Apple Picking

my people staring down the family who dared try to pick on our row

Tomato soup and grilled cheese when we got home.

Apple picking is one of my very favorite fall things to do. The crisp air and fall sunshine; my girl twirling and singing through the aisles while crunching on an apple she picked herself; the smell of the orchard; Elias giggling from my back at his sister's antics...it's all so lovely and perfectly fall.

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This year we made an official event out of our apple picking by first stopping at one of the yummiest places in our neck of the woods: The Green Frog. We had our little breakfast and the sun got a little higher and warmed everything up a bit for us. When we left home it was only 35 degrees. oops.

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Somewhat sadly, we realized that our team is not cut out for pressing our own apple cider. There are so many rules and only somewhat pleasant people hanging about, looking over your shoulder to make sure you follow all of the rules and lots of other people waiting to press their own cider like pros. And, I have learned through several years of apple cider pressing that this is not a recipe for success for my man. If someone is breathing down his neck, he gets anxious and wants to press on through to the other side of this little experience. Inevitably, he did just about every thing that lady didn't want us to do. At one point I was hopping up and down with Elias on my back when Nick inadvertently set an apple press bucket thingy on the ground saying, "Oh no! Don't put ANYTHING on the ground, remember?! That lady is going to come back and yell at us! Quick! Pick it up!" Then Nick responded with rising anxiety, "But where do I put it? Don't they wash them anyway? Does it count as contaminated now? What should we do with it?" So I quick quick grabbed it and put it back onto the press so we could squeeze just a few more apples to finish off our jug and get the heck out of there. But, guess what? Just then the lady who may have once been nice, but was now sick and tired of our foursome, came stomping and huffing up in her rubber boots demanding to know where we had put that bucket that she saw on the ground "right there". She pointed to the spot of our crime. Reader, I'll be honest. We lied. We started to hem and haw and I peeked at Nick and thought for sure he was going to lose it in some small way, so I pointed at the clean bucket on the bench and said, "that one!" We then vowed that we would never again press cider. We will buy it at the store where there are no ladies in big rubber boots stomping around scaring cider novices like ourselves. phew. But this batch sure tastes good...