VeMoFo#29: Picking Pecks of Pink Papples

There's a texture and a difference to an apple who's home you've seen.  Who's home you've even twisted it off from, that is to say - an apple plucked and fallen into your own basket!  I worked at an orchard out in Ormstown (about an hour out of montreal) at the end of August this summer, just for a few days, but enough time to sufficiently drink in enough of the heavy silence and dusky richness in the air, completely devoid of cell phone crackle, car exhaust, cable hum and well... the city in general.

double stem

I took a certain liking to these pink ones especially.  They're not even eating apples, normally, but used for wine, and they grew all clustered like burnished billiard balls exactly even in size and ridiculously easy to pick, plus fuschia seeds.  The other main kinds we picked were Jersey Macintosh and Jona Golds (crisp as ice!!)

I only just ate the last of these a few days ago... yay for hardy fruit

We also stayed in a trailer!!  So exciting, I love small spaces, and living as MacGuyver-y as possible.  We rotated every precious dish, washed with a teensy cloth (no soap or running water), ate out of tahini jars, and everything was sumptuous to eat because A: we were exhausted, B: communal food obviously tastes best, C: half of it came wild from the land!

Dinner on our last night was a chickpea & wakame & brown rice pilaf, curried coconut vegetable stew, green beans & wild dandelion greens picked just outside, and a stovetop apple pie made with our own apples, on a strawberry granola crust!  Oh, and topped with wild blackberries, and sweetened with dates luckily left over from snacking, of course.

Can I even tell you how overjoyed I was to "bake" in the wilderness?

Zoop's Zon!

I also saw the most amazing tree, curled in and over itself like a snake or a spirit!  I have 4 or 5 pictures of this creature, and in each one it looks entirely different, and exquisite.  

It was in a very long and flat expanse of shale (weak sedimentary river rock) that ran with a shallow crystal brook for kilometres and kilometres up, full of tiny fishes, some fossils, seaweed that looked like mermaid hair, and when you jumped up and down on certain parts of the rock it kind of shattered just a little bit, like jumping on ice in November.  And everything was copper-coloured.

yeah, you can pay me to do this...