It's Cider Time!

First, I'd better clear up a few terms.  In much of the world, "cider" means the fermented version that we call "hard cider" here in the US.  In grocery stores, apple cider & apple juice mean pretty much the same darn thing.  However, if you live near apple orchards in the US (or presumably parts of Canada), cider means this:

a totally unfiltered, unpasteurized beverage that has some of us literally pestering fruit stands & orchards to find out when we will be able to get our "fix" for the year.

Here in the states, unpasteurized cider can only be purchased from a local fruit stand or directly from the orchard because the USDA requires all commercial "cider" to be pasteurized to eliminate the possibility of contamination as the unfiltered stuff--not to mention the fact that it has a pretty short shelf life, unless you enjoy the more alcoholic version. (Although the alcoholic version might actually help us get through the current vole-stink problem, come to think of it....)

Since I was visiting a fruit stand anyway, I decided to pick up some honeycrisp apples as they are quite popular now & we hadn't tried them

though I was disappointed to find them in cellophane bags & pretty obviously waxed for shelf life.  I was delighted to find

not just unwaxed apples, but apples from an orchard that I think produces the most amazing red delicious apples ever.  Normally, I don't like the red delicious variety of apple--an apple grower once explained to me that they had been bred so single-mindedly to produce the rosy-red apple that American consumers had come to expect that the flavor had all but gone from the breed.  I certainly can see his point, but these were from an orchard in Fruitland (which seems to have been renamed but used to be Hennegler) and my college roommate used to bring a case of these apples to school in the fall and my friends and I would devour them with all the ferocity of a group of women eating without men around as witnesses........