THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

It was Apple Day in Wormingford, Essex.

 

You had to get some apples – take them along to the Community Education Centre in Wormingford where you, or somebody, cut them into quarters, then they went through a coarse chopper, 

then into a big old press which liquidized them, and then eventually you had a bottle or two apple juice.  Best to take your own bottles.

 

The word was that you only had 24 hours to drink the juice before it went off  so a little cocktail-making was obviously required.

 

To be honest with you, apple juice and whisky (seen above) wasn’t all that great a combination - you could taste both the apple juice and the whisky but they never really combined and melded, a bit like Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler in the movie The Bounty Hunter.

And then we tried apple juice with vodka which of course was just fine because most things are OK when they’ve got vodka in them. 

 

I think I shall call this the Nick and Kylie – as in Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue – the ingredients are both OK, you’re not quite sure what they’re doing together, but the end result is a winner.

(Pics are mostly by Luna Woodyear-Smith, except for the ones that obviously aren't)

 

 

SWEET AND SOUR

What’s the point of having friends if they don’t give you stuff?  And what’s the point of having friends who go to exotic places if they don’t come back bearing food treats?

My pal Mariette returned from Sao Paolo with a box of Banana Passa:

which I imagined would be insanely sweet but they aren’t – they’re justvery sweet, but also very chewy, and somehow the effort of chewing means that you don’t get the sweetness all in one burst, which suited me fine.

And then my pal Jason showed up, back from Normandy with a bag of apples, mostly cider apples I think – and they’re great – not all the same variety – some very sour indeed some only semi-sour.

He also produced a bottle of Normandy cider – demi-sec it says on the label, which he says is the main reason he decided to move to Normandy.  It was very fine, but I wouldn’t have complained if it had been a little sourer.