I haven’t been apple picking in ages – since I was probably 5 or 6. I have great memories of climbing (or rather trying to climb) the trees. I also have a vague memory of making apple sauce when we got home, using the metal food press with the red handle. There’s nothing quite like the scent of warm apples cooking on the stove, with some cinnamon mixed in. YUM!
I’d mentioned to E that one of the things I really wanted to do when we moved was go apple picking. So, a couple of Saturdays ago, E and I and friends of ours went apple picking in western Virginia. We went to the Marker-Miller Orchard in Winchester, VA. E had found them online and found several other fun things to do along the way. We stopped at the Route 11 Potato Chip Factory in Middletown, VA. Yummy chips that are safe for me to eat! Well, some of the varieties are not, but a good number of them are, and it’s a good thing! Next was a stop at the Italian Touch restaurant. Sounds kind of kinky, but it’s really just a tiny pizza joint in the middle of town. A really GOOD tiny pizza joint, where we were the only people besides the staff who weren’t wearing overalls. 
Once we arrived at the Orchards, we went out back and started walking through the trees. Most of the trees in the front section were small, young trees, only about 7 feet tall. They had been pretty picked over, but once we moved to the back of the first rows, we found lots of apples.
Then, once we moved across the driveway to the older part of the orchard, the apples were plentiful, and gorgeous. They had Red and Gold Delicious, Granny Smith, Nittany, Ida Red, Fuji, Crispin, Red Stayman, and others. We missed a couple of varieties, Empire and something else, because it was already late in the apple season.
It was a great time. We walked between the rows of trees, sampling the varieties to make sure that they were something that we would want to eat.
I think the Red Staymans are my favorite new kind of apple – kind of tart but not as tart as the Granny Smiths you find in the store (I should have tried the ones at the orchard – DOH!). The Fujis were pretty fantastic as well, but the Crispins were bland and unappealing.
We also had an entertaining time tasting wine from a local winery. Mostly apple wines with a few plum wines and some really odd mixtures of flavors. It was hysterical how the vintner doing the tasting would go on and on about how great the wine was, and the overwhelming sentiment from our group of tasters was: “YUCK!” I tried a couple and sort of enjoyed one of the plum wines (which I made E buy for me), but I have to agree with the crowd on most of them.
Well, we haven’t made applesauce, but I’ve been eating amazing apples, mostly Red Staymans, for the last week, and E made an apple tart with the Fujis. We have some baking apples at the bottom of the bag, which are really not baking apples, but Nittany apples, which are HUGE (maybe because they’ve been on the tree a long time) and are good for eating, but definitely on the line between good for eating and better for baking.
E made some apple tarts the night we got home (or maybe it was Sunday); I made sauerkraut and apples the next week to go with some delish pork chops; and we made some more baked treats last weekend. I was busy making up a new recipe for apple crisp with cranberries and crystallized ginger, which turned out okay, but it needs some tweaking before I’m ready to post it. And now I’m thinking that cranberry chutney with apples would be really tasty… Hmmmm… since we’re already out of apples, I may have to make a trip to a local fruit stand!
