Apple Picking

Last weekend we participated in the second-annual CI apple-picking event. Last year, for the first-annual, we went to this charming orchard in Wisconsin:


This is a different kind of apple orchard than I was used to. (This is where the link should go for an apple orchard I grew up going to, but, see, those apple orchards don't have websites. I did find this mention of Apple Annie's.) It offered not only cheese curds, but cheese shaped like beer


And not only a petting zoo, but


Yeesh. We had a great time, though. Tom and Elizabeth even used this photo on their wedding website:


(If Abigail and Jeff ever have a wedding website, I think they should use this one:)


On the other hand, the traffic going and coming was awful, and likely to be worse this year because of construction, so we abandoned Apple Holler for a place farther off the beaten path, in Indiana (no offense to Hoosiers: I don't mean to say that Indiana's any farther off the beaten path than Wisconsin, just contrast these particular orchards, OK?). Except for it being 90 degrees, it was idyllic: lots of apples, no cheese curds in sight. There were these golden-delicious trees that were the most beautiful color.


And the apples were scrumptious, too. Even Abigail, who doesn't like any Deliciouses, was so delighted with them that she made a face like this:


They also made wicked good throwin' apples.



But it was 90 degrees, and we had to take breaks to rest in the shade. Rob started the trend.


And before long Tom and Elizabeth were on the wagon.


It was all downhill from there. Andrea got so hot, she said "screw you all, I'm going to Steak 'n Shake."


Actually, she didn't say that. What really happened was that we all got so hot that we said collectively, "screw this. We're going to Steak 'n Shake."



And we did.

(There are more photos on flickr: Andrea's and mine.)

Necessary to be had in all families

It's actually October, which means it's definitely fall, which means people are getting sick left and right. Jeff came down with a bad cold last week, and in addition to giving us an excuse to spend Saturday on the couch watching PBS cooking shows, it reminded me that I have to share this with you.


It's called switchel. It looks ominous, and tastes that way too, but it will make you not sick anymore. I guess everyone has his or her own anti-cold potion--Jeff swears by matzo ball soup--but really, you should try this. (Is Jeff better yet? No. Too many matzo balls, too little switchel, if you ask me.)

Switchel is apparently an olden-days drink, not a cold medicine, just something people liked to drink. My family discovered it at one of those olden-days festivals they have at farms sometimes, where they make kids roll hoops around and card wool, I guess to make them appreciate how good we have it in the present. So they had this drink, and Mom liked it (even though it's kind of gross), and then we found a recipe for it in The Loaf and Ladle Cookbook. I don't remember how its cold-fighting properties were discovered, but they were, and they exist.

What you do is you take a lot of apple cider, substantially smaller amounts of cider vinegar and molasses, and a bunch of ground ginger, mix them together, and drink as much as you can stomach until your cold goes away. I don't know specific amounts--I would say "to taste" except that it tastes pretty bad, so it's more like "to tolerance." In the brew pictured above I filled up an old liter-sized soda bottle about three-quarters of the way with cider, and divided the remaining quarter among the other ingredients and some empty space so I could shake it up. If that clarifies anything. But try it. Really.

Now that I've done my public service, I will tell you what else has been going on. Mostly, it comes down to a lot of mess, like this:

And lists, like this:


And ingenious space-saving solutions, like these:

(Many thanks to Ikea and The Container Store, without which none of this would have been possible. Except the mess, and the lists.)

It's getting close to a month since we moved, so I guess we can't say we're moving anymore. We're not quite what you'd call settled, but we've come a long way--we did clean up that mess in the living room, at least enough to sit on the couch:


Actually, we took that photo our first night here, to document our first dinner in our new home. But the mess got put back on the couch afterwards, so the point stands.

My plants are pluckily coming back to life, after being brutally burned because I left them in the hot sun in the car for two days:


Inspiring, isn't it? And us, we're chugging along, hanging things up, cleaning out the wall-anchors section of the hardware store, drilling a lot of holes. As it turns out Jeff's legal education has come in unexpectedly handy:


(The secret usefulness of my own education continues to await the right moment to unveil itself.)

And then, there's the rest of life, which we're trying to get on with. Which, speaking of, I should get on with. 'Til next time.