APPLE PEELING CALLOUSES

Thursday, October 19, 2006

So a couple weekends ago we went apple picking in Julian, a town about an hour east of San Diego. Julian is an old mining town from the gold rush days that some marketing genius has now made synonymous with apple pies. I guess the climate is perfect for apple growing during the fall. There are some 17,000 apple trees in Julian orchards, and the place puts out 10,000 pies a week during October.

But the demand for apple pie from Julian is now year-round, and it's shipped around the world. So in the off-season, most of Juian's apple pies are made with Washington Apples that are flown in. Talk about pressure to live up to an image!

Anyway, so that's what we did a couple weekends ago. Most of the low-hanging fruit had already been picked, and the orchard we went to didn't have a huge supply of those stick thingies that are used to get at the top of the trees. So Becca became our primary apple picking tool. Don would hoist her up to get the 8-footers. Or alternately he would just smack her against a high branch and shake some loose.

Meanwhile, Sarah and her friend Leah were "supervising." (aka taste testing all the apples and commenting on how the picking was going.) We got each of the kids an empty bag for $5 and filled it through the sweat of our labor. OK mostly Becca's labor.

At any rate, then we got home and realized we had a retarded amount of apples that could not possibly be consumed by the typical packing of one in a lunchbag here or eating one as a snack after school there. Some sort of mass apple usage was going to have to happen.

Naturally, we decided to make pies. Never mind that I have never made a pie in my life. I'm reminded of the time when I nearly burned down our apartment building in Chicago making toast. (Well, that wasn't entirely my fault, but still. Toast.) Or the time when I was making fajitas and my blender exploded. We were scraping marinade off of places in the kitchen that were never really meant to touch food (ceiling). Anyway so naturally, we decided to make pies.

I found some good pie recipes (ones that called for butter AND lard AND 2 types of sugar... how can it be bad?) and Sarah and I went out and bought pie ingredients. Because when you are the kind of person who sets off fire alarms making toast, you don't necessarily keep things like flour and baking powder around. We spent $48 on pie-making supplies. If you think about it, for $58 (the cost of the 2 bags of apples plus all that baking stuff) we could have bought a couple pies at Julian. But then I would not have the apple peeling callouses.

Because when you peel like 12 pounds of apples, and you are not used to it and you are using some cheap-ass peeling tool anyway because you don't want to buy a good one because you're a toast-burner... well, it takes a looooooong time (2 hours?) and you get blistered up. And then another couple hours of rolling dough and mixing and baking and burning my arm (don't ask).

My friend Allison came over and noted the crust-making. "You know, you can get ready-made crust in the freezer aisle," she tells me. Well where was YOUR ass last night when I needed that information, smarty pants!

The pies were actually extra-good. I took some to work and had to actually convince people that I made the pies. They thought we had bought them from Julian. Which, I believe, is what we will actually do next time!