Well Pooey on that, as stepdaughter Celia used to say. I wouldn’t be without one and I’m not particularly gadget prone. In fact most of my cooking equipment is either

Vintage:

Bill manning the Strand Universal kitchen stove.

Or primitive

The outdoor clay oven. Beans in the pot, pork roast in the pan, coals banked at the back to boost heat for the first few hours of cooking. The wooden door is lined with flashing to keep it from getting burned.

We didn’t choose the current incumbent it because it was a turbocharged 1300 watts, or because it was black and chrome, thus more or less matching the kitchen decor. We chose it because it was the only mid-sized unit that would fit on the shelf as currently configured.

This selection method worked out very well with the dishwasher. When we did the kitchen back in 1995, the Asko was the only one that would fit under the 34 inch counter top (unless you count dishwasher drawers, already available but out of our financial reach – which alas they still are). Fifteen years later, it’s still going strong, quietly, efficiently…

Where was I ?

Oh, the micro.

Our current microwave - and, it must be admitted, a few other gadgets I’d be hard pressed to do without.

So far so good, except for its being way too powerful for some of the uses I’m used to. The defrost is little short of amazing, but a full cup of room temperature liquid will boil if you push the beverage button and fail to extract the cup in roughly half the pre-measured time.

There are 10 power levels. As far as I can tell, level 6 is about equal to full power on our old one. Fortunately 1 and 2 are still low enough to make melting chocolate the same tidy, near-foolproof breeze it was with the previous machine.

Chocolate (and caramel) aside, we mostly use this handy appliance to defrost and reheat, so it sounds at first as though the naysayers are right. They’re not; defrosting and reheating are huge, because they make it so much easier to eat well locally all year ‘round, even in the frost belt.

From late fall to mid-summer, the freezer is our reliable source of home grown tomatoes and sweet corn, harvest vegetable soups and stews, a good supply of local meat, and plenty of leftover lasagna, cassoulet, etc. the slow food version of heat n’ eat fast food.

Defrosting can of course be accomplished by always knowing what you want far enough ahead of time to allow complete thawing at room temperature. This is not how we operate, and I well remember the pre-micro days: Become fed up with how long it’s taking to thaw whatever by immersing the container in cool water. Switch to warm water. Become fed up. Put it in a saucepan over low heat. Poke and prod and pry at the slowly dwindling frozen lump while the rising sea of already-thawed material inexorably overcooks. Personally, I’d rather put the frozen item in the machine, go do something else and come back in 5 to 10 minutes to find the job accomplished.

Reheating is equally gratifying, for more or less the same reasons. Whatever it is reheats quickly, all of it at the same time, and unlike things reheated on stove or in oven, it’s  unlikely to dry out while doing so. Of course that’s why micros are lousy to cook with – unless you want to do a lot of waterless steaming – and may explain why the anti’s are so down on them. Nothing dries out, but nothing reduces either. Nothing browns and genuine crispness simply isn’t happening.

* Illustrated oven building instructions here, should you be looking for a project.

A genuine heirloom (i.e. passed down through generations) turkey: my mother’s gravy boat. It has a matching ceramic ladle that broke about 15 years ago and has been in storage awaiting repair ever since. This speaks equally to my tendency to procrastinate and to the fact that said ladle, while cute, does not hold enough gravy to be practical.

In the edible bird department, some givens, about which more below:

1.) Like the proverbial yacht, if you have to ask how much a heritage turkey costs you probably can’t afford it.

2.) Buying a heritage turkey helps keep an endangered gene pool robust, so you get preservation points as well as a delicious dinner (assuming you cook it correctly).

I’m not in the yachting class and am already convinced on the deliciousness front, but I’m cooking two turkeys this year anyway, just for the sake of comparison.

One is a heritage bird from a farm about a half hour north of here, the other is an “organic, free range heirloom,” imported from Pennsylvania (about 5 hours south of here) by a specialty grocery. Although I haven’t cooked them yet, some things are already clear.

Those who simply want kitchen tips can go immediately to Roast Turkey 101.2 for general cooking hints and a recipe for wild mushroom stuffing. Guidance that’s specific to heritage birds is in the second part of  Wild Turkeys, Thanks But No Thanks. 

