And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.

Let me update you on what I haven't found the time to write about:

Not having much experience with it before, I tried to get in every moment of autumn this year. And found that the most delicious, most productive, and most enjoyable way to experiencing the colors, tastes, and essence of the season is to eat as many apples as possible.

So when I took a mini-road trip up to Ithaca for the apple festival, and volunteered to make birthday cake for our beautiful hostesses, I found this apple cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

 Not really a birthday cake, but it was pretty good.

But I wasn't happy with it. It was more a breakfast-y coffee cake than the wet, apple-y, spice laden cake I'd been hoping for. So I tried again, this time with David Lebovitz's apple spice cake recipe.

Right off the bat it calls for apples and butter, so you know it's a winner. 

 It was a hit when I brought it to class - both the dreadlocked, Jamaican, high school history teacher and the middle-aged family woman studying women's history were very complimentary. It's one of those nice, simple recipes I'll be happy to make over and over again.

 I don't have a bundt pan, so it's not quite as pretty as it ought to be, but it did taste exactly right. Possibly because I doubled all the spices?

For Thanksgiving, though, I went the more traditional route, with this apple-cranberry pie from Cook's Illustrated. Cook's requires a subscription to view their recipes (hence the link elsewhere for the pie recipe), but they are always marvelous. This is the pie recipe that they used to feature their now-notorious vodka pie crust - apparently using vodka instead of water makes the crust easier to handle but doesn't affect the structure. I'm pretty happy with my crumbly, hard-to-handle, ugly pie crusts and I never have a lot of vodka on hand, so I still haven't made it, but this pie is amazing. 

 And patriotic.

But sometimes even simple baking is too much. Finals, holidays, and the end of the apple season coincided in a big way this year, so I decided to repeat my cheap, easy, homemade gift of last year and make everyone apple sauce.

Most apple sauce recipes are pretty simple. Mine cuts the ingredients in half. Apples, cinnamon. That's it. No added sugar, no other spices. Just a variety of apples cooked together with cinnamon.

And then you can them and get on an airplane with a really heavy suitcase.

 To recap:

Apples are delicious.

True friends smuggle carne asada from California in their socks.

Parte Uno: Tacos

Philadelphia is proving to be a fantastic food city, particularly in the summer and fall, when local produce is abundant, restaurants try to lure in customers with unique offerings, and everyone has plenty of time for eating a long, slow dinner outside in the warm evenings. I love it. Except that, for me, the epitome of outside summer food is a taco. From a taco truck. And my California upbringing has instilled a ridiculously high standard for taco truck cuisine. Which is silly, since the taco I want doesn't meet the health standards, gets cooked in the back of a hot, stinky truck filled with hot, stinky guys, is loaded up with terribly unhealthy ingredients, and drips spicy orange grease everywhere.

I want one so bad.

So bad that I asked one of my fellow Californians to bring me back something I could turn into a taco in exchange for a ride home from the airport. Which is how, at 6:30 in the morning, I was greeted with a dripping plastic bag of raw carne asada.

I have good friends. Friends who share my absurd love of taco.

Anyway, tacos are very easy to make, although I rarely do it, because they're cheaper and more delicious when you get them from a truck on E.14th in Oakland. When you're in Philly, most taco ingredients can be found in the Italian Market and in little South Philly corner stores. They're of varying quality, so it's worth shopping around a little. The time of year matters too, although I'll never figure out when nopales are in season. Does it matter to a cactus pad what time of year it is? Can you grow big cacti plants in places with winter? Where are my cacti pads imported from? Why doesn't everyone ask these questions?

We also bought tortillas, despite having driven a tortilla press all the way across the country last year. I'm still experimenting with homemade tortillas. I think I need to add lard.

Ok, enough, now to the tacos!

Cook your carne asada well - it's been defrosting in the bottom of an airplane, and could well be poisonous.






We got some nopales too, for a more veggie-based taco, although I usually cover them in cheese, thus completely undermining their health benefits. They can be eaten raw, but for cheese-covering purposes, I usually boil them briefly, and then cook them in a pan with some queso fresco.

We cut up some radishes, onion, and cilantro to garnish our tacos, and we grilled some jalapeños in the toaster oven. The jalapeños really varied in spiciness: next time I'll probably add some directly to the nopales and carne asada so there's a more even flavor.



Everything turned out delicious, and while there wasn't any orange grease dripping out of my tacos, neither did we get horribly ill from the smuggled meat, so all in all it was a definite win.

Parte Dos: Fruta Sorpresa

While we were wandering around the Italian Market making impulse taco buys, we came across an ugly-looking fruit that neither of us had ever seen before. The "mamey sapote" was described as a cross between a coconut and a papaya, although after eating it and doing some google searches, I think a better description might be an avocado that tastes like a sweet potato.

We weren't very impressed.

And then my meat-smuggling friend decided that the fruit's pit smelled good (almond-y) and ate a piece of it while explaining the benefits of cyanide. Another google search, this time on the edible properties of a mamey sopote seed, was extremely inconclusive. Answers ranged from "the seed is said to be fatally toxic if eaten raw by humans or animals" to "use it as if it were nutmeg" to "grate it and add it to your shampoo."

Probably he'll survive.