One of the best food investments we can make, if we don’t have our own orchard, is in several large produce boxes filled with organic apples. Far better if the apples are heirloom varieties grown locally. Each fall I make sure I’ve purchased enough apples from our local grower to dry, freeze, and put up our yearly mead and vinegar. I love this picture of our adorable granddaughter, Nori Kai, during apple season in Santa Fe.
By the time our grower’s market closes in late October, we always have one box of Fuji apples bundled up in plastic and stored in our spare refrigerator, where it will stay untouched until sometime in March. Fujis are the only apples that can be stored for up to a year without significant deterioration. We also make sure all our refrigerator bins are filled with several different varieties of apples before the end of the season. I’m very grateful to John Trujillo, who still tends the old apple orchards his ancestors planted generations ago in the enchanting highlands of northern New Mexico.
Fresh apple slices with the juice of one lime squeezed over them is the only dessert I ever have in the evening. If I’m late preparing lunch, a handful of dried apples staves off hunger, and apple smoothie (made with frozen apples) is on our breakfast table at least once a week throughout the year.
We’ve been mead makers for 30 years, a tradition that has added great delight and enjoyment to our lives. A huge amount of work on the front end, juicing apples and ladling out honey, once the jugs of mead are safely put to bed in their warm winter jackets, we get to enjoy the charming sounds of soft bubbling coming from various cupboards throughout the house. We love sharing our bounty with friends and neighbors.
Apple cider vinegar is easy to make, especially if you happen to have a load of apple pulp on hand, which we certainly do during mead-making time. Now that I understand that probiotics must come from our own environment to have any positive effects whatsoever, and have experienced those effects myself over the years, I will never buy store-bought vinegar again. The same applies to commercial bread yeast.
The world is changing very fast and I’m counting on our learned traditions, garnered year by year through deep interests in natural food, gardening, sewing, fiber arts, and natural medicine to carry us through a time when supermarkets and shopping malls may be completely abandoned. I’ll post a video shortly on how to make your own vinegar, as well as simple meals using this treasured living food.