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| Pennsylvania Apples |
I decided it was time to partake in one of life's simple pleasures while attaining a more accessible goal on my bucket list. It was the perfect time of year to go apple picking. September and October are peak times for apple orchards so I set the date for the second weekend in October. My dear friend Kimba was going to accompany me on this journey but unfortunately she had come down with bronchitis. I will say, as gorgeous and brilliant an autumn as Pennsylvania has experienced this year, the propensity for catching cold after sickness after cold was alarmingly high. I spent the majority of the autumn fighting off varying colds myself. Everyone seemed to be.
I promised my friend I would pick some apples for her and wished her a speedy recovery from her ails. Then I forced the two people that live in my house to come pick some crisp, tasty apples with me. We needed some quality time together anyways. ( Okay so I didn't force them but I may have bribed them with the Cracker Barrel for dinner. LOL.) Actually they were both excited to come along for the 90 minute ride. It had been a very trying, melancholy and onerous summer for the three of us. We didn't really have an opportunity to do much as a family in the warm months. The fact that my kids are older and beginning to branch off and do their own things sometimes weighs heavily in my mind as well. It makes these stolen moments all the more precious for me.
In the blink of an eye...... sigh.
Our destination is Ontelaunee Orchards in Leesport, PA, 90 minutes south of Hazleton. A co worker had recommended the orchard after a summer visit. She had brought in some peaches she had picked during the peach season from this orchard and I was very impressed. They were enormous, healthy and tasted perfectly sweet and peachy. This was the orchard I wanted to visit. I write the directions to the orchard on a piece of paper the old school way mostly because every GPS app I download on my phone frustrates me. We are not even two minutes into our journey when we see our first amusing sight of the trip. (My kids and I always see the strangest, funniest things.)
Some advice for all the bicyclists out there....if you are going to ride your mountain bike around town or anywhere for that matter, make sure you are donning the proper biking attire. Pants that not only fit well but are made of material that moves fluidly while you are peddling your little heart out is the way to go. There is nothing more disturbing and distracting than seeing a man in front of you riding his bike with more than half of his ass hanging out. My daughter and I exchange looks in the front seat. My son is already cracking up in the back seat. Yes, we all have a good laugh at the bicyclist's expense. Good lord!
We continue our travels through the grid and plow down the endless hills of the Skook (Schuylkill County, PA) through Pottsville, Cressona, Deer Lake, Port Carbon and Hamburg. The sky is blue, the clouds are like stretched cotton and the trees covering the Blue Mountains are burning orange and red and yellow. The fresh, brisk air creeping in from the open windows feels amazing. This is the kind of weekend drive I live for. As we enter Leesport, my daughter reads the directions to me. We turn onto the gravel road directing us to the orchard and drive up a hill then down another. I throw my blazer into 4W, praying it goes into gear. It does! Yes! (My truck loves to keep me on edge.)
We see numerous groves filled with rows and rows of trees on either side of us. From their website, I know Ontelaunee not only grows peaches and apples but also cherries. I need to definitely come down for cherry season. Love them. They also have strawberry and blueberry bushes, although they are way out of season already. As we drive to the parking area, we notice they have a corn maze and pumpkin patch as well. This is a really great all in one stop I think to myself. Near the parking area, there is a sign directing us to check in before we begin picking the apples. I notice people lined up at a little shack near the sign with crates, boxes, bags and wagons filled with apples.
We exit the car and head towards the shack. A nice young lady approaches us and inquires if we were ready to start picking apples. Yes we are! She takes our bags and weighs them so we are not charged for their weight. I laugh because I think to myself, my bags aren't even going to register a weight, but surprisingly they do. She writes the weight of each bag on a sticker and places one on each bag. She proceeds to give us a run down of what apples are in season and ready for picking. Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Jona Gold, Cameo, Empire, Cortland and a few others are available for the taking. Several varieties including Fiji and Macintosh are already past season. She informs us where the ripened apples are located on the orchard. They also have arrows marking ripe areas to help guide us. She mentions that while all apples are $1.19 a pound, they prefer we not mix the apples varieties we pick so they can keep track of the varieties for their records.
