Guts For Glamour on PNN

Stocks are down, but apples are up, up, up!

"With an apple, I will astonish Paris."
-Paul Cezanne, French painter, Post-Impressionist, and apple enthusiast.

Summer's warm sunsets on my city have been replaced by fall's chilly early evenings that send me inside earlier and leave me alone in my house with nothing but my husband, my couch, my fridge, and my army of dirty laundry (guess which one doesn't get much attention). Summer makes me want to work out and eat just one helping of veggie pizza, while Fall finds me licking chocolate-laced beaters and face-down in a pile of Pumpkin pie.

Apparently fall also inspires my waistline to grow into the jeans that I worked so hard all summer to fit into.

My smaller size is sacrificed for a good cause though, because the food in the fall is so much more comforting than summer's snoballs and hot dogs. The new season reminds me of coming home from school and smelling my mom's homemade meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and then going next door to the neighbor's house to see what they were having for dinner. I really did not like meatloaf.

True, the beginning of the fall season means remembering many forgotten habits (putting whipped cream on everything that will sit still) and celebrating, as Wikipedia so poetically puts it, the "bounteous fecundity" which I think means "leaves blowing into your freshly-raked yard." It also means it is time for my friend Sara to ask me what she does every year around the beginning of October.

"Just as an FYI, I'm going to the Apple Festival next weekend if anyone is interested." she announced to a few friends a couple Saturdays ago.

You have never met my friend Sara, but she is what I imagine what would happen if Oprah, Reese Witherspoon and Martha Stewart could have a baby; she knows everything that's worth knowing, she's the cool girl that everyone wants to be friends with, but most important to and feared by me is that she is extremely crafty. When I first met her she had my no-Thanksgiving-no-Christmas-tree-no-holiday future husband and his roommate on the kitchen floor, sprinkling nutmeg and cinnamon inside freshly carved pumpkins "so they make the house smell wonderful." While the pulp was still drying on her professional pumpkin carving kit from Crate and Barrel I knew that I had to hate her. Or be her. I settled on being friends with her.

This was going to be my first apple festival, so I didn't know what to expect as I climbed into Sara's car to make the hour-long trip up to Pennsylvania. I searched for clues on the official Apple Festival website, but it left much to the imagination, although impressed nonetheless with a cross-stitched likeness of Abe Lincoln's head in front of an American flag. Anything could happen. I'm glad I wore my converse.

When we arrived they hustled our cars into an open field and bussed us over to the festival like school kids going on a field trip. A quick $8 later and we were inside, along with 25,000 other apple-starved men, women, and children. I, however, had one thing on my mind: how much cash did I bring? These people didn't look like they took credit cards, and I couldn’t pay in apples.

Our festival experience began with a tangle with a questionably full porta potty. Although open for only an hour, festival goers had – how do I put this delicately – not used the bathroom for days out of anticipation for the festival. We were, after all, at an event that celebrated the massive ingestion of fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Our first meal was pit beef that we enjoyed on the bleachers while we watched children make their own scarecrows out of Apple Festival supplied hay and thrift store clothing. When we were full and tired of hay-men dressed like lumpy homeless lumberjacks, Sara led us to the rows and rows of barns that were crammed to the brim with homemade everything. Arts and crafts, salty meats and sweet apple jams surrounded us; the smells were all different but mixed well together and made a potpourri that I would have bought if they could have packaged it.

While Sara’s sister wondered if she should buy a glowing tree nightlight (I also like a tree to show me the way to the bathroom at 3am), Sara and I were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of an elusive figure from our childhood: the scrunchie. And it’s no wonder, if pieced together the fabric scraps that these crafty women produce could clothe a naked village in Ecuador and Christine Aguilera in all of her music videos. It takes a special person to take one piece of trash and sew it into an even bigger piece of trash.

And if they were cheaper I totally would have bought one.

The craft booths took up most of the day, and while I was debating between a bracelet made out of spoon or apple pie ice cream we decided to cut our losses and leave before anyone had to use the porta potty again.

Now my house is filled with one other diversion: bags and bags of apples. And although the substitute-apples-for-meat spaghetti I made didn’t go over so well, the apple pie was gone before I could buy some ice cream to pair it with.

For the sake of my taste buds, please share any apple recipes you have.

If you are interested in finding an apple festival near you, please visit http://www.pickyourown.org/applefestivals.php. And go to the bathroom before you get there.

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