in my kitchen, around the farm
Summer goes as summer must. Everything wildly blooming and fruiting despite the lack of rains this year. Our old apple trees have never produced more voraciously than they are this year. Some of them are over one hundred years old and they desperately needed some pruning. Having done that with vigour early this spring, they decided the time was right to show us what they got and my goodness! Show us they most definitely are!
I’m thankful for the apple trees, old and young. Apple butter is probably the most in-demand preserve I make. I started apple preserves making apple sauce, but truly, there is no comparison to apple butter. Apple sauce is like the little kid sibling to the more robust, filled-out mature apple butter. Apple sauce, just cooking down apples quickly with maybe a bit of sweetener (or not) and maybe a bit of spices (or not) is nothing like the concentrated, saturated, deeply flavoured apple butter of my dreams. Apple butter, made with a variety of apples, including crabapples if you please, with some added glugs of good cider has never met a meat or a sauce or a cultured bowl of dairy that it doesn’t get along with.
A few years ago I started using the deep, rosy red crabapples that grow from this huge, gnarled tree beside our compost pile. That is one happy tree, let me tell you. All summer the chickens take refuge under her expansive limbs, scratching through compost - our automatic compost turners. When the dairy cows make their rotation through the fruit orchard, they are fenced off from the younger trees, but old Mother Crabapple is too big for them to push over so they are content to move under her