It’s hard to overstate my reverence for The Apple!
A perfect globe, a happy fruit that sits perfectly in hand. Its gentle heft, its smooth skin, even with imperfections, is beauty in itself. It’s a joy to behold, coloured brightly with reds, greens, yellows and a multitude of hues in between. Bring it to your nose and breathe in its fragrance. It’s surely passed through heavenly realms here to earth, bringing scents with them, arrayed in layered splendour, essence of the divine. And the flavours when you bite into them, the splash of juice, the tang and sweetness in the mouth …
Essence of the divine
It’s apple season here on Pender, Island of Apples! The time when these nuggets of ambrosia hang off trees, bending branches. They’re ready to break free and fall off into grassy loam, the soft earth. Those trees that helped bear them, nourish them, sustain them.
Last Friday, at the Medicine Beach bread pick-up, Andy Nowak and Mary Reher showed up with several boxes of apples, many varieties. They will become this week’s Pender Island Apple Bread. Their glorious fruit will be peeled, sliced and dehydrated to concentrate their sweetness. They will be tossed into the sourdough. Hydrated with Pender’s own Twin Island Cider, they’ll make the annual Happy Monk Apple Bread.
It’s a welcome indulgence for me, making bread that glorifies this noble fruit, celebrating one of this island’s perfect creations. When I hold one of Andy and Mary’s apples, I see where they’re from: Black Rabbit Farm just off Pirates Road. The garden/orchard is condensed beauty, neatly laid out. The tiered garden, the vegetables, the flowers, the rustic roadside fence, the tool shed, the hill rising upwards into tall firs and cedars. And the row of small apple trees, loaded with fruit, large and small, red, yellow, green and orange.
Lost and found apples
But apple trees are all over Pender! Our neighbours along Gowlland Point Road have towering King apple trees that must drop tons of fruit yearly. Another neighbour, a true apple devotee from Bristol, once had 40 different varieties of trees, including Bramleys, Pippins, Gravensteins and Liberties.
Not forgetting the bigger ones, Olde Apple Orchard, Corbett House Orchard, Raven Rock Farms, all in the Port Washington area, Roesland Orchard, Shingle Bay and in backyards of countless homes.
Ask the Twin Island Cider proprietors, Matt Vasilev and Katie Selbee, who know all the orchards. They’ll even tell you about the hidden ones. These are orchards long forgotten and grown over and the Vasilev/Selbees lovingly clear, rescue, and turn into producing orchards.
And I remember stopping on Hooson Road a few years ago after spotting an apple tree off the side of the road, rising out of a thicket of grass and brambles, teeming with luscious fruit. Many were strewn on the grass, spilling into the ditch. Jennifer and I picked a few, cleaned them off and feasted on the way home in the car.
Eating apples: an act of conscience
Apples are abundant and plentiful on Pender Island. There are so many apples falling off trees! It’s an act of conscience, almost, to eat as many as possible so they don’t go to waste. An easy task, a pleasurable duty, an altruistic act with delightful benefits.
They can be made into comforting apple pies, or course, or apple crisps, betties 1, apple jam or butter or candied apples for Halloween. But to my mind, the fruit’s simplicity is a little lost when it’s baked.
Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, revered the apple so much, in its simplicity and innocence, that he believed it had the power to unite the globe if we only had the vision, the appetite, the tastebuds. Biting into an apple and its “round innocence,” he said, we “regress for a moment to the state of the newborn.” It’s the reverse of Eve’s bite of the Apple, the fruit of knowledge. It’s not a loss of innocence, but a return to innocence!
Have an apple today! Taste the fruit of innocence, be it a Liberty, an Ambrosia, an Elstar or a Golden Russet. Savour it, love it. Do your bit to save the world!
Ode to an Apple
By Pablo Neruda
You, apple, are the object of my praise. I want to fill my mouth with your name. I want to eat you whole.
You are always fresh, like nothing and nobody. You have always just fallen from Paradise: dawn’s rosy cheek full and perfect!
Compared to you the fruits of the earth are so awkward: bunchy grapes, muted mangos, bony plums, and submerged figs. You are pure balm, fragrant bread, the cheese of all that flowers.
When we bite into your round innocence we too regress for a moment to the state of the newborn: there’s still some apple in us all.
I want total abundance, your family multiplied. I want a city, a republic, a Mississippi River of apples, and I want to see gathered on its banks the world’s entire population united and reunited in the simplest act we know: I want us to bite into an apple.
Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda, Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004
All spelt, all the time … well, with a few glugs of maple syrup .. . . . . . #spelt #wholegrain #tinloaves #realbread #breadbakers #breadbakersofinstagram #artisanbreadbakers #speltbread #speltsourdoughbread #speltbread #wholegrainspeltbread #penderisland #southpenderisland #happymonkbaking #happymonkbaker
All spelt, all the time … well, with a few glugs of maple syrup .. . . . . . #spelt #wholegrain #tinloaves #realbread #breadbakers #breadbakersofinstagram #artisanbreadbakers #speltbread #speltsourdoughbread #speltbread #wholegrainspeltbread #penderisland #southpenderisland #happymonkbaking #happymonkbaker ...