I only brought two bags so I tell the kids we need to make sure we can tell the difference between the apples so I can separate them at check out. My goal is to find apples suitable for dumplings since I plan on making them for the first time ever. I had become fascinated with them since the Bloomsburg Fair two weeks prior. It was my first time having an apple dumpling and the stand we ordered from, Roan's, rocked my world. Their dumplings consisted of a peeled, cored, whole apple filled with cinnamon, sugar and butter, wrapped in a simple dough then baked in a little metal tray. They served the dumpling warm, in the little metal tray with all the juice and butter leftover from the baking process swimming on the bottom. The ultimate accompaniment to the dumpling was a nice big scoop of cinnamon ice cream. This is what heaven tastes like I remember thinking. My friend Renee agreed. Well worth the 20 minutes we stood in line.
I had also wanted to make the Cracker Barrel's Apple Cheddar chicken and try an apple sangria recipe I found online. My daughter wanted to try her hand at my apple crumb cobbler. In other words, there was gonna be a lot of apple stuff all up in the Fessler household. An apple a day they say. We were about to get our fill. The kids and I walk over to a row of apples ready to be picked. They are Cameo apples. I had never heard of them before but was impressed by the sheer size of them. I notice that most of the orchard trees are pruned so they are smaller in size, no ladder required, yet I was astonished that such small trees could hold so much fruit on them.....large, perfectly shaped, beautiful fruit.
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| Stunning dark crimson Red Delicious apples. |
I walk over to a tree to get a closer look. Then I notice the yellow jackets, aka flying, stinging, scary, yellow bastards. The website had stated that there would be fruit on the ground which attracted bees. I don't mind honey bees, bumble bees or even carpenter bees. They all have a job to do so they pretty much focus on what their purpose in life is, be it making honey, pollinating flowers or eating big ass holes in your deck. They don't purposely attack humans. They only sting when they feel threatened. And by threatened, you pretty much have to get all up in their business to piss them off. Yellow jackets, wasps, and hornets on the other hand, are predators. They are assholes. They will attack you and repeatedly sting you because....they can. And where there is one, there are 1000 more just waiting to go to war. They get off on stinging people. Well, that is my theory anyway. Here, I almost just stepped on an apple filled with yellow jackets. I back away slowly and say a Hail Mary.
I warn my kids to be careful. Today is not the day I want to find out if they are allergic to bees. Their father was when he was a child, however he had been stung several times as an adult by yellow jackets and was okay. Like I mentioned above, there are many varieties of flying, stinging spawns of satan so we proceed with caution. The three of us start examining and picking Cameo apples. I figure these will be the apples I use for dumplings. We begin loading up the bag my son is holding. It becomes rather heavy, very quickly. We twist, turn and snap about 15 Cameos from the trees. As we are getting ready to head over to the Empire apples, I notice a bunch of perfectly good Cameos lying on the ground in between two trees. Someone must have picked them then decided to leave them.
That pissed me off. I bend down and examine the apples. There are about seven perfectly good apples lying on the ground. I pick them up and place them in my bag. I know sometimes we can't help but waste food but this just didn't sit well with me. Don't blatantly pick so much fruit, then disregard it like that. Since I have so many Cameos, I decide to forgo the Empire apples entirely. My bill is already going to be high because these apples are so large. They have to be close to a pound a piece. Instead, we walk down a little hill and across the road to the Golden Delicious.
