Smashed and Mashed

The cider is officially fermenting.

We chopped, smashed, squeezed, juiced and canned. And now the hard earned juice from few pounds of apples are fermenting with yeast and sugar. I'm still not sold on the idea, but I suppose I have at least a month or two of fermentation time to get comfortable with the idea.

In other news, we got pumpkins on Sunday! Unfortunately we didn't get to go to a pumpkin patch (the rain really ruined this year's crop, so the "you pick" places were pretty much empty), but we got them from a really great market just off the island. We've driven past so many times and never stopped before, but I'm certainly glad we did this time. Not only did we get some really good pumpkins, but we went through their haunted house (not bad for a small scale operation), got some excellent cider, and chatted with the adorable man who runs the market. You could tell he was doing exactly what he wanted with his life, his joy was infectious! (the excellent weather didn't hurt either) Plus he made excellent mulled cider!

Anyway...I'm hoping to carve our pumpkins tonight since Halloween is fast approaching. Not sure what I'm going to do yet...should be interesting!

Golden Delicious!

Yesterday Joe and I finally had the time to go apple picking! I was getting a bit nervous that'd we'd never get the chance to go and that we'd miss the season completely (like we did with strawberries and raspberries) but I'm so glad we waited until now. The apples were perfect! They were all perfectly ripe and the trees were absolutely loaded! Some of the branches were resting on the ground from the weight of all the apples they were holding. I'm guessing the rain helped the harvest and maybe we weren't the only ones who didn't make it out at the beginning of the season because there were definitely a lot more apples left on the trees than there were when we went picking last year. A few of the trees had even dropped what looked like an entire tree's worth of apples on the ground and still managed to have full branches!

It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon and I'm now spending my time looking up delicious recipes to try. Of course we wound up with a rather large number of apples, so I'm excited to get the chance to try out lots of new recipes with them!

Leaves and Fog

It's officially fall. The trees are changing, and I've been to the orchard. My fridge is full of apple crisp, applesauce, and of course just plain apples. I've also got apples softening in the crock pot as we speak which will soon become apple butter...Tasty.











This morning Joe and I drove off the island to pick my car up from the shop and we got a glimpse of some of the truly beautiful trees that line Rte 1. There's still a lot of green around, but the more anxious leaves are starting to show their colors. The peak of colors should come in the next two or three weeks, and I can't imagine what they'll look like then if they already look this gorgeous now. The grey skies and drizzly fog just add to the beauty of the ambiance.

Joe informed me this morning that we're under a hurricane watch. Apparently Kyle has made his way up the coast and is supposed to give us a bit of a storm this weekend. It's nothing worrisome, and I'm actually okay with a bit of a rain storm.