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Pick Your Own
An apple a day may keep the doctor away but can cause a visit from the bankruptcy attorney. An annual fall-classic family outing has become so prohibitively expensive...that is apple and pumpkin picking...that I may be forced to consume fruit rollups as my major source of fiber.
Recently I went apple picking with some friends and all of our children. We opted to go on a Sunday which is much like the decision to go to Rockefeller Center during the tree lighting ceremony or for that matter taking a joy ride on Route 3 in New Jersey while a Giant game lets out. The orchard intrigues you with the wafting oily aroma of fresh cooked doughnuts and sweet pressed cider. But the chances of you buying any of these goods are as likely as getting half priced tickets to "The Producers" for a Sunday matinee at the TKTS kiosk in Times Square - with those lines it ain't gonna' happen. So after the visit to the porta-john, not to pee mind you, just to eliminate any craving you may have had for those doughnuts by nauseating you into fasting, you opt for the pumpkin patch, for the kids sake. They just love decorating any vegetable over 25 pounds whether it be your classic orange gourd or the zucchini you forgot to pick from your vegetable garden, which by now must be the size of a little league baseball bat. So you discourage your kid from picking the 46 pounder because of the 2 to 3 mile walk back to your vehicle from the pumpkin patch. You tell them that their jack-o'-lantern will be cuter if they pick the 3 and a half pounder. Thus a compromise of 25 pounds is reached. You haul this beastly fruit to the check out line. The queue will inevitably be as long in people as per pound your carrying. So being the 26th person on line, as your arms are beginning to weaken like your will at the Viennese table at your cousins Italian wedding, you finally make it to the scale. The 14 year old kid come cashier, who they temporarily hired for the three week busy season, prices you at an astonishing 61 dollars. Freakin' 60 bucks for a damned vegetable left to rot at your front door! You could feed a family of eight Afghan refugees with this dammed gourd, but those people would probably mistake it for a U.S. Government supplied tent and move into it instead. So at $2.25 a pound it's time to head over to the apples.
You are forced to purchase a Tyvek plastic bag for $20 -- enough to hold a half bushel of apples. Bushel is a Belgium word, roughly translated it means--can feed an Afghan family of eight for three weeks. Then your traipse up the hilly road, naturally with a heavy child upon your shoulders, to get to the orchard. "Where are the McCouns and the Gala apples?" I ask the 12 year old temporary employee who couldn't tell you the difference between a Red Delicious from a pound of sliced tongue meat. "They're all picked out sir, but the Macintosh's are up to the right."
Great, now I'll have a thirty-two pound bag of pedestrian Macintosh apples which I could have picked up at the A&P for a fifth of the price. So we get one of those giant poles to grab the apples at the top of the tree. It beats me why though. The same damned apples taste and look just the same at arms length at the tree bottom and you don't boink yourself on the head with the other three apples that inescapably fall upon your head while your reach for that really red one.
You finally fill up your carry bag to the very brim, because at the price your paying per pound, you want to get the maximum apple value....even to the point of squishing them down within the bag, making apple sauce out of them. Because at seven dollars a pound you know you could have gone to Balducci's for a significant savings and the fruit would have had that nice waxy shine that they add in supermarkets for extra marketing a-peel (pun intended).
You finally make it home with your hundred pound investment of fruit when you realize you are the one who's going to have to eat these voluminous amounts of apples and there is not one Afghan in sight to assist you! So you make an apple pie, baked apples, apple crumb cake, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread and two tablespoons of Immodium to counteract the vast consumption of fiber your about to consume. And in about six weeks, at the end of November, you can take the rotted shell of the jack-o'-lantern and the 12 pounds of leftover bruised and aging apples, toss them into your compost heap and then head to Costco so you can buy a 40 lb. bag of Idaho baking potatoes which will inevitably continue to feed your compost pile. And with all of the rich soil that you'll have next spring, I bet you'll grow a zucchini the size of a walrus tusk!