Surprise apples enchant changing seasons and kitchen.
It rained this summer.
A lot.
And that changed the world.
Typically in Colorado, “where I come from,” we get just under 14 inches of precipitation a year. According to the Colorado state climatologist in a conversation with National Public Radio, the driest year in Colorado’s 150-year history was 2002 — a mere 21 years ago — when the state only got 11.9 inches of precipitation. In 2020, we only received 12.2 inches across the state and Denver saw a mere 8.7 inches, which is to say almost nothing.
In 2020, in the middle of that parched year, the Cameron Peak fire took advantage of the tinder-dry conditions to blaze through 208,663 acres of forest land. It burned for almost four months before it was declared 100 percent contained. Later that same autumn, another fire with an apt name, the East Troublesome Fire, charred more than 193,000 acres, destroyed 400 structures and killed two people. On one day a week in, pushed by strong winds, the flames ran through 6,000 acres an hour, and the fire grew from 25,000 acres to 125,000 overnight.
It is not unusual to hear words like “parched,” “semi-arid,” and “drought” when people talk about Colorado’s climate. “We could use the moisture” might as well be the state motto.
But that was three years ago.
This year it rained.
By the end of June, Colorado had seen 14.42 inches of rain. That’s 99 percent of the state’s annual precipitation in just six months. Year to date, Fort Collins had been blessed with more than 20 inches of precipitation. Some areas of the state have seen even more, some areas much more: 26.7 inches at Lost Dog, 35.1 at Bison Lake, 40.3 at the summit of Wolf Creek Pass, 43.4 at Spud Mountain.
These numbers might not be surprising in some parts of the country, but here? Let me put it this way: I had a green lawn all summer and I never once turned on a sprinkler. That has never happened before.
But it did this summer.
Because it rained.
And the whole world changed.
The first manifestations of a new world were the mushrooms that popped up in the backyard. To say lots, and lots, of mushrooms would be an understatement. We have a giant pine tree in the backyard and so some cool and green and shady spots yearly give rise to little clumps of mushrooms, easily picked and dispatched to mushroom heaven. This summer, though, that was just the beginning. They showed up in the cool spots in the yard, in the shady spots, in the bright sun-scorched center. They popped up near trees and shrubs, huddled along the fence, hidden beneath weeds and tufts of grass.
I spent hours online trying to ascertain whether they were dangerous. I think they were mostly, although not entirely, common puffballs, aka the devil’s snuffbox, which are edible if you get to them at the right time in their life cycle. But I have a dog, who I adore and who typically has a voracious appetite for, well, everything — so every day for weeks, I filled a bucket or a grocery bag with fungi. Then I allowed them to dry in the garage until the next trash day and sent them on their way.
One day, early in the morning, I found a path of little mushrooms meandering its way from the lawn through a long-neglected garden to the deep fragrant underneath of a little pine. I think it was a fairy road, although I didn’t see any fairies. I left the ’shrooms there so the little pixies could find their way home.
I’m still waiting for that magic.
Some weeks later, I started noticing crabapples littering the ground in my backyard. Fort Collins has a lot of crabapple trees so seeing the berry-sized fruit is not unusual here. In fact, I remember walking to school as a child, seeing the fruit on the ground, in the yards and in the streets along the route, little red, yellow, orange pomes, many of them squished beneath the sneakers of school kids. And invariably, some kid would dare some other, likely younger, almost certainly more gullible kid to taste a crabapple right then and there. Straight from the tree. No sugar. “Come on,” that big kid would say as others laughed and jeered and covered their mouths in horror, “it’s an apple. Why wouldn’t it taste good?”
Because they don’t. They didn’t then, and they don’t now. They are super tart; they make the inside of your cheeks pucker. No one eats them raw.
My neighbors have a crabapple tree. It’s very large, so I guess they’ve had it for years, for decades, forever, but until this summer of magical rains I never noticed. This summer it grew, branches stretching into the sky and across the fence, and it grew heavy with fruit. And in the fall, the fruit started falling into a little corner of my yard, where the shadows are deep and the weeds mostly wild and untended.
At first, I was kind of annoyed, thinking the crabapples were making my dog sick. My dog’s a pug, and he’s always hungry and thinks anything small enough to fit in his mouth is a treat. So while I had the words of poet Eugene Fields going round and round in my head — “Love to chawnk crabapples and go swimming in the lake / Hate to take the caster ile they gives for belly ache” — he was sampling the harvest.
Turns out the crabapples weren’t what was giving the dog a belly ache. So when we figured that out, we decided to forage the fruit that fell in the yard. Every morning for 10 days or so, we picked up the little apples that had found their way to the ground during the night. We stopped when we had gathered about three quarts.
I’ve never heard of Crabapple Pie (although I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find such a recipe), so we made jelly.
I made another amazing discovery: an apple tree is growing in my backyard. And it was big enough this summer to bear fruit.
This is an old neighborhood — or more precisely, a middle-aged neighborhood with mature trees — so it’s not unusual for the roots of a tree to shoot into neighboring yard. Typically, it’s not a big deal. If you pay attention, you can just cut those little shoots down like any other weed. I’ve become expert at clipping out the aspen shoots that continue to sprout in my yard years after the neighbors OG aspen was cut down.
Fun fact: An aspen grove, or a clonal colony, is actually just one massive organism that includes a huge root system and hundreds, even thousands of suckers that become trees. In Utah, there is a clonal colony, called Pando, that is comprised of 47,000 trunks that have sprouted from a single root system spanning 106 acres. Pando is considered by some to be the largest living organism on earth, but the discovery of a honey fungus — or mushroom — in Oregon that spreads across nearly four miles and stretches three miles underground is changing the dialogue.
