January Apples

We had a really paltry crop of apples this past fall, but we made a point of storing away as many of the "good" ones as we could. "Good" is a relative term in our entirely organic (read, "more than half wild") orchard (orchard could have quotation marks around it, too, but that gets tedious...). You can see that even our good apples are often fly-specked, or worse. Still, enough of them keep so that we have fruit through most of the winter. Mainly it's cooking fruit--the apples are quite soft by now. We'll sauté apples to have with pancakes and bacon at breakfast, or to serve with grilled pork or duck confit--confit and apples is on the menu for this weekend. They're still fit for drying, even if they're soft--well, by this time they're halfway dry even before they go in the dehydrator.

I had a basket of our character-ful apples on our bread table at the Midtown market a couple years ago, all shapes and sizes and colors, and not a one meeting the Platonic, take-the-teacher-an-apple ideal. A young woman came up and beheld said basket for a few moments, then said with a smile, "Are you celebrating the beauty of imperfection?"

Yes, that's it.