Otherwise, onward, with background research help from: My friend Ilana the egg lady at Blue Moon Farm;  her friend – and now mine – Maryann Hegel, at Freedom Farms, where I attended a turkey harvest last Saturday;  and Peter Davies and Mark Sherzer, co-owners of Turkana Farms LLC. (Mark’s a lawyer), where I bought my heritage bird.

1.)Why They Cost So Much

Just how much varies quite a bit, but a heritage bird (probably but not definitionally raised on organic principles) will cost somewhere around three times as much as a USDA Certified Organic conventional bird, which will in turn cost roughly twice as much as the supermarket standard. This is because:

* Right at the start, baby heritage chicks (poults) cost the farmer twice as much as conventional chicks. It is in the nature of turkey raising to lose at least a few poults in the first week or so, so right away the heritage grower is out of pocket at twice the going rate.

* Whatever their individual merits, all of the many heritage breeds take roughly twice as long as the agribusiness standard to make market size. During this extended period, those birds that survive childhood are eating more and more and more, all the while requiring protection from predators and an assortment of other regular attentions.

*Heritage  market size is @ 8 – 24 lbs, compared to conventional’s 10 – 40 lbs. or more, so fixed costs like shelter and care are higher on a per-pound basis.

* Most growers of heritage turkeys are small to tiny fry as the turkey biz goes. They can’t buy feed grain in cost-saving quantities and they don’t sell enough birds to recoup the cost of proper on-farm slaughter facilities. There aren’t many inspected slaughterhouses willing to accept small orders; those that do charge a lot for their services and of course the turkeys must be transported to and from.

2.) Doing Your Bit for Conservation

Almost all – maybe 97 percent – of the commercial turkeys in the US belong to one breed: the Broad Breasted White, a miracle of efficient feed conversion that otherwise has very little to recommend it, being both profoundly handicapped and not especially tasty. Then another percent or two are Broad Breasted Bronze, immediate progenitor of the whites and not a whole lot better in either regard.

But even if the Broad Breasted’s were models of animal health and gastronomic delight, confining an entire domestic species to a single very narrow gene pool is orders of magnitude not smart.

Alternative turkeys: a couple of closely related heritage breeds: New Jersey Buff hen, Bourbon Red tom, photographed at Blue Moon Farm

As I see it, you could save money and still help out by donating a less-big chunk to a worthy organization like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy , but that’s a lot less fun. You can’t serve a thank you letter for Thanksgiving dinner – and you don’t get the extra bang-for-buck of helping a nearby farmer stay in business.

Genuine heritage birds (Chocolate Slate) on left; psuedo-heritage bird (Broad Breasted Bronze), delivered to Freedom Farms by mistake but raised as carefully as his cousins.

One minor irritation: Organizations like The Heritage Turkey Foundation and Slow Food and many individual suppliers wax lyrical about the particular merits of Bourbon Reds and Narragansetts, Chocolate Slates and Royal Palms, but can you order them by name? Probably, somewhere, but everywhere I looked “heritage” was the extent of the guarantee.

Obviously, this gives the growers maximum wiggle room to hedge their bets with assorted breeds and then deliver whatever does best in a given year, but I think it may also be because so many of them buy day old poults, rather than breeding their own, and they’re buying from hatcheries that are willing to sell a relatively small number – tens and hundreds, rather than thousands – of birds.

The catalogues from such places are closely related to seed catalogues when it comes to enticement. This breed is gorgeous, that one is especially sociable, this other is teetering on the brink of extinction. If you’re not breeding your own, you have no incentive to stick to just one when browsing in the candy store.

Unfortunately, if you’re not slaughtering your own you have no way to keep them separate for marketing purposes. They leave the farm as distinct as can be, but they come back headless, footless and featherless, looking pretty much the same.

That said

There’s no mistaking the difference between heritage (above) and not (below).

The fat bird on the bottom is the one imported from PA. It is a Broad Breasted Bronze. It is not, however, the same as these

A couple of the standard issue Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys that landed by accident at Freedom Farms.

When I ordered the commercial turkey I was just trying to compare Broad Breasted Modern with Heritage, but it turns out (after a bit of googling) that the bird I got is probably an Orlopp Bronze, a protected hybrid of a hybrid, created by Hendrix Genetics, a huge multinational major player in livestock breeding.