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| Ricky going in for the kill. |
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| Snow White and her apple. |
Golden Delicious are not the most ideal apples for baking in my opinion. They are a little too soft and sweet, better for eating as is, but I have baked with them. They make for a great homemade applesauce. I also believe they would be fantastic to put in .....say.....some apple cider sangria. Hahaha! I genuinely adore their flavor. They are such a gorgeous apple. My daughter shares my love for them too. The Golden Delicious trees are larger and the leaves, a deeper green. The yellow apples hang in beautiful contrast to the green leaves. I walk among the rows with my daughter just admiring the trees.
This is when I swallow my first gnat. I tend to breath more through my mouth than my nose so I make a conscious effort to close my mouth and let my nose do the work. Yep....Knew that was going to happen. I just snorted a gnat. Then I snort another one.We got both nostrils covered now. Symmetry people! Let's just say there are gnats EVERYWHERE. For some reason, they weren't as bad by the Cameos but they are definitely a huge nuisance by the golden delicious trees. I turn to mention to my daughter that the gnats are pissing me off when I eat another one. Then I get one in my eye. WTF?? I look down at my blonde hair and there are little black dots all over it. I start shaking my hair with my hands.
Gnats don't freak me out or anything, but they are utterly annoying. I am literally walking around among the trees with one hand rubbing my eye while the other one alternates between shaking my hair and swatting the air in front of my face. I would be quite the spectacle if everyone else wasn't doing something very similar. The kids are in their own epic battle of the gnats. I decide to light a cigarette in hopes that the smoke will keep them away. (Okay...So I really needed an after dinner smoke since I ate so many freakin gnats!) It works a little. We do our best to ignore the pests. They are not ruining our fun time! No way!
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| Golden Beauties! |
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| The kiddos getting their apple on. Somehow I, the elderly one, ended up carrying a bag. Notice which child has no bag.... LOL! Men! |
We begin loading up the bag my daughter is carrying with Golden goodness. We pick about 15 of them. Next to the Golden Delicious are the Red Delicious. I decide to forgo them as well. I remember the young lady saying there were Granny Smith apples down the mountain. Granny Smith are the perfect baking apple. They are tart and firm. They are also great for slicing and slathering peanut butter on them. I would like to pick some of them. We begin the journey down the mountain in search of Grannies. (On a side note, when my daughter was little, every time she saw an elderly woman she would ask me rather loudly, "Mommy is she a granny?" or she would say "Hi Granny." to them as they walked by us. Yep.... 50 shades of red right here.)
Maybe it was the mass ingestion of gnats, or maybe it was the fact that the temperature had risen what seemed like twenty degrees in 30 minutes, but we were struggling a little looking for the granny apples. We glance at row upon row of trees but no Granny Smiths. We notice a sign for Jona Gold apples. I decide to settle for them. We walk back to the rows of Jona Golds. The gnats must really love them too because this area was by far, the most heavily concentrated area. It was beyond annoying at this point.
We are DeCosmo/Fesslers though. We do not allow anything to get in the way of fun times. We begin perusing the apples. They look very similar to Cameos. Later I find out that both the Cameo and Jona Gold apples are bred from the Delicious apple family. It was fate that I picked these two apple varieties. Pretty wild huh? Hahahaha. It is here, in this grove of trees that my son finds what he declares the perfect apple. It has a great blend of color, nice shape, a strong stem, and most importantly, little leaves intact on the stem. Yes people, in a matter of 30 minutes my son has become the "authority" on apples. I have no idea where he gets this from. (That is complete sarcasm of course. I know exactly where he gets this from....his sister. LOL!)
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| The perfect apple...according to Ricky. |
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| It really is a nice apple. |
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| Mom and daughter enjoying some quality time. |
We place the epitome of appleness in the bag with the Golden Delicious apples because the Jona look way too similar to the Cameos. I have a tendency to get into havoc everywhere I go. Don't feel like getting scolded at the shack for mixing varieties. Why am I so paranoid? Who knows. After picking about ten apples I decide this is about all my budget can allot. We head back up the hill to the shack. I remember having a plastic grocery bag in the car. I tell the kids to hang at the picnic tables while I go fetch the bag. (I am so paranoid about presenting mixed apples. This is obvious.) I come back with my plastic grocery bag and put all the Jona in it. There! Now all the apples are separated. This gal ain't getting scolded today!
