This fall, I have been stealing apples. The houses on my street all have apple trees in their yards, except mine, but no one seemed to care for the fruit. The beautiful red and green apples fell to the ground and were left there to rot. It broke my secret housewife heart to see such perfect fruit go to waste. So, from the end of September and all through October, I went out at night with my bicycle lamp and my cloth bags and picked the fallen fruit from the wet grass. I filled bags and bags of them, bought them home and started exploring the wonderful world of apple cooking.
I made Lori’s apple pie, I made apple buns and apple sauce and apple juice. I had apple rings drying on my kitchen counter for weeks, so that eventually my entire appartment smelled of apples.
When the first frost came in the end of October, I realised that I had to give it up. The apples in the trees wouldn’t be good anymore. It felt like a relief. The apples had become an obsession for me. A couple of days ago, I put away the last dried apples from their drying sticks and could finally start doing other things at night. I had no more apples to peal.
But I’ve kept a record. I ended up carrying home 50 kilograms of apples this fall. More than half of my freezer is filled with more than 16 liters of apple sauce and 6 liters of apple juice, and I have an entire shelf in my cupboard filled with bags of dried apples. My grandmother would have been proud of me.
And yesterday, I was at a party and started talking with a guy about my apples. It turned out he had done the same thing, only, he had made wine of the stolen apples instead of sauce. And it was a delicious wine, too. After half an hour’s intense conversation about the adventures of apple stealing and fruit processing, his girlfriend came up beside him and put her hand possessively on his shoulder. She probably took our lively conversation as me trying to hit on her boyfriend. This came as a shock to me. I was just so happy to find someone who could talk about apples with me. Someone who understood my obsession.
I guess these apples have made me just a little bit crazy. (As if I wasn’t before…)
Katja Malmborg 