None of this means it won’t be delicious, and none of it necessarily means it has genes not normally found in turkeys. (Can’t say for sure about that part since although it was supposed to be organic, it wasn’t) But in any case this does suggest that “new and improved” might be a more accurate description than “heirloom”.

My oven is orders of magnitude too small for me to cook them at the same time;  the largest contingent of leftover eaters will be here on Friday, and by me the whole reason to have Thanksgiving is in order to have stuffing that has indeed been stuffed into the bird.* So I’ll be cooking the BBB on Thursday and the Heritage (which will come out better if cooked unstuffed) on Friday.

Stay tuned for a comparison based on the cold leftovers, which can be tasted side by side.

Might as well give it a shot, even though it’s actually apples and oranges. The conventional bird, while theoretically raised humanely and given plenty of room to roam, was actually neither, as far as I can tell from a bit of internetly drilling down. It did get far better treatment than anything raised for the mass market, but that’s not saying much.

Maryann may be the one who’s had the best chance to really see. She didn’t cook two birds side by side, but she did cook one of the accidental  Broad Breasts she raised side by side with her Chocolate Slates. The verdict? “It was absolutely delicious.”

Her guests said they liked last year’s heritage bird a little better, but it sounds to me as though (not surprisingly) nurture matters as much as nature if you’re talking strictly about table quality.

Before we met, Bill raised BBB’s for a few years, not de-beaking or clipping their wings, letting them roam freely and all the heritage usual, and he says they were far and away the best turkeys he’s ever eaten.

Update: When Bill read this last night he denied the BBB part. I thought he’d gotten his original birds from the local Agway, which even 40 years ago would have meant the Bronze turkeys he’s raved about all these years would have been BBB’s. But I seem to have misunderstood. He traded with a farmer friend – some rabbits for the turkey poults – and as he also got a Royal Palm or two and a Bourbon Red, his Bronzes – all of which flew with no problems, one of which mated with a wild turkey, were probably every bit as heritage as any in this story.

* See The Food Lab at Serious Eats for an interesting suggestion about preventing the “stuffed bird doesn’t cook through fast enough” problem. Short version is you put the stuffing in a cheesecloth bag and get it good and hot before you put it in the turkey.

____________________________________________________________________________________

 The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy Definition of a Heritage Turkey

“All domesticated turkeys descend from wild turkeys indigenous to North and South America. They are the quintessential American poultry. For centuries people have raised turkeys for food and for the joy of having them.

Many different varieties have been developed to fit different purposes. Turkeys were selected for productivity and for specific color patterns to show off the bird’s beauty. The American Poultry Association (APA) lists eight varieties of turkeys in its Standard of Perfection. Most were accepted into the Standard in the last half of the 19th century, with a few more recent additions. They are Black, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland, Slate, Bourbon Red, Beltsville Small White, and Royal Palm. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy also recognizes other naturally mating color varieties that have not been accepted into the APA Standard, such as the Jersey Buff, White Midget, and others.  All of these varieties are Heritage Turkeys.

Heritage turkeys are defined by the historic, range-based production system in which they are raised. Turkeys must meet all of the following criteria to qualify as a Heritage turkey:

Naturally mating: the Heritage Turkey must be reproduced and genetically maintained through natural mating, with expected fertility rates of 70-80%.

Long productive lifespan: the Heritage Turkey must have a long productive lifespan. Breeding hens are commonly productive for 5-7 years and breeding toms for 3-5 years.

Slow growth rate: the Heritage Turkey must have a slow to moderate rate of growth. Today’s heritage turkeys reach a marketable weight in 26 – 28 weeks, giving the birds time to develop a strong skeletal structure and healthy organs prior to building muscle mass. This growth rate is identical to that of the commercial varieties of the first half of the 20th century.

Beginning in the mid-1920s and extending into the 1950s turkeys were selected for larger size and greater breast width, which resulted in the development of the Broad Breasted Bronze. In the 1950s, poultry processors began to seek broad breasted turkeys with less visible pinfeathers, as the dark pinfeathers, which remained in the dressed bird, were considered unattractive. By the 1960s the Large or Broad Breasted White had been developed, and soon surpassed the Broad Breasted Bronze in the marketplace.

