I went apple picking with my family and close friends this past weekend. I love apple picking. I love the social aspect of it. I love the outdoors aspect of it. I love apples, they’re my favorite fruit. I love apple cider. I love eating apples right off the trees. I love the prospect of making something wonderful with our hand-picked apples when I bring them home.
But it’s that last part that makes me both amazingly happy and strangely lonesome.
Making things from our apples is a joyous experience for me. We usually make an apple pie first, where even the crust is made from scratch. My wife and son take care of said crust while I’m in charge of the apple filling. It’s a whole group project that I look forward to because I love family activities, especially surrounding food. The kitchen always smells amazing, too. And then when it’s done, I get to enjoy it for days on end.
But that’s the problem. Only I enjoy it. I love to share what I enjoy, especially when it comes to food, but I don’t get to do that in my house very often because my wife has an aversion to anything that isn’t meat, cheese, or bread and my son is a picky eater.
Tonight we made apple crisp. It took some time because I chose an involved recipe. It came out great, but you wouldn’t have known it from the reactions in the house, especially from my son who whined that he didn’t even want to try it, even with ice cream served beside it. He took one bite of it, turned up his nose, and pushed the dish away. (That he proceeded to be an insufferable little brat the rest of the night for unrelated reasons didn’t help my mood either.)
So, like every year, I’ll be enjoying my favorite apple dishes by myself. The silver lining is that I still get to have my favorite late summer / early autumn desserts and there will be more of it for me, but if I’m being honest I wish the rest of my family would share in this joy with me.