Johnny Appleseed has nothing on me!

Saturday was rainy and seriously cold, but plans had been made and there was no way that I or my friends were going to back out of them.  So off into the Virginia countryside we went. By 10:30 am we had found the pick your own apple farm and let me tell you the proprietors were quite surprised to see city girls willing to brave the rain and pick some apples.  Despite the cold it was so much fin.  I have never gone apple picking as it is not a very common thing to do in SoCal, so I was amped up.  Rome, golden delicious, and red delicious were scattered all over the place and their colors were so vivid under the grey sky.  I honestly hadn't really thought about how one apple picked, but I had imagined ladders and reaching up into the branches.  Yesterday I found myself crawling on hand and knee to get under all the branches and checking out what was strewn on the ground.  Although there were some great apples still hanging above, I was not feeling the climbing tree idea as I envisioned my ungraceful self falling down.

I wish it had been less dreary as I would have loved to enjoy all the other produce they had at this little farm.  30 minutes picking enough apples to last 2 weeks was enough and we went on to do some wine tasting.  Yummmm......

And boozing did happen and the rest of my day consisted of cheese and wine and I would not have had it any other way.  But today I woke up determined to put these apples to use.  I mean there is no way I would be apple to eat all these bad boys in a week.  As I do not have pie plates, which is probably a good thing, and I wanted to do more than a few baked apples I decided to try my hand at apple sauce.  The recipe has cranberries, apples, maple syrup, sugar, water, and cinnamon and it tuned out awesome.  So now I am swimming in apple sauce heaven over here and am super excited to have a new snack for my lunch bag.  Yeah, you should be jealous.

Okay I know it doesn't look super appetizing, but you have to trust me.  It tastes awesome and I feel like I am making some headway in this whole "learning how to cook things besides grilled chicken on a George Foreman".  

Hope everyone has a wonderful week and I will try to think of other fun things to talk about.