Today’s commercial turkey is selected to efficiently produce meat at the lowest possible cost. It is an excellent converter of feed to breast meat, but the result of this improvement is a loss of the bird’s ability to successfully mate and produce fertile eggs without intervention. Both the Broad Breasted White and the Broad Breasted Bronze turkey require artificial insemination to produce fertile eggs.

Interestingly, the turkey known as the Broad Breasted Bronze in the early 1930s through the late 1950s is nearly identical to today’s Heritage Bronze turkey – both being naturally mating, productive, long-lived, and requiring 26-28 weeks to reach market weight. This early Broad Breasted Bronze is very different from the modern turkey of the same name. The Broad Breasted turkey of today has traits that fit modern, genetically controlled, intensively managed, efficiency-driven farming. While superb at their job, modern Broad Breasted Bronze and Broad Breasted White turkeys are not Heritage Turkeys. Only naturally mating turkeys meeting all of the above criteria are Heritage Turkeys.

Prepared by Frank Reese, owner & breeder, Good Shepherd Farm; Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Manager, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy; Dr. Cal Larson, Professor Emeritus, Poultry Science, Virginia Tech; Jeff May, Regional Manager & Feed Specialist, Dawes Laboratories; Danny Williamson, farmer and turkey breeder, Windmill Farm; Paula Johnson, turkey breeder, and Steve Pope, Promotion & Chef, Good Shepherd Farm.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Blue Moon Farm photo by Ilana Nilsen

I would rather show you something that was pleasantly autumnal, so there will be no picture of the equally autumnal Eek. (The link to an easy recipe for old fashioned pumpkin chiffon pie is at the end of the post, should you wish to skip the horror and go semi-directly thence.)

Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert is a mix, brought to you by the folks at Jell-O, aka Kraft Foods, and it came to my attention because my local supermarket featured it on an end cap, exactly at eye level. Boxes and boxes and boxes of it, so it was at everybody’s eye level.

As “Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert” makes clear to the label savvy, there is absolutely no pumpkin – or any other fruit or vegetable (unless you count carrageenan) in it. Whether the non label savvy will be enticed by “flavored with natural cinnamon and ginger” is a near-existential question I don’t feel equipped to answer.

The 9.2 ounce package costs $3.59.  To make what is probably a pretty thin 9-inch pie, you add 2 tablespoons of sugar and 5 tablespoons of butter or margarine to the trademarked Honey Graham graham cracker crust, then 2 cups of milk to the agglomeration of  sugar, starch, other sweeteners, texture enhancers, preservatives, artificial colors and flavorings that turns an innocent dairy product into the ersatz pumpkin filling.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel but good grief. Plus I for one need frequent reminders that this is the norm for a whole lot of people, people who are responsible for getting dinner on the table. Not perhaps the majority, but almost certainly many more than make pie from scratch. Our current culture’s problem with food goes far beyond a fondness for the fast kind you buy from your car.

If all this makes you think positive thoughts about making a genuine pumpkin pie – not a difficult pie to make, especially if you use a crumb crust – consider scrolling down here for Mamie Eisenhower’s Pumpkin Pie recipe.

You have to scroll down because the first recipe is for Cheese Dollars, “the ultimate potato chip,” a close relative of cheese straws that gets its addictive quality at least partly thanks to a food-industrial product than cannot be manufactured at home and for which I make no apologies.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

I first saw this thing around Easter time, took a photograph (finding it almost uniquely eekworthy), then realized I couldn’t excoriate it here because I’d forgotten to take a closeup of the label.

And when I went back it had disappeared.

Or so I thought. No such luck. It has returned. The greenhouse/nursery at Adams is a reputable outfit and has therefore posted a warning

But the distributors of this abomination

are less conscientious

At least as far as the label on the plant itself is concerned. Pretty expensive for a cheap trick. Especially when for the same money you could buy a tree peony like

'Ezra Pound'

I almost like it better closed

Ezra in the rain

One bit of advice: Do not plant a tree peony – or anything else with fragile branches – at the corner of the drive and the walkway to the gas tanks. Persons dragging heavy hoses must be warned, which rather spoils the effect.

