Honeycrispin'

Another gorgeous weekend in Chicago. The primary goal for this trip was to go apple picking in IN and get some delicious honeycrisps. Boy did we ever! 1/2 a bushel or ~52 apples were gotten and at $0.85/lb, it was quite a deal! Since we were having people over for dinner (Sustainable Seafood Paella a la Joe), I clearly needed to make dessert. Made a sour-cherry streusel pie with some of the leftover sour cherries from before and then a double-crusted apple pie with the honeycrisps and a couple grannys laying around. The butter/cream cheese pie crust is much more of a challenge with neither a food processor nor a rolling pin. But a Nalgene filled with water is fairly sufficient. We also had dates stuffed with goat cheese, almond stuffed dates wrapped in bacon and Catalan spinach with Kalamata olives. A ton of food and great company to wrap up the morning apple trip. Hooray! And a nice way to use up pie crust scraps is to dust with cinnamon and sugar and bake up in the oven to make some nice little snacks. Mmmm.
In addition, I made some spiced apple butter and some cinnamon-ginger applesauce with some more of the plethora of apples with still 20 leftover for some good eating/fruit bowl filling. Still a little warm these days to truly feel like Fall so maybe another trip for Fujis and Mutsus later in the season.
Also, we picked up some lovely sweet corn (good enough to eat raw), kettle corn, venison meat sticks, and grape twists at the farm stand/store at the farm. Joe had the good idea of having a picnic in the park when we got back to the city and we had some of our treats while watching some little leaguers horse around the baseball field. All in all, a pretty gosh-darn great day before Labor Day.
(Also over the weekend - 30 miles on the bike for brunch at Frontera, errands and Sox-Sox at Comiskey on Saturday; 19 miles on bike to go to Montrose for beach pick-up in the fog on Monday; 12 miles on the bike to meet Beth for a delicious lunch at Tre Kronor and an apple butter/applesauce for books and keys exchange on Tuesday.)