How to Cure Seasonal Affective Disorder with Apple Sauce

Be Glad About Any Old Thing

One minute watching world news is enough to know that if there was ever a time to count your blessings it is today. For us the sun is out, chickens are laying, courgettes are sneakily becoming marrows and it is raining gluts of fruit, especially cucumbers.

Too Much Food? Give it Away

Sometimes I sneak cucumbers into the village larder and, if visitors come here, they can’t leave without one. Weirdly, cucumbers are comedians. Follow somebody out brandishing a cucumber saying ‘please take this.’ and you will always get a snigger.

Deal with Apples

Apples grow like weeds in Devon and everybody is trying to give them to everybody else.

Dozens of them, thudding to the ground every day. Years ago somebody here made a cider press, we had gallons of stinking, cloudy scrumpy, and bad heads. That won’t happen again but they have to be turned into something.

Worry about Today

News keeps coming. The UK has accidentally lost most of its European workforce, so now we have serious first world problems with not enough people to process or transport food. It is dreadful knowing there are no chickens in Nandos, or milkshakes in Macdonald’s. Whatever next?

Turn this into an opportunity and distract yourself from the future. Get into survival mode.

Make Emergency Apple Sauce

Gather apples and spend half a day peeling and chopping. The end result will be a huge pile of peel, cores and wormy brown bits for the compost and a small pot of apple slices. Don’t give up. These apples are going to you get right through to spring.

We have a helpful dog living here at the moment. He offers to round up the chickens every day and he loves it when you give him a slice of apple because it means you must like him. He doesn’t really like the apple taste though, so he chews it up and tries to spit it into the saucepot. 

Store it for Winter

After all the work the slices will start going brown so you must quickly boil them up, with a bit of sugar, until you have powdery sweet sludge. Hopefully, it won’t be too brown and will look nice in pots.

It is easy to find the pots. The cupboard from hell unleashes a tsunami of plastic. Proof that somebody around here has been wasting money on takeaways. But not anymore. Oh no, I am going to eat apple sauce every day and save all that money back again.

The only problem is remembering it is apple sauce for an entire winter. The old labels were potentially confusing and tricky to remove. They must have been stuck on with super glue.

Nothing looked nice anymore and it turned out that the freezer was dammed after years of hoarding and dramatic diets. Dried up fish pie from the day of eating more fish, wholesome, tasteless, pre-pandemic soups, and bags of grey chicken pieces in case the cats would like unprocessed cat food. Idiots. Everybody knows cats only eat chicken fresh from your own plate.  

More work. Several hours later the freezer is gleaming with a few tiny pots of sauce in the corner and the waste food bin is stuffed with fish pie and soups. There was no time to think about winter.

And suddenly things in the garden looked pretty good.