Tree peony prices vary, but as it happens Klehm’s, where I bought our plant, is truly selling E.P. for 39.95.

Lois in action, in more ways than one.

Whether you’re already a fan or not, you can learn a lot about how she works from this interview with John Yau (in the Brooklyn Rail), but you can also just cut to the chase and go see the show, at Alexandre Gallery in NYC until March 12.

Image: Shadow of Painter Painting “September Light,” 2009, oil on linen 32 x 50 inches

I kid you not. These treats exist, in multiple flavors including cherry, sour apple and blue raspberry. (A popular flavor, that last; I’ve seen it in water ices and soft drinks and it’s probably in many other products well below my radar.)

Cherry on the sundae? The Nuclear Sludge bars came to my attention because they made the news. Some of the cherry flavored ones were found (by the California Department of Public Health) to contain  way too much lead , so the company decided to initiate a voluntarily recall… We remember long about now that until the new food safety law both goes into effect and is sufficiently funded  - wanna take bets? – the FDA cannot make anyone take anything back.

Here’s the  rest of the information:

I was unable to find any organized initiative  called ” A Cleaner Planet,” with or without the tasteful logo. If you know of one, please tell us.

Also, does anybody know why kids, who supposedly have very sensitive taste buds, adore super-sourness? There are lots and lots of candies marketed to this craving, and it ain’t just candy. Country children are (or were) partial to chewing on stalks of rhubarb and ” don’t eat too many green apples” wouldn’t be such a staple warning if eating green apples were rare.

Photos from the website of the FDA

These aren’t they, but next year...

I’m not sure I’m really all that worried about it. Between the bacon and the barbeque we’re no doubt consuming enough carcinogenic material to make it a bit bogus to get all het up about the lids on the catsup – especially since after the jars are opened I  switch to one of my favorite products: plastic reusable caps like the one on the strawberry jam (reasonably easy to find although not, for reasons that elude me, available wherever canning supplies are sold).

Where was I?

About to say something about “better safe,” no doubt. BPA – free canning supplies do exist.

And now that I know about them, our next batch of lids and rings will come from Tattler company. Lids and rings are all we need, alas, thanks to the lifetime supply of perfectly good jars we bought for use as wine glasses at a garden party.

I say “alas” because otherwise I’d probably go for the far handsomer models from Weck, even though their plastic snap-on lids fit fewer other jars; the rings are the old-fashioned, single use sort, and the whole assemblage is a bit pricier than standard jars.

So what? It’s not a lot more if you’re starting from scratch and have to buy jars anyway. Given the time and love invested (to say nothing of having to look at the damn things sitting expectantly on the shelf), home-canned pickles and preserves deserve the prettiest presentation consistent with food safety.

(Home canned string beans not so much; but I don’t know anyone who is still putting up major amounts of unseasoned produce to use a full jar at a time in everyday meals.)

Photo note: The canned goods lined up at the last and very dark it’s raining minute so this would have an illustration are all pretty readable except maybe the little jar of Brandywine Tomato paste.

BPA avoidance notes:

1. We don’t have any children in the house. Keeping the stuff away from them seems well worth any hassle and expense.

2. I realize the reusable screw-on lids may themselves be loaded with BPA and have a call in to the manufacturer about it. Update when the call is returned.

Update, 10/28/10: no BPA in the lids, which are available online from Ball if you strike out locally.

A recent sighting at Schoolhouse Farm, in Warren, Maine

We grow a lot of the food we put by for the winter, so most of the relevant posts here start in our own back yard. But as I was just saying on the radio, you don’t need to have a garden to take advantage of seasonal abundance; there’s plenty of it at farm stands and farmers markets. And it’s a bargain. When the fields are yielding full tilt, locally grown produce is not only far more delicious than the stuff in the supermarket, it’s also far less expensive.

Seasonal, however, is the magic word; if you want to eat well in the winter you have to stock up when the stocking is good. It’s easiest if you have a big freezer but even if your freezer is small and already full of pizza and ice cream, saving great produce for winter is not difficult.

