Adam's Apples

Temporarily between snow storms, I couldn't place these large blocky apples in a bin at Somerville's winter market today. Some of them were huge. Their cheerful sunshine yellow and small rosy orange blush (but not the shape) suggested Blushing Golden , which would have been a find indeed in February. When I learned they were Mutsu I had to see how they had fared in storage for 4 months.

Battered but good: Rubinette Between last fall's bumper crop here in the Northeast and a bit of apple tourism on the West Coast, I got to try an astonishing 30 varieties of apples for the first time last year. (That's not counting a few whose identities I am still trying to sort out.) I also had help from some of you who sent me samples to try. Thank you very much. I hope my descriptions repay some measure of your generosity. I like all of these apples. However, today is the day I rank them according to a rating system in which one star is very good, two stars are excellent, and three stars are extraordinary.

If you follow this blog or subscribe to its feed  in an online reader, email client, or via email , you'll sometimes get notifications about old posts as if they were new. I'm sorry about that! It's an unavoidable effect, apparently, of revising those posts, which I need to do from time to time. This is not an attempt to pass off old work as new or lure you back to read something you've already seen. I fix errors when I find them and sometimes revise a post to refer to a later post about the same apple or topic. This time of year I typically make many revisions to add apples to my one-to-three-star rating system. Sorry! And thanks for following me anyway.