Passing on traditional skills like foraging, cooking from scratch and living well on less
Our 9 year-old, Alex, asked last night if we could make mini donuts together for breakfast for everybody today. I said yes, and dug out this recipe that I came up with a few years ago. This is a really easy but delicious recipe that also includes lots of fruit and/or veggies, since each batch […]
I was chatting with my friend Polly from Glasgow, Scotland (imagine Craig Ferguson’s accent, but prettier. A lot prettier.), and I mentioned that we had given our children some apple cider. She was horrified. “Ye do that with your weans?” I told her cider is no big deal, and she pointed out that cider is […]
We’ve been acquiring a lot of apples lately, and some of them are just plain mysteries. They’re either from old properties, gifts, or sometimes it’s just from “that tree in the yard”. A local man sells apples in his driveway, and one of his varieties is called “Tree #2” because when he bought the house […]
It can be nearly impossible to identify unknown apples, especially feral ones. There are a few ways to narrow it down, but Seed Savers Exchange orchard manager Dan Bussey is writing a book about 20,000 named apple varieties in the US, and there are probably many more out there that are lost to time. And […]
Do you want to try some high-end apples at bargain basement prices? Culled apples are the way to go! In my article about urban foraging, I mentioned asking produce sellers for “canning” or “freezing” grade fruits and vegetables, which are the “not-so-perfect” ones. Some orchards do the same thing with apples — they’re called the […]
While 2014 wasn’t a good year for mulberries or acorns, it was a banner year for apples. We had many more than we could possibly process, and had to leave some trees untouched. We have over 400 pounds of apples (about 8 bushels) either already processed or waiting, with more on the way. They were […]