Apples

Today has been more apple-heavy than any day ever should be. Not Apple. I mean, I’m writing this on an Apple laptop but no…real apples from real trees. Garden of Eden and Eve. Newton and gravity. That kind.

We’ve got a pretty big apple tree in the garden and it’s mainly been the bane of my life. It drops so many apples every autumn and my poor little robot lawnmower can’t handle them and gives up. At least once a day I get a notification on my phone that he’s stuck, and I trudge up in the rain to kick apples into the borders and get him started again.

This year looked like it’d be no different but I chatted to some of my AI friends and asked them what I could do with all the apples. As usual, they suggested a number of things that I’m definitely not going to do. The assumption they all have is that I’m awash with time and would like nothing better than to spend a day peeling and coring apples.

I abused an LLM enough until it told me that I can just quarter them, lob them in a slow cooker, and then strain them through a sieve and Bob’s your job. I had the one-year-old at a loose end this morning and he wanted to go outside and there were apples everywhere so I gave it a go.

Firstly, a good round of 50 or so apples kicked into the long grass. Then, shake the tree to make sure you get fresh ones. Side note: the one-year-old finds it hilarious when all the apples fall on the ground which already made the whole thing worth it. He also finds it funny when you throw them all in the buckets which is, coincidentally, the next step.

Then after using every pot and pan I own and boiling apples until the kitchen smelled like an orchard, I made more apple puree than I’ve ever seen in my life. At least enough for 16 apple crumbles. Comfortably. And that was using around a quarter of the apples that I made fall off the tree in one day.

It’s a big apple tree.

Anyway, then my mother-in-law used my apple puree to make an apple crumble with the big two children. As an afternoon snack, we all had a little bit of apple crumble made from the apples that had, this morning, been sitting on the tree in our garden. I just had another portion with ice-cream and it was brilliant.

Now I need to start up pork and apple stew, make an apple chutney to go with cheeses, mix some apple through porridge or yoghurt for breakfast. We cannot rest. We must eat more apples than we’ve ever eaten before.

Apples.