Apples

We now have some neighbourly apples from the south, not the same as those from the north, although still more or less cooking apples rather than eating apples. A simple and useful distinction which some media cook in the Observer had the cheek to have a pop at.

The one above was taken for breakfast. Crisp and tangy and sweet if you sucked a piece in the mouth. Not the sort of thing that you can buy from a shop at all. And Bessborough Farm of Kent, which might have come near, has not bothered to turn out for our last two farmers' markets. Not that many farmers do.

Don't know about all this notes of pineapple stuff that said media cooks go in for.

Then this afternoon, I suddenly had a need for some kind of sweet, wet fruit. Something along the lines of tinned peaches, for which I have a thing for from time to time. And we do have some tinned peaches in the cupboard - but then I remembered about the apples in the garage.

Heated up a little water with between one and two tablespoons of sugar.

Meanwhile, quartered, peeled and cored two large apples. Cut the pieces into half again and dropped them into a bowl of salty water. A wheeze to stop them going brown from the iron in the knife or something.

Transferred the apples to the now boiling sugar water, brought back to the boil and simmered for around five minutes, by which time they were starting to froth up. Still some lumps lurking at the bottom.

Eat (with a spoon) as soon as they had cooled down enough to put in the mouth. Very good they were too, and I did around two thirds. Somehow the freshness of the apples survives into the freshly stewed fruit. We will see if that freshness survives until later on today, or perhaps until breakfast tomorrow.

I wonder what the nannies at the end of reference 1 would have to say. No doubt they would applaud the peeling of one's own apples. But what about all that sugar: glucose not even healthy fructose? What about supermarkets offering cartons of the stuff on BOGOF? Which they almost certainly do for baby food.

PS 1: oddly, no thought of cloves. I have been enjoying the (cold) stewed apples that BH has been doing with cloves - as a change from the blackberries before that - but they did not cross my mind earlier today. Perhaps the sugar fix was uppermost.

PS 2: somewhat later, I remembered that my mother used to have yens for things. I was not surprised to find this possibly north American usage from the 1930s in Webster's, where as well as being a coin (properly, the yuan), it was also a Chinese word for a craving for opium, since generalised to cravings generally. Maybe you could buy your fix for a yuan: the eastern version of the quid deal of my time. While OED (first edition) only allows the coin.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/defection.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/exit-portal.html. The very beginning of the peach thing.