Bambi gets no love from these apple mavens

These days, there’s a battle going on between deer and man – or should I say woman – just down Route 1 in Epsom. It’s not fought with the firing blasts of rifles, since the four-legged foe both advances and retreats while we Eaves folk sleep. Instead, retaliation’s waged with afternoon apple-picking frenzies — Mama scooping up basketfuls of any untouched Granny Smith apples that remain after our brown-haired, white-tailed neighbors have munched on their midnight snack.

I remember the day that Daddy, donning his straw-brimmed hat, shoveled earthen pockets about our yard and planted the several sprigs that have now matured into fruit-bearing trees. Despite his knack for gardening, Daddy’s mini-apple orchard was endangered on numerous nature-imposed occasions. Mama’d signal the siren with, “It’s coming up a cloud!” As we kids scurried inside, she’d unplug all of the lamps and the television set in our old farm house. Hushed, we’d huddle together in the darkened living room until the “thunder cloud” passed. Meanwhile, Daddy would venture onto the front porch to watch Mother Nature’s wrath, a TRUE cigarette dangling from his lax lip. Occasionally it was the lightening, but more often the strong winds, that toppled the branches and sometimes tree trunks in Daddy’s budding orchard. Even as a child, I deemed the uplifted tree roots an unmerited mockery by Mother Nature herself.

Despite two decades of thunderstorms, ice storms and Hurricane Fran, some of those original apple trees remain. And as I write this week’s column, Mama is outside picking apples from them.

When Mama is finished picking those apples, she’ll begin peeling and cubing the batch. Depending on the picking’s yield, she’ll sprinkle cinnamon and sugar over the slices and slide them into the oven. Baked apples are one of our family’s favorite summertime treats. For those apples spared from tonight’s baking heat, they’ll be bagged in the freezer for later months, when Daddy’s apple trees lie dormant in the raw of a grey winter.

An older generation has some apple-baking treats as well.

“Old folks used to slice apples and place ‘em on a piece of tin outside until they dried,” Granny explained a few nights ago, as we dined on apple rolls and homemade apple sauce. “They’d bring ‘em back out during the winter months, soak ‘em in a stove pot until the apples plumped back up, and then fry ‘em into apple jacks,” she continued, as she approached the stove and grabbed for her pan of apple rolls. “The old folks would eat apple jacks with turnip salad.”

“How much sugar’s in these apples?” I laughed, as Granny giggled and served a second helping of our apple dessert.

“Back then, folks ate like this and never gained any weight. They worked it off in the fields,” Granny replied. “Honey, I’d go back to school after working the farm all summer, and I’d have lost weight!”

As Granny offered a third serving of apple rolls, I reminded myself that I don’t toil on a farm all day long. And so, with disappointment, I declined the sweet, flaking apple pastry that beckoned me from Granny’s baking pan.

Sometimes, I wonder what I’ll tell the next generation of Eaves offspring when they ask me what “the old folks” used to do.

Yet, I’m certain that as long as there are apple trees and made-from-scratch recipes, there’ll be stories to share about Mama’s apple-pickin’, Granny’s dessert-fixin’, and Daddy’s front-porch smokin’ in a little farm community called Epsom.

Gina Eaves is an Epsom native, a Peace College graduate and an advertising representative at The Daily Dispatch. Her columns appear on Sundays. E-mail her at geaves@hendersondispatch.com.

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Apple Rolls

• Buttermilk

biscuit dough

• Cooked Apples

• Sugar

• Butter

Make buttermilk biscuit dough or buy dough already prepared. Roll out with rolling pin and cut into roll size pieces. Put 2 tablespoons cooked apples (not mashed) on top of dough and add sugar. Fold and seal around edges. Place in pan, brush each roll with butter and bake until brown.

Raw fruit can be placed inside dough. It will cook with dough. Substitute blackberries, blueberries or peaches.