New Happy Monk Blog: Spring brings mixed blessings! A sense of loss, along with warmth and a new cast of light, "That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature Feels." Westeros and Emily Dickinson`s sensitive heart. [ See LinkTree in Profile ]
New Happy Monk Blog: Spring brings mixed blessings! A sense of loss, along with warmth and a new cast of light, "That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature Feels." Westeros and Emily Dickinson`s sensitive heart. [ See LinkTree in Profile ] ...
This little guy is a workhorse, plain and simple. A brute! Thursday, it milled over 27kg of incredible flour for a recipe that needed the freshest flour possible. And its output was beautiful. Wheat, spelt, rye and buckwheat. A larger mill could have handled that in a fraction of the time, but who’s complaining? Some amazing bread was the result, milled and mixed the same day. A Country Miche from an article by Eric Pallant @epallant in the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Bread Lines.
This little guy is a workhorse, plain and simple. A brute! Thursday, it milled over 27kg of incredible flour for a recipe that needed the freshest flour possible. And its output was beautiful. Wheat, spelt, rye and buckwheat. A larger mill could have handled that in a fraction of the time, but who’s complaining? Some amazing bread was the result, milled and mixed the same day. A Country Miche from an article by Eric Pallant @epallant in the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Bread Lines.
O, for a slice of raisin sourdough! that hath been Warm’d a long age in the deep delvéd oven, Tasting of Hestia and the ocean green, Rest and a slow moving song and sunburnt mirth!
O for a loaf full of the warm South Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded raisins winking at the crumb, And cinnamon-stainéd mouth; That I might eat, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
— Apologies to John Keats for my butchery of his “Ode to a Nightingale”
O, for a slice of raisin sourdough! that hath been Warm’d a long age in the deep delvéd oven, Tasting of Hestia and the ocean green, Rest and a slow moving song and sunburnt mirth!
O for a loaf full of the warm South Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded raisins winking at the crumb, And cinnamon-stainéd mouth; That I might eat, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
— Apologies to John Keats for my butchery of his “Ode to a Nightingale” ...
At the outset of the Happy Monk Baking Company, I cherished those early mornings, working alone with Mildrith in the dark before the birds began their glorious morning chorus. The world was silent, unhurried. Mildrith and me, the trees, the solid earth, a passing deer, the baskets of bread dough waiting for the oven.
Going to work in the pre-dawn hours was something bakers did, I thought. They sacrificed sleep and delivered their bread early to appreciative customers. It was a romantic notion on my part, a naïve commitment to the baking trade without fully understanding the consequences, i.e. sleep debt.
It was satisfying to have loaves ready for some customers before noon; it was a triumph! But by the time most of the bread was ready for delivery, bagged and labelled, my eyelids were growing heavy, my mind fuzzy, my body slowing down.
At the outset of the Happy Monk Baking Company, I cherished those early mornings, working alone with Mildrith in the dark before the birds began their glorious morning chorus. The world was silent, unhurried. Mildrith and me, the trees, the solid earth, a passing deer, the baskets of bread dough waiting for the oven.
Going to work in the pre-dawn hours was something bakers did, I thought. They sacrificed sleep and delivered their bread early to appreciative customers. It was a romantic notion on my part, a naïve commitment to the baking trade without fully understanding the consequences, i.e. sleep debt.
It was satisfying to have loaves ready for some customers before noon; it was a triumph! But by the time most of the bread was ready for delivery, bagged and labelled, my eyelids were growing heavy, my mind fuzzy, my body slowing down.
Milling a little corn to mix in with some marinated olives before they go into a tapenade infused dough. Big olive flavour … plus a rare shot of Mildrith, the wood-fired oven!
Milling a little corn to mix in with some marinated olives before they go into a tapenade infused dough. Big olive flavour … plus a rare shot of Mildrith, the wood-fired oven! ...
Happy Monk Tidings - November 1, 2023 🍞 - BAKER`S CHOICE: Sourdough Sandwich Loaf; BLOG: Don`t Let That Wonder Lawyer Tell You It`s Not Real Bread! [ See LinkTree in Profile ]
Happy Monk Tidings - November 1, 2023 🍞 - BAKER`S CHOICE: Sourdough Sandwich Loaf; BLOG: Don`t Let That Wonder Lawyer Tell You It`s Not Real Bread! [ See LinkTree in Profile ] ...
