Apple Madness

Fall is the season for apple picking and when presented with the dilemma about what to give my best new friend and her (now) husband for a wedding gift, I thought, " what could be better than a day at Paradis des Fruits in the Eastern Townships picking apples?".

The novice that I am, although having lived in Canada for over 20 years, I have never done this before and after 10 minutes out in the orchards surrounded by many trees, I soon realized three things:

1: that visually we could not tell the difference between the Mackintosh and Lobo apples (none of us wanted Mackintosh)
2: that it was crucial to find the one 'great' lobo tree and pick all our apples from it.
3: that we needed to devise a taste testing strategy to find this tree.

After a half hour where the comments were as follows:

Friend #1 - "This looks like a Lobo. What do you think?"
Friend #2 (while polishing another apple) - "I don't know. Let's compare it to this one."
Friend #3 - "Yours it too shinny. Stop polishing the apples. Makes it harder to tell."
Friend #4 - " Who's got the knife?"
Friend #1 (cuts the apple in question) - "Here you try it."
Friend #4 - "It does look good!" Takes a bite "Oh no, it's terrible! It's a Mackinstosh"
Friend #1 - "Now what do we do with it?"

Friend#1 casually walks away to find another tree. He accidentally trips and drops the Mackintosh along the way.

Nevertheless, the day apple picking was a success and we went home with 30 lbs of Lobo and Gala apples.

Now at home, although there are still many Gala on the roll....

This is the result so far...