Hope you all had a lovely Easter! We spent most of ours scrumping for apples and making cider. Inspired by the adventures of the lovely Hugh from River Cottage we took to the highway and collected apples from roadside fruit trees.
Apple trees were everywhere once we started looking, it was amazing. Here's a pic of Adam doing some particularly risky foraging, but mostly they were just all over the ground, waiting to be collected. There were so many scrumptious apples to be had!
Charlie enjoyed tasting all the different varieties we came across! We ended up picking so many apples that we just filled up the back of the van! We got more than enough for the cider so we also gave apples to our friends, made stewed apples, apple juice to drink and sliced a whole heap to be dried.
Then Adam, chief executive cider maker got into pressing the apples.
And now the cider is bubbling away in our little cellar. Hopefully in about eight months time, just in time for Christmas, we will have wonderful tasting summer cider to enjoy!
We are just so excited by the concept of foraging for wild food. There are so many possibilities of wonderful things to make and share. Next weekend, it's chestnuts! And after that, maybe mushrooms?
Is there a wild food that you enjoy?
Wow that is a LOT of free apples! How good is that! I have spent a lot of time scouring the roadsides round here for fruit trees (after reading a rather romantic article about picking roadside apples written by Maggie Beer a while back) but found nothing. So last winter I planted a mini orchard down the front of our property - 6 varieties of apples, 2 types of pear, 2 types of plum and two almonds. Will have to wait another year or two for fruit but worth it I think! Enjoy all your lovely appley goodies :)
ReplyDeleteOoh, yum, how exciting. xx
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