The kids and I head to the shack to have our bounty of apples weighed. I patiently anticipate the damage. The total for 45 ginormous apples is...... $36.00. I can live with that. We had a great time so it was well worth the price. The next day I make apple dumplings. It takes me all day to create these dough encased apple treasures for a number of reasons. First off, it is Sunday. Football day. I do watch college football on Saturdays but go about doing my things around the house. I'm a little more religious about watching NFL football, especially Steelers football. I'm not going to lie. I peeled the apples in front of my big screen TV. That took three hours.
There was also the problem with coring the apples. They were too big for me to core with a knife without risking a trip to the ER. Since I wanted my apples whole, I had to cut a perimeter around the top of the apple, then scoop out the core with a spoon. I begin questioning why I had to ambitiously choose such huge apples. This process took awhile as well. Then there was the problem of the dough. I am not great with dough for starters. The fact that I could not find my rolling pin made me go watch two hours of the 4:00 football game. I refused to give up though. I walk back into my kitchen, grab an empty wine bottle (they are plentiful in this house) and roll out my dough. I so suck at rolling dough. The swear words start drifting from my lips.
The fact that the apples are huge make me hate my life even more because I have to work really hard to roll out slabs of dough big enough to cover the apples. Why did I decide to make 15 of these f@ckers?? I am always challenging myself whether I want to or not it seems. Add insult to injury I can hear the game on the TV in the next room. I am missing so much football right now. Finally, after 37 hours of hard labor, the dumplings are ready to bake. I am calm again and eagerly anticipating enjoying a homemade apple dumpling made by me! 40 minutes later we are already into the 8:00 football game and the dumplings are ready. Or....are they? I pick a dumpling, dump a bunch of vanilla ice cream in the little metal pan and top it with cinnamon. (No cinnamon ice cream available at the store.) I park my ass in front of the big screen and dig into my dumpling.
My spoon is being met with a lot of resistance. What the hell? I finally get a piece of apple to cooperate and get on my spoon. As soon as I put it in my mouth it dawns on me that the recipe I used called for chopped apples. Chopped apples only need 40 minutes in the oven. Whole apples need about an hour, maybe even longer because mine were Godzilla apples. My apple is not soft. It is al dente. Al dente is great for pasta, not so great for apple dumplings. By now, I am no longer hungry. I get up from the couch, walk back into the kitchen, turn on the oven again and bake the dumplings for another 25 minutes. I don't even try one when they come out. By this point I have resigned myself to cherry whiskey. It is bedtime. Tomorrow is another day.
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| Fess's Apple Dumplings |
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| This is what heaven tastes like. |
I will say, Monday night, I heat up an apple dumpling and have it for dinner. It was fabulous. It was not as delicious as Roan's but better than I was expecting for my first go round. I will definitely make them again. I will just make sure to make them on a non-football day. I also bought an apple corer and will be getting a rolling pin shortly to make my life easier. And perhaps....I will rethink the size of the apples I use to make dumplings. Maybe. LOL! Turns out all the fruits of my labor came out wonderful and tasted amazing. The kids were apprehensive about the apple cheddar chicken but once they tired it, they were hooked. I also got to spend quality time with my kiddos. As I always say, it's all about the little things. For they are the big things. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Chrissy
Links:
Apple Varieties
http://www.orangepippin.com/apples
Ontelaunee Orchards
http://www.twin-o.com/
Apple Cider Sangria
http://www.inspiredbycharm.com/2013/09/apple-cider-sangria-lose-the-bottle-2500-contest.html
http://www.howsweeteats.com/2012/10/apple-cider-sangria/
Apple Dumplings
http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/09/10/apple-dumplings-recipe/
