[g-rant] apples!

It’s officially apple season. From apple top to – wait for it – “apple bottom,” our household has fully taken off the reigns and gone completely apple bonkers lately. We recently took a family excursion to our favorite local apple picking spot, Stuckey Farm, and had quite an amazing experience. We walked the grounds and chose among trees of more apple species than I ever knew existed. Long gone are the days that I will ever be able to ask our kids, “Would you like a green apple or a red one?” Stuckey’s offers over 20 different delicious apple types and make it very easy to decide based on your palate, with charts depicting various levels of tartness or sweetness, or varieties more suitable for baking. They also had a great playground area with this crazy slide that our lil’ apple pickers rode no short of 45 times.

So this post isn’t the typical full-fledged “rant,” but my desire to write about apples is because this is “season’s eatings” at its finest. My kids and I long for apples throughout the entire calendar year. They are one of my favorite foods and snacks and apples went way up in my book when a friend of mine/cycling buddy from church who used to play many years in the NFL raved during a long ride of the “super food” qualities of apples and how he eats over six a day. And (how do I say this without sounding weird?) the dude is completely shredded, in amazing shape, and so I tend to listen to his dietary recommendations. So with apples being delicious, sweet, and good for you, it’s hard to not buy them 52 weeks a year whether or not they are in season in Indiana when we’re at the grocery and the kids are begging for them.

However, this has served as yet another great opportunity to explain how eating seasonally works. Yes, we will occasionally buy apples throughout the year, but now that our kiddos know that in Indiana, apple season is a several week window at the beginning of autumn, they get super excited in the weeks leading up to the mayhem involving us eating apples all the time. This marks a monumental time of the year. We go completely nuts over apples this way, because we’ve waited all year for it. I bet I ate seven different varieties of apples while picking our bushel bag at the orchard. And we were only there for about two hours!

Because they are now in season, we eat as many as we possibly can so as to not waste any of the bag we bought. We ended up buying four different types of varieties, none of which I had ever heard of, and Sara has had so much fun preparing them in various ways (recipes coming, she says).

So here is my rant: how can I keep this up?! At this pace, I’ll get completely sick of apples and never want to eat them ever again, right? Well, because as it is with eating seasonally, I know the fresh local apple window is just here for a short time so there is virtually zero chance of apple burnout.

This time of year is my absolute favorite. The leaves are starting to change, the air is brisker, the pace starts to slow down (momentarily), and the calm before the storm of holiday bliss and nonsense is just around the corner. And today, I will eat homemade apple crisp on my yogurt, an apple with peanut butter during lunch, an apple for an afternoon snack, and perhaps have a hot “Apple Jack” (hot apple cider and Jack Daniel’s – you’re welcome) or two with my bride this evening. Sound like overkill? Not when one waits the rest of the year eating seasonally and preparing for the apple debauchery of this time of year!