One half sunny weekend with a small breeze, our family trekked to one of our favorite “pick-your-own” farms in Massachusetts, the Belkin Family Lookout Farm. With its verdant green rolling hills speckled with fruit trees, you feel plopped in the middle of a child’s watercolored-and-inked picture book story.
Adding to its charm is the white train that travels under trestles dripping with grapevines to take you to an open orchard for fruit picking.
We came in August for the peaches. The peaches! Peaches warmed by a hot summer sun seemed like a way to taste summer itself. We were told the peach orchards were open, but also some apple. Apple?
At the end of the train route, the Jersey Macs, Red Dandee (small and perfect for back-to-school lunch boxes), and Early Gold (they really do look like small drops of gold, and were our favorite) were ripe and delicious.
With such an abundance of apples, what to do with them? And, it got us thinking, what could be a better fall hostess gift, than something created out of your fall harvest.
Here are 10 fall hostess gift ideas, inspired by the overabundance of apples you will surely have after apple picking at a farm near you.
- A delicious and easy recipe for apple butter (Taste of Lizzy T).
- Brown butter apple loaf (The Kitchn).
- Grandma’s homemade applesauce (Pinch of Yum).
- The perfect apple pie (Once Upon a Chef).
- The best apple cake (A Family Feast).
- A savory apple chutney (Food Network).
- A mason jar of canned apple pie filling (Skip to My Lou).
- Slice apples in half to make a fall version of these hand-stamped tea towels (Making Lemonade).
- Mason jar apple, caramel and cream cheese dip (Hoosier Homemade).
- Gourmet candy apples (The Creative Mom).