Some weeks back we went on a nice family bike ride with Yeti the dog hitched up and Things One & Two in the bike trailer. We use a Walky Dog bike lead to attach our wild beast for a bike ride and I highly recommend it - it is inexpensive, extremely easy to attach/detach and has adequate give in the internal spring to keep you upright even if a squirrel flashes its sexy little tail for your canine friend.
Our bike trailer is locally made by the Burley company, which I would support even if they were not a local company - they make extremely high quality and rugged bike trailers. Things One & Two love going for bike rides in the bike trailer.
Thing One is not a vampire - that is blackberry juice around his mouth. And yes he is holding the hand of his sleeping little brother - you can go ahead and melt from the cuteness :)
One of the many blessings of living in the Willamette Valley is an abundance of fruit and berries all summer long. Most of the topsoil from eastern Washington got scraped off and deposited in Oregon towards the end of the last ice age in a series of cataclysmic floods, a good portion ending up in the Willamette Valley. Combine ridiculously thick black topsoil with a river flowing the length of a valley and year-round mild climate and you get some of the best agricultural conditions in the world. Almost anything, literally, can be and is grown here.
We biked a few blocks from our house to the Willamette River and joined up with a paved bike and pedestrian trail system that runs for miles along both sides of the river. I am grateful for the city planners in the past who had the foresight to purchase the riverbank property in Eugene and Springfield to preserve it as park and natural areas. We stopped in a sunny field to fill up containers of blackberries.
A familiar sight to any Oregon native - a wall o' blackberries
It only took a few minutes to fill all the containers we brought with blackberries, and we continued on down the trail to one of our favorite river spots. The Willamette in the summer is a somewhat docile river, one that I have swam across dozens of times in dozens of places. It is a wonderful river for throwing sticks out for your dog to swim after and retrieve. It is a wonderful river for a toddler to wade in the shallows. I love the Willamette.
After a picnic lunch by the river and once the Things were properly exhausted and muddy, we turned the bikes around and headed back. This time we stopped in a field that has a half dozen different varieties of apple and pear trees. The pears weren't quite ripe yet but one of our favorite apple trees yielded a decent haul of large juicy apples. I do not know what variety of apple these are - they have a very pale green, almost yellow skin, a mild sweet flavor (not as flavorful as the cider apples that also grow in this field) and an inbetween texture that is not super crispy but is not mushy. They don't preserve very well in the fridge or out of it (they bruise super easily and even if not bruised they quickly become mushy after harvesting) but they make great apple sauce. One great thing about this tree is it is shaped like a torus (donut), not very tall at all, and you can easily walk around it and pick apples both on the outside of the torus and on the inside (there is basically a circular chamber inside the tree, the tree forms a ceiling and middle section but there is open space inside for you to walk all the way around the tree picking it from the inside).
@dillemma with a bike helmet full of mystery apples
Mystery apples on the kitchen counter
We stopped at a few other apple trees along the ride home, smaller tarter apples but a perfect counterbalance to the sweet and mild mystery apples. I made a quick and easy blackberry applesauce with our urban harvest. I do not believe in peeling my apples before I make applesauce - peels give you a lot of flavor and are very good for you. I just cut my apples up and live with the (almost disintegrated) bits of peels in the final product, but if you want you could add a final step of running the cooked apple sauce through a blender to end up with a smoother texture and no bits of peels. First, I chopped the apples up, discarding the cores, and put the chopped apples in a pot with some blackberries.
I add water about up to the level of the apples and blackberries, then simmer on a low heat. I use a potato masher to mush up the apples and blackberries as they cook.
I do not add sugar to my applesauces, nor do I recommend that you do. Apples are plenty sweet. Sugar is a devious thing - the more you eat of it, the less you can taste it. If you are in the habit of adding sugar to anything and everything you cook, I recommend slowly reducing the amount of sugar you add and eventually eliminating it entirely from most dishes - as your body gets used to a lower amount of sugar, you will soon realize that the natural sugars present in fruits and cooked vegetables are amazing and taste far better than processed sugar, not to mention the health benefits of reducing processed sugar intake. Give it a try! I promise your applesauce does not need sugar.
I simmer the applesauce and mush it with the potato masher until it has a nice apple sauce-y consistency like so:
At this point I call it done and add it to glass jars while it is still hot, filling it up all the way and letting the natural vacuum effect from the cooling liquid seal the jar. If you really can't handle little bits of peel, at this point you could run the applesauce through a blender to fully liquify it and end up with more of a "store-bought" consistency. Try it without though - I personally like the little bits of peel and can honestly say that I prefer apple sauce this way.
Do you take advantage of the natural bounty in your area? Are you an "urban forager"? Let me know in the comments what you harvest and make!
Much love - Carl