That morning — a morning unlike these approaching days of winter, when the sun was still warm and the sky was bright blue, the grass not yet faded and the air gentle and caressing — we were picking up the little crabapples that the neighbor's tree had offered us the night before. I looked up to see if I should expect more fruit to fall, and I saw them: three actual apples hiding among the leaves of a free-standing tree. They were pink and a little yellow, and small, like the lunchbox apples they sell in the grocery store, and they smelled sweet when I plucked them from their hiding place.
It was surprising and kind of thrilling. Like a gift from the autumn gods.
When my little apple harvest was all said and done, I think there were eight apples sitting on my kitchen counter, plus four others already on the ground that I left for the bunnies and squirrels. I ate one, stewed two or three with some cinnamon and brown sugar, and chopped up the rest to add to some quick bread. I felt like the Pioneer Woman.
In this new next season of transition, my dog is sick and this has been a difficult autumn, in some ways hard and painful beyond reason. In order to get through the tough days, as well as crabapples, we’ve been searching for magic.
Sometimes we find it. We’ve found it in a little fairy trail of mushrooms. In the jewel tones of a jar of jelly. In the smell of apples and cinnamon baking in a loaf of bread.
We found magic in a raindrop.
The pie:
Myriad Mushroom Pie
with Whole Wheat Marjoram Crust
I first saw this recipe in the early spring when the cold was hanging on and the ground was too wet and too hard to surprise us with abundance. It was touted as comfort food, extolled for the creamy gravy, the earthy almost meaty bite of the mushrooms, the flaky buttery crust. But I wasn’t interested in comfort food then. I was looking toward summer and lovely light summer delights, like lemonade and grilled peaches and fruit pies with ice cream. Then the rain came and the mushrooms followed. And I started thinking about this recipe again.
No, in spite of gathering buckets of mushroom from my yard and in spite of being pretty confident that they were perfectly safe to consume, I did not use yard-’shrooms in this pie. In fact, I just went to the grocery store down the street and bought every variety of mushroom available. Who knew there were so many? Shiitake, Maitake, cremini, portobello, button, oyster, trumpet. It was fascinating — and expensive, so I should add here that I think you could successfully make this recipe with fewer, less exotic, more reasonably priced varieties. I chose to use a hearty crust on this pie, and the Whole Wheat Marjoram Crust paired perfectly with the rich gravy and robust umami flavor of the mushrooms.
This recipe makes one 9-inch double-crust pie, but I chose instead to divide it into four smaller pot pies. That works well if you want individual servings for your dining companions or if you are an individual who doesn’t want to eat mushroom pie every night for a week. This pie can be frozen, uncooked. Just thaw it before putting it in the oven. We ate it once as a main course, with a salad and fruit, and once as a side dish to complement a grilled steak. It’s satisfying either way.
The recipe
2 discs Whole Wheat Marjoram pie crust (recipe below)
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1½ pounds mixed mushrooms, torn or cut into bite-size pieces
Salt
Ground black pepper
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 medium onion, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons fresh marjoram leaves (substitution suggestion: thyme or oregano)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2½ cups vegetable broth, chicken broth or water
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1 large egg
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Prepare dough (directions below). On a lightly floured work surface, roll out dough into two 12- to 14-inch rounds. Fit one into a 9-inch pie plate (preferably a glass pie plate) and gently drape the second crust over the first. Refrigerate while you prepare the filling.
In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add half the mushrooms and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms shrink in size and begin to brown, 5 to 8 minutes. Add the remaining mushrooms, season with salt and pepper, and continue to cook until all the mushrooms are about the same size and tenderness, nearly golden brown, another 8 to 10 minutes.
Add the garlic and onion and continue cooking until the mushrooms and onions are deeply browned, shriveled and caramelized at the edges, an additional 10 to 15 minutes. They should still be tender in the center.
Reduce the heat to medium and add the butter and marjoram, letting the butter melt around the mushrooms. Add the flour and stir to coat the mushrooms. Cook until the flour starts to toast in the skillet, 2 to 3 minutes. Slowly add the broth, stirring to combine. (It will be thick at first, but it will loosen up.) Add the heavy cream and simmer until the mixture is no longer soupy but instead is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Add the parsley, season with salt and pepper, and remove from the heat.
Remove the pie plate from the refrigerator. Set the second round of dough aside. Fill the mushroom mixture to the top of the crust-lined pie plate. Lay the second crust on top. Trim, crimp and vent.
Mix the egg with a teaspoon of water and brush the top of the crust with the egg wash. Sprinkle with salt and black pepper.
Bake the pie for 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes or until the crust is deeply golden brown on the top and cooked through on the bottom.
Let cool slightly before eating.
Whole Wheat Marjoram Pie Crust
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup white whole wheat flour or unbleached whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon marjoram, or more to taste
¾ cup (1½ sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
4 tablespoons cold vegetable shortening
4 tablespoons cold vodka
8 tablespoons cold water, plus extra as needed
In a large bowl, stir together the flour, salt and marjoram until everything is thoroughly combined. Add the butter and shortening and cut the mixture together using a pastry cutter until it forms small pea-size crumbs coated in flour.
Pour the vodka evenly over the dry ingredients, a couple of tablespoons at a time, using a rubber spatula to press the dough together. Add the water, a tablespoon or two at a time, and continue to press the dough together to form a large ball. If the dough doesn’t come together or seems dry, add a little extra ice water a tablespoon at a time until everything comes together easily. (Be careful to work the dough as little as possible; otherwise the crust may be tough.)
Divide the dough into two equal balls; press each into a disk, wrap each in plastic wrap; and refrigerate for at least an hour or up to two days before rolling out.
(Original recipe by Alison Ramon.)
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