Winter squash, for instance, will keep at cool room temperature for months. Dried peppers, mushrooms and tomatoes all last indefinitely as long as they’re stored airtight in the dark. And canning is a lot less hassle than you might think. More about what can go where is at Putting Food By, but for now let’s concentrate on

Saving Tomatoes

We do can them, mostly as Intensely Delicious Roast Tomatoes, the world’s quickest pasta sauce, but most of our crop is frozen, either as puree (Bill puts them in the blender skins and all) or  just as they come from the garden.

To Freeze Whole Tomatoes:

Choose unblemished fruit, size doesn’t matter and they don’t have to be uniform.

Rinse and dry them – or just wipe them off with a damp cloth if you know where they came from and they’re already pretty much clean.

Put them on a rimmed baking sheet in a single layer. Put the sheet in the freezer. That’s basically it.

Freezing takes anywhere from a couple of hours to overnight, depending on the size of the tomatoes and temperature of your freezer. As soon as they’re rock solid, transfer them to freezer bags. They will remain separate and can be removed individually. Very handy; sometimes you just want one.

Using Frozen Tomatoes

Think of them as puree-in-a-skin, a primo ingredient for soups and sauces and stews, but not usable in salads and sandwiches. (Freezing busts all the cells, so the fruit collapses when thawed. Some people put partially thawed cherry tomatoes in salads. Some people will do almost anything to prove a point.)

I always start by peeling them: dip the frozen tomato in hot water for about 10 seconds; the skin will split and slip right off. Cold water works too, actually, it’s just less comfortable.

Then I put the tomatoes in a shallow bowl and let them thaw to sherbet texture. At this stage they’re easy to core, which I do. They get chopped at this stage too, if I’m in a hurry to get them thawed. otherwise they can simply sit there (or be added as is to whatever you’d be pouring regular canned tomatoes into if you were reduced to using regular canned tomatoes).

Dear Mr. President, how about these? (Clockwise from top: Winesap, Pink Lady, Stayman

The President’s office has had the requisite makeover, pictures in the NY Post, story in the NY Times, reviews galore all over the net. Expect I’m not alone in agreeing with just about all of them, including both the snarky –  it looks like a business hotel; the rug is a tad obvious – and the sympathetic: it looks restrained and comfortable and anyway he can’t do anything too stylish when there’s a recession on.

He also can’t do anything even remotely interesting or he’ll just exacerbate the out-of-touch-with-regular-folks problem. But that’s neither here nor there. What I want to know is “what kind of apples are in that bowl of same gracing (if that’s the word) the jazzy new coffee table?”

On the first skim-through of the top posts, I couldn’t figure out why so many design pundits were saying nasty things about the fruit bowl. You can barely see it in most of the pictures and when I think of fruit-as-decor I think of arrangements inspired by Severin Roesen (or Caravaggio)  and think what the hell’s wrong with that?

But as soon as I actually looked it became clear that it ain’t about art. The fruit bowl in question is simply an ok-looking bowl, not completely filled with ok-looking apples.

Could it have been a last minute fix, I wondered, the kind that drives decorators mad? A staffer not trained in the ways of styling takes a look right before the shoot and thinks: OMG! The coffee table looks stark and empty; gotta put something on it, quick!

Nope. As those more up on these things are well aware, the bowl of apples is an iconic Obama item. Per obamafoodarama

“Of course, the apple bowl is present. It has appeared in thousands of photos since President Obama’s inauguration, a steadfast visual cue that healthy food is a critical issue for the administration. It’s a pretty big statement that a bowl of apples, rather than a floral arrangement, is a central decorative element.”

Central, yes, and more power to him. Decorative, not so much, and not nearly as good an apple promo as it might be with a little effort.

The pundits want to know who’d be so relaxed they’d be apple-chomping while talking with the Prex, and what these relaxed people would then do with the cores. I want to know why the bowl appears to be filled with supermarket Macs, instead of  an assortment of antique and modern apples in multiple colors and sizes and flavors.

I almost hate to mention it; at this point the only-five-varieties, what-happened-to-diversity apple is almost as much of a cliché as the Styrofoam tomato. But so what? It’s true. And it’s still a crying shame for still being true knowing what we know now.

On the other hand, change comes slowly, as we also know, and may yet be on the way. Appreciation for flavor is on the upswing and these days good apples can be almost as easy to get as good tomatoes, if you’re willing to go the extra mile or two.

