Apples

An Apple is one of the first fruits introduced to a child as weaning foods…it’s also one of the first words a child learns at school while learning the English alphabet ! The shape and colour of the fruit are so pleasing that it’s not uncommon to find it illustrated in a lot of our childhood explorations of art :)) The perfect apple is something we all strived at achieving on paper in kindergarten,complete with the stem and leaf ;)))

Today while becoming aware of the food that nourishes are bodies the Apple sadly has got a lot of bad press…All over the world people looking at primarily short term monetary gain are ripening the fruit unnaturally and thereby slowly allowing it to do more harm than good for the human body ! I for one had given up eating the apple a while ago…because one always never knew where exactly the fruit came from…if I did need to cook with it I preferred to stick to the Indian apple rather than a glossy waxed one.

Reading an Enid Blyton book as a child one always thought of an apple as picnic fare…the child sitting by the brook,munching on a crunchy apple and then tossing the core in the water after eating…I always wondered,what it would be like to pluck an apple off the tree and bit into it….would I be disappointed or would juicy,crunchy,sweet,tart be the adjectives that came to mind?!……
Recently thanks to the efforts of a dear family friend and my mother in law,we actually got a tiny apple harvest after 7 long years of nurturing the trees…small ,though they were and of different shades of red…I am pleased as punch to tell you that they were indeed,crisp,juicy,sweet and tart all in one bite…the only thing missing was the picnic spot !!!!

So imperfectly perfect ! Now ,since the kids were always taught to eat an apple without the skin due to the pesticides etc….that posed to be a problem…I could not bear the thought of throwing away the skin so in a flash of inspiration, set out to make an apple peel chutney….nothing much to look at,thanks to the efforts of an over exuberant kitchen helper,who ground it to a fine puree  but oodles of flavour :)))
If you do have an organic dealer in your neighbourhood and you know where the produce comes from,do try biting into an organic apple,it does indeed match the taste and smell  of the childhood stories that you have stored away somewhere deep in your subconscious !