APPLEWOOD AND TINY DOUGHNUTS
By James Norton
As part of my slow, cunning plan to drag my family to every single one of Minnesota’s well-regarded apple orchards, I took Becca and the kids last weekend to Applewood Orchard in Lakeville, Minn. It came recommended by one of Heavy Table’s reliable correspondents, and it didn’t disappoint.
At a certain point in one’s orchard-going career, you get a sense of the trade-off that every orchard has to make. Commercialize further, and make money at the expense of atmosphere? Diminish the number of trees to increase the number of attractions? Build out the bakehouse at the expense of the wholesale business?
Applewood is one of my favorite situations: the apple trees, beautifully organized and labeled acres of them, absolutely come first. Everything else supports that vision: hay rides (that also serve as a way to get deep into the trees, or return from them), a low-key play area including a small playground and a corn pit, and a shockingly tasteful hedge maze that wouldn’t be out of place in the garden of an English estate.
I’d knock a couple points off for the doughnuts (made on site, but tiny, meaning that they’re crunchy at the expense of cakey) and the lack of apple cider in the shop, but otherwise this is a nearly perfect, classic apple-driven orchard. Plus, we discovered Cortland apples, which are crispy and fresh-tasting as the dickens.
If you haven’t yet hit an orchard this year, Applewood’s our new tied-for-first favorite, up there with Whistling Well Farm in Hastings, Minn.
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THE WRATH OF GRAPES
A fruit called King of North makes a fiercely tasty pie.
By Bill Childs
My “On This Day” social media memories this time of year often include me telling our neighbors in Northampton, Massachusetts, that the Concord Grape Guy had shown up outside the waste transfer center. Most every year we lived there, I’d pick up a bunch and make Concord grape pie with it. If you’re saying “Huh? Grape pie?” you are echoing my friends’ texts this last week (“Is this an actual thing?”; “I’ve never heard of this”; and so on).
The recipe came from my grandmother in Magnolia, Arkansas. Where she got the recipe is unknown; a 1937 Arkansas newspaper refers to Concord grape pies as being a must “during purple season” (whatever that might be), but the recipe doesn’t line up with the one she passed down. For that matter, where she got the actual Concord grapes is unknown, though there are some places up in Northwest Arkansas growing them now. Maybe my grandfather (a cattle farmer and agriculture professor) was doing some bartering of beef for grapes, as I believe he did for peaches.
Lacking a Twin Cities Concord Grape Guy, I asked Tara from Saint Paul’s excellent Hot Hands Pie & Biscuit for her pie grape source, recalling that she’d made such a pie a few years ago. She pointed me to Good Courage Farm out near Hutchinson (about a 90-minute drive from Saint Paul). Kerri Meyer, the executive director of the farm, invited me to come out and pick up some King of the North grapes, which she (and Tara) said would work in place of the classic Concord. So off I went to west-central Minnesota.
The trip was lovely drive, perfect for open windows and loud music and admiring the shift in dominant political signage. Meyer, who greeted me at the gate, is not just the farm’s director. She is also an ordained Episcopal priest, having served a congregation in the Bay Area before the move here. Her wife, Dr. Jennifer Blecha, teaches food and agriculture at San Francisco State University. Both have Midwestern roots and the farm, which they acquired six or seven years ago, is a return home of sorts.
They started the enterprise a half dozen or so years ago, and it’s a melding of their work, both spiritual and agricultural. Kerri and farm dog Pippin showed me around a bit and described their organic crops—everything from rhubarb and shiitake mushrooms to plums, pears, apples and, yes, grapes.
When Good Courage (a reference to Psalm 27) was getting up and running—especially during the early days of the pandemic—the business was doing a fair amount of traditional farm sales, including to Hot Hands. Now that they’re more established, they’ve switched to mostly a more mission-focused approach, and their Faith Community Supported Agriculture program is foundational to that.
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