Rising to the Occasion:
Tips for Seasoning Your Meals with Soul
with Karen Mitchell-Wilcher

An Apple A Day…

Recently my 5-year old son came to me a told me that he wanted to make a pie. Naturally, I did what any busy mom would do and said “that’s nice sweetheart” assuming that the conversation would end there. I went on with my day but my son was undeterred. Every time he thought about it, he would ask me about making a pie. I managed to stall, coming up with a myriad of reasons, including telling him we needed to go to the store to get the ingredients hoping that would buy me some time. Unbeknown to me, my son had taken inventory and informed me that we had sugar, the other white stuff (flour), butter and cinnamon. He then announced that all that we needed were the apples. The boy is relentless so I had to soften and comply.

The next thing I knew I was taking a stroll down memory lane to my childhood and telling my children about our apple picking adventures.

My parents liked to take us apple picking in the early fall.  We would pile into the car early on a Sunday morning and head up to U-pick farms in Michigan.  We would usually get a bushel and the activity for the day would begin.  My brother was still very young in my memories of those days so you had to watch the ones he tried to put in the bushel.  He was too short to reach most branches and tended to pick up the ones that had fallen on the ground and sometimes been sampled by the animals.  My sisters and our parents tended to yield better results.   
 
Invariably, we would end up with a whole lot of apples. That would have been great but we lived with a mother who really did not like to cook.  So we had a lot of apples and not a lot of variety in her recipe repertoire.

You could count on my mother to make Easy Apple Pie, apple pancakes and Mom’s Fried Apples.  Thankfully, my aunt lived on our block and she loved to cook so we always shared our bounty with her and she would come up with some treats such as Apple Fritters and Caramel Apples.

By sharing my apple adventures with my kids, I must now plan an apple-picking afternoon for our family.  I am looking forward to an apple a day for however long it takes us to get to the bottom of the bushel!!