There are small specialty orchards all over the country –  if you don’t know of any nearby, try the Orchard Locator at All About Apples.com – and completely apart from the orchards there are still apples growing almost everywhere apples can grow.

Wild apples by the roadside; apples in the yards of houses built before, say, 1945; apples buried in thickets grown up on abandoned farmland; apples stranded beside parking lots and stores on land that abandoned farming.

Finding the trees is simple. Once you start looking, they start jumping out at you. Finding the ones that have tasty fruit is another matter. Seedling apples are frequently duds and not all cultivated varieties can survive neglect with their flavor intact, so many of these freebies will be somewhere between awful and not-worth-bothering. But not all! Some of them are going to be marvelous.*

Apple trees at our friend Jeff’s house; he just bought the place and started bringing them back.

Case in point: apples from the (formerly) neglected trees in the picture. The apples look almost the same. Both are very dark red, small, and tending to conical without getting there. But they are not the same. The ones on the right are n-w-b, the ones on the left are beyond splendid: crisp, spicy, juicy, with just the right balance of sweet and sour. So I’ll take a few up to Great Maine Apple Day – October 23rd this year – and see if one of the experts there can tell us if they have a name.

Fruit of the left hand apple tree

Meanwhile, I’ll be using them to make Chunky Roasted Apple Sauce, a very good thing to make at this time of year regardless of where you get the apples.

Update: Chunky is also the word for my favorite apple cake. A picture and recipe link are here, along with pic and link for foolproof apple pie (and never fail sour cream piecrust).

* Marvelousness will often be slightly mitigated by a worm or two. It takes terrifying amounts of pesticide to keep conventional apples unblemished and worm free. Alternatively, it takes enormous amounts of being there special care to produce organic apples that don’t look too organic. Apples that nobody’s paying attention to usually require at least a little surgery.

All you have to do is get it from Finest Fried Maine Seafood, where the succulent, crisp crusted haddock, scallops, clam strips and shrimp are the platonic ideals of their kind and it’s probably better not to speak of the homemade potato chips.

Seren Huus, of FFMS, portioning out the chips. (That’s my hand holding ‘em up for your visual delectation.)

FFMS is genuinely fast. Even when the lines are long, as they generally are, it only takes a few minutes to get your order. And it’s genuinely food, in the slow food sense. The haddock, scallops, clams and potatoes are fresh. The shrimp, being local Maine shrimp, were frozen in shrimp season (Any restaurant that sells “fresh Maine shrimp” between roughly April and November is lying in its teeth.)

And of course it’s fried. All of it. The seafood of choice is dipped in flour, egg and milk wash and plain, unseasoned unpreserved cracker crumbs, then passed through a frialator filled with frequently changed peanut oil. The whole potatoes are machine peeled and spiral cut, not quite to order but pretty damn close, before their hot oil moment.

A simple menu doesn't mean choosing is easy.

End of description. You can buy soft drinks and bottled water. There’s a condiments table with salt and pepper, bottled hot sauce, vinegar and lemon wedges as well as catsup, presumably for the chips, and a vat of undistinguished but not horrible commercial tartar sauce with which you can pollute your seafood should you be inclined.

This being a hard world there is of course a catch in it – several, actually, all connected to access. FFMS is a one-outlet family operation, started by Chuck Huus in 1982. It only operates in summer. And there is no fixed location; the restaurant is a concession stand that travels on the Maine fair circuit; the only way to get at the eats is to go to the fair(s).

Maine Antiques Festival, just yesterday, our most recent dining experience at FFMS and the inspiration for this post

Still to come:

Union Fair August 22-28

Windsor Fair August 29 – September 6

Common Ground Fair September 24-26

Fryeburg Fair Oct 3-10

Then that’s it until June 2011.

The fair websites give a good idea of what to expect from each. Union, Windsor, and Fryeburg are all in their own ways “worth the journey” if you’ve never been to a big, old fashioned agricultural fair, and Common Ground is double “worth the journey” if you have.

Full disclosure: FFMS is owned and run by old friends and although it’s been about a decade since we saw each other outside of the fairs, affection is undiminished. If you don’t know me very well you might think this is relevant.

Photos by Bill Bakaitis