Apples

We are at the height of apple season, and Ohio grows tons of apples. You can get good local apples almost anywhere except the local food-store conglomerates. Earlier this summer, we picked peaches at Branstool Orchards in Utica, Ohio and made peach jam and canned peaches. I've already written about the peaches.

Branstool Orchards sells fruit at many of the local Farmers' Markets. It you get on their email list they will notify you each week where they will be and what they will be selling. We started the apple season with Gala, Honeycrisp, and Sweet Sixteen apples. The Gala apples went into applesauce and we ate the others. Some of the Honeycrisp were almost as big as a softball. They were all fabulously delicious. Later, we make more applesauce from Cortland,

This past weekend we bought Jonagold, Cortland, and the most beautiful deep red Jonathan apples. Following the recipe in The Locavore's Kitchen for "Mom's Apple Pie," which uses only apples, sugar, and flour for the filling, with no spices whatsoever. The Jonathan apples were crisp and sour, and the pie was the best I've ever baked. The quality of the apple pie had little to do with the cook and everything to do with the apples: they were picked late last week and we bought them on Saturday.

I should have taken a picture of the pie, but after pulling it out of the oven, that wasn't the first thing on my mind.

We Ate Very Well (and Locally) This Weekend

We picked the first beets of the season this past week along with one acorn squash, one cabbage, and two large eggplants. We also made a trip to a local Farmers' Market and bought some fabulous apples from Branstool Orchards, four quarts of nice green beans, a beautiful yellow squash, and some Russian kale.

We used the eggplants and squash to make ratatouille following a strict Niçoise recipe with the following ingredients:

eggplant (ours)
squash (local)
garlic (local)
onions (local)
peppers (ours)
tomatoes (ours)
parsley (ours)
thyme (ours)
rosemary (ours)

We had this for dinner on Saturday night with our beets and beet greens with a mustard vinaigrette, a loaf of bread from Lucky Cat Bakery (local), and an apple pie with apples from Branstool Orchards (local). Major ingredients of our dinner that were not our own or grown locally were olive oil (tough one to grow in Ohio), flour, salt and pepper, sugar, and the wine (white wine from Reuilly in Burgundy). Our chickens ate the apple cores and a lot of the vegetable trimmings.

Sunday night, we roasted a chicken (local) and had it with acorn squash (ours) stuffed with apples (local), onions (local), and raisins. We also had the Russian kale (local) braised in vegetable stock with onions and garlic, served with Tuscan white beans. This was served with a bottle of white Burgundy, and the leftover apple pie.

We blanched the green beans, vacuum sealed them, and put them in the freezer for this coming winter.

These menus were prepared simply based on the seasonal ingredients that were available in mid-September. You don't have to be a fascistic locavore to make this happen. It takes no more time to go to a Farmers' Market than to Kroger, and it is way more entertaining. And always, it supports local farmers and the people they employ.