. Felt pen drawing, tried to make it a bit impressionistic.
Basically windfalls, five rough pears, two apples, three green walnuts and a single green tomato. The wind must have been blowing.
For the first time we have a good crop of apples on the main tree, the pear tree is bent over with pears that are growing slowly larger. The walnuts are being stolen by squirrels who bury them and the tomatoes are growing in a hanging basket and in a grow bag surrounded by other plants. They are all having to take their chances while there is less rain, but they are well established plants and I think the fruit trees have deep roots. We plan to do some pruning of the garden. The blueberries are gradually ripening, the gooseberries have all been eaten as have the raspberries. I saw no strawberries this year, but I think they have been shaded out by other plants. We even have redcurrants although I misidentified them as woody nightshade (not a good idea). Earlier in the year we had a small crop of cherries and we might get a few elderberries. So all in all not a bad year of fruit and veg.
Our apple trees have got a lot of fruit for a change. I think they are finally maturing and as they have had their branches trained along the fence they are bearing more fruit than if they were growing straight up, some of them are already ripening and turning red. I don’t know their variety but they are tasty.
I decided to stew four apples that were starting to soften. I wanted to use them up and also half a tub of clotted cream.
Ingredients :
Four medium sized eating apples
A couple of teaspoons of sucralose based sweetener (or sugar to taste).
A level teaspoon of cinnamon powder.
A single measure of whisky, or you could substitute a small amount of lemon or orange juice.
About three or four tablespoons of water to stop the apples burning onto the pan.
A tablespoonful of clotted cream or whipped cream.
I roughly cored and chopped the apples and left the skin on. I put them in a pan with a little boiling water to stop the apple flesh burning. I cooked the apples for about 15 to 20 minutes till they softened. Stirring and mashing them until they were a chunky pulp.
I added a couple of teaspoons of sucralose based sweetener to make the apples less sharp. Then I added a single measure of whisky and a level teaspoonful of cinnamon and cooked the mix for a couple minutes more. You could substitute fruit juice for the whisky and leave out the cinnamon if you don’t like it.
Serve hot in a bowl with the clotted cream or whipped cream dolloped on top.
This reminds me of the Wassails we usually go on in January. They are to celebrate the local apple trees and wish for a good crop of apples the following autumn.
Playing with a photo of fruit. Somehow a face appeared. Pareidolia again! I can’t help myself, I see faces everywhere. Must be the way my brain is wired!
A cornucopia of satsumas and apples with an added banana. Tasty. Silly, fun.
I had leftover cooking apples from this years crop that were starting to go soft. I didn’t want to cook a cake so I decided to poach them, with a twist…..
Ingredients:
2 or 3 cooking apples
A half cup of diet ginger ale/ ginger ale or water and a couple of teaspoons of sugar or a small amount of sweetner.
Custard powder
Milk
Sweetner or sugar
Method:
Cook the chopped apples with the diet ginger ale (or ginger ale or water and sugar), choose which you prefer, the ginger ale does give the apples sweetness and a bit more of a bite.
The apples will soften and as they do will give off liquid, stop the cooking when they are still slightly firm.
Put into serving dishes.
Mix up the powdered custard as described on the pack. Substitute the liquid from the apples for some of the milk that is needed for the custard. Top up with milk to the desired amount. (I add less for thicker custard). Add sugar or sweetner to taste.
Once the custard mix has been boiled to the right thickness pour over the apples
Serve
Result, a tasty treat for tea. The ginger ale does add an extra bit of flavour.
You could probably make further substitutes to create a vegan treat.
Mallaband-Brown