Apples Apples Everywhere!

We should start by wishing our brother Andy a very happy birthday!

This was the only picture I could find on the fly of Andy!!  Thought it was funny though, so we're posting it!  This is at Dave's Bachelor Party 2 summers ago.  L to R: Joe, Dad S, Dave, Andy, Mike, Aaron.  These were the winning teams from their golf outing and here they are posing with their prizes: growlers from the KBC!  Enjoy this memory, Andy!  We hope you are having an awesome birthday!!!

 We FINALLY sold Trixie!!  She left us officially on Sunday.  A young couple purchased the Matrix from us Sunday afternoon, after taking it for a spin the Thursday before.  It was their first major car purchase, too, just like it was for us.  We're glad she's in good hands, but will surely miss her!  It was one of the best vehicles we've ever had!  Now we've been using just the one car for this entire week, and let me say it is extremely hard to do when we work at places on opposite ends of the Metro.  So this Sunday we'll be out looking for a clunker -- that's right, looking to BUY a clunker, not sell it.  ;)  We'll just get a crappy little car to get us to and from and junk it whenever it dies.  We'll only need one car in about a year or 2 anyway, so this is the best plan to help us eat up some of our debt and work toward getting our office open!

Last weekend we also took some time to do something fun for a change.  We hit up the biggest apple orchard in the Cities called The Harvest.  It's only a few miles south of our apartment in Jordan.  They had free admission, which is key!  We didn't have much time to phyically go on the tractor and pick our own apples (we had to get back to the apt to sell our car! plus it was super cold and rainy!), but we walked around a bit then went inside the clubhouse to taste.  Okay, so who has ever even HEARD of a Honeycrisp apple??  Better yet tasted one???  SO GOOD!  We'd never heard of that type before.  The University of Minnesota actually created it by cross breading 2 other types, and what resulted was the Honeycrisp.  They taste just like the name -- like a crisp, honey sweet apple!  THE best ever!  So after sampling all the apples, we grabbed a bag of those and also a bag of Haralsons (another breed famous to MN).  We also got to taste some of the other products the apple orchard makes: salsas, sausages, cheese, and CIDER!  Yup, grabbed a half gallon of their cider, too.  On our way out, we also got 2 warm cups of cider, a slice of apple pie and an apple dumpling.  DElicious!  We'll definitely go back next fall and take more time so we can do our own picking!  We're thinking of making our own apple pies this weekend.  Maybe some other apple things...any ideas out there??  Possibly one of our favorite fall soups for dinner Saturday night -- Curried Apple Soup.  If you can think of anything else Apple, send it our way!  We have so many apples sitting around!!

This was the first thing we saw after following the signs to the orchard.  I guess the old barn looked cooler in person, but I wanted to take a picture of it.  Didn't turn out so great on here though.  Oh well.  I just really liked  how the apple looks, where they put the state of MN on there to look like the bite was taken out.

We had to drive up this muddy, mucky road to get to the main grounds.  All along the way, the road was lined with the various breeds of apple trees!  Haralsons are the ones in this picture.

 Driving up the mucky road to the Harvest!

These were all over the place.  This was close to the entrance and it was very kid oriented with all these apple characters and other pictures, stories, etc.

 

A little glimpse of the clubhouse.  This was the bakery section.  It was quite a unique place!

 

Yum!  Pie!

Stay warm everyone!  We hear snow is on the way later this weekend!!

-E