Dylan Thomas, one of my muses, would have been 109 years old this Friday, Oct. 27. One of a small-handful of poets whose words are cherished and summoned often for their music and wisdom. They soothe, they sing, they evoke. I`ll be thinking of him this bread day, under "the mustardseed sun"….. and the "switchback sea"…. as he "celebrates and spurns his driftwood thirty fifth wind turned age." . . . . #dylanthomas #poetsofinstagram #poetrylovers #poetryisnotdead #poetryofinstagram #poets #poetryislife #poetrylove #poetrydaily #poetryworld #poetryinstagram #bakerpoets #poetryforbakers #southpenderisland #penderisland
Dylan Thomas, one of my muses, would have been 109 years old this Friday, Oct. 27. One of a small-handful of poets whose words are cherished and summoned often for their music and wisdom. They soothe, they sing, they evoke. I`ll be thinking of him this bread day, under "the mustardseed sun"….. and the "switchback sea"…. as he "celebrates and spurns his driftwood thirty fifth wind turned age." . . . . #dylanthomas #poetsofinstagram #poetrylovers #poetryisnotdead #poetryofinstagram #poets #poetryislife #poetrylove #poetrydaily #poetryworld #poetryinstagram #bakerpoets #poetryforbakers #southpenderisland #penderisland
Happy Monk Tidings - BLOG: Abundance: Season of Apples; Baker`s Choice: Pender Island Apple Bread with Pender Apples and Twin Island Cider - October 4, 2023 🍞 [ See LinkTree in Profile ]
Happy Monk Tidings - BLOG: Abundance: Season of Apples; Baker`s Choice: Pender Island Apple Bread with Pender Apples and Twin Island Cider - October 4, 2023 🍞 [ See LinkTree in Profile ] ...
Happy Monk Tidings - September 20, 2023 🍞 - BAKER`S CHOICE: Garlic Levain Bread; BLOG: Harumph! Author Says Leave the Baking to the Professionals! [ See LinkTree in Profile ]
A hefty Country Miche, formula from Breadlines published by Bread Bakers Guild of America. Hefty in size, hefty in flavour. Four flours (Sifted Metchosin Wheat, Rye, Buckwheat, Spelt), a super-active levain and an intense crust colour. I think I’m addicted! It’s kind of finicky, though, and trying to work out a reasonable schedule to produce 40 loaves for Happy Monk customers.
A hefty Country Miche, formula from Breadlines published by Bread Bakers Guild of America. Hefty in size, hefty in flavour. Four flours (Sifted Metchosin Wheat, Rye, Buckwheat, Spelt), a super-active levain and an intense crust colour. I think I’m addicted! It’s kind of finicky, though, and trying to work out a reasonable schedule to produce 40 loaves for Happy Monk customers.
REMINDER: Happy Monk is on Summer Break! We`re off on our annual late summer respite. Next bread day is Sept. 22. See you then! (photo by Davy Joel Rippner)
REMINDER: Happy Monk is on Summer Break! We`re off on our annual late summer respite. Next bread day is Sept. 22. See you then! (photo by Davy Joel Rippner) ...
Happy Monk Tidings - August 30, 2023 🍞 - BAKER`S CHOICE: Mountain Rye Bread; BLOG: Making Bread and Art With A Message; NOTE: Happy Monk is on Holiday for the Next Two Weeks - https://mailchi.mp/ae234548bd1a/happy_monk_tidings_aug30
TASTE TEST! I’ve admired @eds_bred of Whistler for some time, though never been there or tasted their bread. But a generous customer brought me a loaf yesterday, a beautiful-looking Sesame-Poppyseed loaf. Coincidentally, I’d made a Sesame Sourdough loaf as my Baker’s Choice this week. How did the two loaves stack up? The Ed’s Bred’s loaf was gorgeous with a dark, sesame-poppyseed crust, lovely colour, subtle flavour. The wood-fired Happy Monk entry had a little less colour, but packed a powerful sesame whoomph. Great flavour for sesame fans! What can we learn from this?
TASTE TEST! I’ve admired @eds_bred of Whistler for some time, though never been there or tasted their bread. But a generous customer brought me a loaf yesterday, a beautiful-looking Sesame-Poppyseed loaf. Coincidentally, I’d made a Sesame Sourdough loaf as my Baker’s Choice this week. How did the two loaves stack up? The Ed’s Bred’s loaf was gorgeous with a dark, sesame-poppyseed crust, lovely colour, subtle flavour. The wood-fired Happy Monk entry had a little less colour, but packed a powerful sesame whoomph. Great flavour for sesame fans! What can we learn from this?
Happy Monk Blog - July 26, 2023 🍞 - Swimming the Neighbourhoods; how John Cheever`s short story, The Swimmer, made more sense to kids in the summertime. [See LinkTree in Profile ]
Happy Monk Blog - July 26, 2023 🍞 - Swimming the Neighbourhoods; how John Cheever`s short story, The Swimmer, made more sense to kids in the summertime. [See LinkTree in Profile ] ...
A Betty is a dessert which consists of fruit layered between or on top of small bread crumbs or cubes. The dessert is made like a crisp but instead of a streusel topping, buttered bread crumbs are used.↩