Unseasonal autumn weather...

I remember last year's visit to Erddig was sunny, but with a definite chill in the air. This year, however, shorts would have been more appropriate as it was warm even as we left Farnworth. Plenty of people thought an apple festival was a good idea and we had to queue for fifteen minutes to get into the grounds. The set-up was similar to last year, except the blacked-up Border Morris Men had been replaced by an altogether more genteel group who didn't look like they'd shout or wield sticks as phallic trophies. I don't know really, as we missed their performance, preferring instead to slob about on a bench in the shade.

Apples were purchased and we also bought a beautiful turned oak fruit bowl. To celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary we needed something in wood and we had often admired bowls at other events, always shying away from paying the price. But we decided that we could justify the cost for our anniversary and the bowl now sits, crammed full of apples, on the table.

So what did we come away with? Several bottles of apple juice, both sweet and medium, went into the fridge, with the apples getting used in the following ways:

• Tower of Glamis: made into puree and frozen
• Arthur Turner: made into a crumble and eaten
• Norfolk Beauty: some floury eaters for Agnieszka
• Beauty of Kent: to be made into a crumble later this week
• Lord Lambourne: bright red eaters, sat in the bowl
• Orleans Reinette: sharp, crispy eaters for me
• Pitmaston Pineapple: small, juicy, incredibly tasty; these won't last long
• Ashmead's Kernal: wrapped in paper, stored in a bag in the porch for Christmas 

Despite the list being quite long, these won't last us for more than a couple of weeks. It really does make us want to plant and maintain an orchard. The look of most of the apples is not of supermarket high quality, some are lumpy and mis-shapen, but the taste is amazing and surely that is more important.

Smacznego!

Images of Spring...

 

Quitte, quince and pigwa...

Some years ago, in Germany, I was given a very strange dessert. They called it ‘Quitte’ and said they were very hard fruits that you had to boil for a week before they were soft enough to eat. I suspected at the time, and later confirmed, that they were quince and in recent months there has been a plethora of articles, both written and on television, about these sadly neglected fruits.

On the way down to Dorset, we stopped at an orchard and bought a few pounds. They sat in the cottage for the week and every time we went past we sniffed them as the aroma is gorgeous. On the way back home, we bought some more and then a week or so ago, we were given a huge bucket of them for nothing. So far they’ve been made into jelly and cheese (like a thin Turkish delight, but sweeter), a quince and apple cake, an experimental liqueur, and a quince and apple crumble. They are absolutely wonderful. We still have some left and plans are now to add some rosemary from the yard to make them into a savoury jam.

If anyone has any other ideas of what to do with them, let me know, but they are disappearing fast!

An apple a day...

... makes Granny Smith a very rich old lady.

I always knew the Piccolo Book of Jokes and Riddles would come in handy one day and I can't believe I only got one chance to tell it when we went to Erddig Hall at the weekend for their 20th apple festival.

We are both sick of the supermarkets and their crappy apples from South Africa, Portugal and Holland so when we found out about this festival on a previous visit to the National Trust property near Wrexham we were determined to visit. We weren't the only ones either, as the place was full at 10.30 on a Saturday morning and we all had to wait until precisely 11.00 before they opened the doors.

Erddig Hall is a lovely property, with an interesting house as well as nice gardens. The apples were set up in a tent away from the main house, and there were, according to the brochure, over 120 varieites available. There weren't that many on show or sale but the choice of what they had was amazing. Far too many to make an informed choice and there was no way we could take one of each. For a start we'd have forgotten the names before we were out of the marquee. So we um-ed and ah-ed and eventually bought a selection:

• Foxes delight - crisp and juicy
• Red devil - hard and crunchy 

Both from a farm shop set up in the slightly off-putting 'midden yard', along with some Buerre Hardy pears which were crisp and crunchy, not soft and gooey like so many of the crappy ones you get at Asda. Add to that a couple of bottles of pure apple juice (which is perfect with Żubrówka) and we were loaded down before we even got to the main attraction.

From the Erddig stocks we went a bit mad:

• Tower of Glamis - to cook with
• Lord Lambourne - a crisp, slightly tart, eating apple
• Rushmead's Kernel - a very tart apple that stores well. These have been wrapped and stored and will come out at Christmas as a special treat. Assuming, of course, they last that long.

We were disappointed that no quince were available, nor were there any damsons or plums. There was plenty of other entertainment, though, and I discovered the £3.50 I charge for a 1lb jar of honey fell far short of the £5 they were charging for pretty much the same thing. With mouths open, we wandered past a potter, basket maker and tree surgeon to end up watching the Border Morris Dancers, who were very good and very entertaining. The girls were very sedate, flicking their hankies and skipping around, but the boys, all blacked up in 'disguise' were a bit more raucous and obviously enjoyed themselves.