magic apple house
magic apple house
we're doing slice of life today I fear
Most of my post ideas come to me on aimless weekday evening wanders through my neighbourhood. I’ll hear something interesting on a podcast or mindlessly collide two thoughts together to create a third one, and have to stop dead in my tracks to furiously type it into my notes app. I plan dinner. I keep an eye on the local allotments to see what’s coming into season. I check my foraging spots to figure out where to take my Swiss army knife and ziploc bags at the weekend.
If I’m lucky, one of my neighbours is in their Marie Kondo era and have left their unwanted clutter lined up outside their house. It’s not always fruitful: I have enough mismatched cups already, no need for broken bathroom furniture, and very little interest in waterlogged fantasy books. But when I do find something great, it gets instant heirloom status. “Oh, this? I got it for free from somebody’s front garden!”
I can’t look at my copies of The Flavour Thesaurus and The Geometry of Pasta without thinking back to the sunny afternoon when I found them on Ribblesdale Road, during my daily lockdown walk, and brought them home beaming underneath my face mask. I can’t flick through my Tamasin Day-Lewis cookbooks without thinking of the anonymous neighbour who put them all outside in a neat pile after spending years lovingly developing the rips, folds and splatters in their pages.
Earlier this week, a neighbour left apples from their tree in a box that read “COOKING APPLES HELP YOURSELF”. I grabbed three and zipped them up in my crossbody bag. It felt like having a secret. I went home daydreaming about the crumble I was going to make with them, about who would pick up the other apples, and about what they would make with those.
I’ve got my apple crumble recipe down by now. Cubed apples mixed with a small amount of cinnamon, ginger and black pepper go in an oven dish. The crumb is, in terms of grammes, one part brown sugar, two parts cold salted butter, three parts flour, plus more ginger and black pepper and much more cinnamon, all mashed into one another between my fingers. It goes on top of the apples in the oven dish, which itself goes in an 180ºC oven for half an hour.
Usually, I pick nuttier apples that keep their general shape for baking – but who am I to look a gift cardboard box in the mouth? These ones turned mushy and were delightfully tart, reminding me with a zing in each bite that the only reason I was eating them was that someone wanted to share the wonders of their garden with their community.
Near my office, there is a quince tree that is slowly but surely swelling with ripening fruit. Last year, I watched the entire harvest fall to the ground one by one then rot over winter, untouched by the people whose garden it grows in. This year, I’m ready. I will be stealing (nay, rescuing) quince straight from the branch to give it the send-off it deserves. Isn’t that what neighbourhood is all about?
Ever since he found a mound of cooked instant noodles at the base of a tree (I’m as puzzled as you are) during one of our walks, Pavlov the office dog makes a point to double check every time I take him to the park. I always make fun of him – oh, silly dog! That was one time! There is no magic noodle tree!
And yet, guess who returned to the magic apple house the day after, and the day after that? Me. With my apex predator brain and all its deep grooves. I returned to the free apple crumble vending machine again and again to slap the sides until something fell out. To be fair, it did keep getting refilled. I smiled at the window every time just in case someone was there watching, curious to see who their tree was going to feed that day.
