After my blog on soft fruits last week, it got me thinking about hard skinned fruits and specifically apples.
The wonderful thing about hard skinned fruit is that you can pack it away and take it with you wherever you are going. I always remember when I was young there was a lad at the posh end of our street who always had a Granny Smith apple in his hand. I used to watch him go to school in the morning and he would get to the end of the street, wave to his mum, take a bite of the Granny Smith and he would be off.
The apple is like the top of the range Swiss army knife in terms of its ability to adapt and have an answer for every food quandary. Mr Apple will sort it out! The Swiss army knife has its 50-odd different bits that do different things; the apple can do lots of things too. If you've got a bunch of apples in the fruit bowl and you're stuck with something to do with them, there's a whole range of different ways you can make use of them.
Take celery for example. I can't stand the texture but I absolutely adore the taste and we never take it off the menu because from a flavour point of view you can't beat it. Celery with apple, walnuts and a Dunsyre blue cheese or Scottish cheddar really is to die for. Apples and cheese are a wonderful combination and they go so well with nuts, which is amazing because a lot of fruits wouldn't. They also go well with winter root vegetables for example in a potato, celeriac and apple soup.
The tartiness of them means they make a great companion to white meat too and you can find them in curries, chillies, relish and pickles. They work so well in tons of dishes.
In the restaurant, we serve cucumber with olives but we found ourselves with no cucumber one day so we used a Granny Smith instead. I said, forget the cucumber from now on we can use the apples. They really do go so well with so many things!
As well as being great in savoury dishes, apples also go really well with sweet things too. If you're going down the sweet route there's apple tatin, apple crumble or baked apple with clotted cream and custard. They also dry out really well and are good for freezing, making puree or why not try caramelising them in the oven with a bit of sugar.
So don't just buy apples and put them in your fruit bowl. Give them a go with your cooking.
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