An ode to apple compote

In the future, I hope to have a garden. I want to grow my own food, the ultimate in sustainability. At the moment, we live in a small flat with no private garden. There’s a communal space and I’m very grateful for it, but it’s accessible through 3 locked doors or down an external path and a locked gate. It makes sense, to keep it secure, but it’s not the easiest to use. I planted some rosemary once and the young folks who work for the gardening service employed by my building, promptly dug it up again. I suspect they thought it was a weed. I yearn to be able to step straight from my house into some kind of private greenery, somewhere I can grow veggies and feed the birds.

For now, I help my Gran with her garden. She has had a lovely garden for over 30 years and every year we harvest apples from her enormous cooking apple tree. I always make apple compote with my portion of the bounty, slowly stewing the chopped apples with brown sugar and cinnamon, over many hours in a slow cooker. I love it with porridge especially, a sprinkling of chopped nuts, pumpkin seeds and maple syrup. I freeze it in batches and for a few months between November and February, the freezer drawers are groaning with compote-filled tupperware.

It feels unseasonable to write about apple compote in February, a full 8 months before it’ll return to my kitchen. It’s appropriate today though, because I just finished my last container, on this morning’s porridge. This Ode to Apple Compote will have to keep me going until the next batch arrives, in late October.