Manzanitas

Several months ago I posted about our beautifully blooming apple trees. All the pinks and whites absolutely covering the entire tree - so beautiful. Almost unreal.
This season, Chris and I enjoyed our small apples and even got more than we bargained for. You see, bigger apples make them more versatile because you can peel them, core them and use them for many things, such as apple pie. But we have small apples. They are about the size of a ping pong ball, so peeling them for recipes just doesn't work (at least not in my books). So, we found two main recipes to use them for: apple juice and caramel and chocolate covered apples.


I have to tell you more about each of these as they were amazing! First, the apple juice. Since you don't have to peel them, just core them, this became our #1 way to use the apples. I would core each of them - making sure that the apple didn't contain worms - and put them in filtered water, boiled them and added a touch of sugar. Perfect! Juice for the week! The flavor was outstanding! I could NEVER have ordinary, sugar water with apple flavoring and enjoy it again. The flavor of this "real" apple juice was as if you were biting into an apple. Tangy and sweet. Perfect. My parents even got to get in on all the apple juice making fun! Ha! (Hey, they volunteered!)

The other way we used the apples was a creation of Chef Chris. He made these perfectly wonderful apples with either a chocolate/white chocolate coating or a caramel glaze that was beautiful to look at and delicious to eat.


Chris made these for my parents when they came, his work and a church group we were going to. On the first batch, he didn't know to add milk to the caramel as they hardened a bit too much and they were hard as a rock as you tried to sink you teeth into them. Ha! My mom had a blast trying to work her way through it. But the next batches came out nice and silky.

I would say one of the downers of having so many apples was picking the ones up that fell on the ground.


We'd have to sweep almost every day to ensure we wouldn't have apple juice on our sidewalk everyone stepping on them. BUT we couldn't pick them up every day because our trash cans would get too heavy for the trash collectors. One day, we even found little boys from our neighborhood lining up the apples and smooshing them with their little feet on our sidewalk. I became the neighborhood witch by having to stop that - yuck! What a mess! And when it would be windy at night, we'd hear thumping and rolling sounds on our roof as the apples fell. Talk about keeping us awake at night.

Alas, we enjoyed our apples and the goodness it brought!

Oh, and yes, the title of this entry means "little apples" in Spanish.

Pack on the Back

Oh, and so it was a nice large pack on the back. Rewind:

For the past few years, we had a little tradition of going camping during the 4th of July weekends with our friends (I'll leave their names off for privacy). We had gone to the campsite where we found the bear nearby and Rocky Mountain National Park. Very nice camping trips. But this year, we wanted to challenge ourselves a little more. We decided to not pack our cars and go camping, but instead, we'd pack very large backpacks and go to our camping destination on foot, with allllll of our belongings on our backs. It turns out that I had about 30 pounds on my back and Chris had more like 40 pounds.


Yes, the dogs had to carry their weight too. So, they had to carry their own food and some of our stuff too. They carried them on their backs like it was nothing.


We rented our packs since we didn't quite know if we'd like to carry all of our belongings on our backs just yet. Off we went. We'd hike up half of the loop on that Saturday morning and come back following the rest of the loop for a total of 11 miles. The day was cool, so that helped make things pleasant. We had a nice lunch by a forested area and we kept going. What was interesting is that you literally can't carry all the water you need. That would just be back breaking. So, we bought this cool water bottle filter that kills the bacteria using UV light. The taste wasn't great, but knowing you can carry a lighter load by refilling was truly worth it!

Once we got to our campsite, our shoulders were just so sore from the packs. But the scenery from the campsite was unbelievable! There was no one camping close to us at all (only across the lake), so it was quite remote and beautiful!



That night we cooked hot dogs and smores and had a nice night by the bonfire. The surprising thing was that it was so coooold - I still get surprised by that since it was the middle of summer. I went to bed early with the dogs and Chris and our friends stayed up a bit longer. That next morning, we had our breakfast - dehydrated eggs - and our friends headed back to finish some papers for school. We stayed to enjoy the mountains for longer. We took a long nap and Chris and the dogs were rested enough to go for a hike to other surrounding lakes. The dogs LOVE Chris and his adventurous spirit. Chris runs down trails with them and encourages them to follow their hunting instincts. This time the victims were marmots - the dogs didn't catch any of them, but they got very close. This is the second lake Chris got to see.

In the meantime, I took naps, enjoyed the view, exercised a bit, re-filled our water containers and made dinner - again, dehydrated food. This is pretty much all you can take to eat since it's non-perishable, lightweight and very easy to prepare. We had more smores that night....oh, and it even snowed for a little while too. Did I mention it was cold? I believe this was one of my first experiences with camping without any toilets... I think the most challenging part was to find a spot to do your business that felt private. I always feared an animal would approach me in the middle of it all. Ha!

The next morning, we packed up all of our packs and headed out. It was a much nicer hike going back to the car - though we found out instead of doing a full loop, we actually did one segment of the loop twice. Oops! We had a nice picnic lunch, the dogs got to spoon and we were off to a nice well-deserved shower at home. The good thing is that our hike was close to Denver so we didn't have to drive for too long.

Backpacking - the next new tradition for us? We shall see.