Better than Country Fruit Stands... Curbside Free Fruit

This morning, as I was making my way down the street to pick Sole, my near-four year old, up from his 2 hours of kindergarten, a discarded wine juice bucket filled to the brim with green balls caught my attention.  I pulled over, did a double-take, recognized the house the bucket stood in front of (family friends of old), and then noted that the green balls were no less that about 50 tart, delicious, suited to apple pie perfection granny smith apples (Quest, my older son's favorite).   Disregarding the ants on it, the few bruises, and the few halved apples that had squirrel marks on them, I loaded them up and felt like the abundance of Fall had just laid itself before me.

And so, spontaneously I decided to test these apples with my young baker Sole at hand.  And if they proved successful, I would prepare a big batch of dough and use our impromptu recipe to cook with my preschool students at my drop-in cooking/art classes downtown tomorrow, in addition to juicing the apples for some yummy seasonal cider.  Since I usually work with a group of 4-8 children and I'm always mindful that each child be directly involved in each part of the cooking or baking process, I decided to try out a mini pie variation by using a muffin tin pan, with each cup lined in parchment paper.   Yes, it was fairly tedious rolling and moulding each pie, but the outcome was pretty delicious.   The buttery crust had a bit of cinnamon in it, and once the crust was folded over the filling and punctured with holes it was brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with brown sugar.

All the fillings had chops of granny smith apples, lemon juice, cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, white sugar, and ground slivered almonds in them to add texture.   For a special treat I added 2/3 tablespoon of nutella to three of the tarts, to add a bit of decadence.  If you try them yourself, let me know what you think (I'll eventually be meticulous enough to write down exact measurements, but I'm more the type of explore, experiment, and amend type of cook... uninhibited by measurements and precision).  I'm working on developing more of the latter, as that would make me more consistent as a cook, as I'd then be able to replicate my successful recipes more easily.

When you peruse the pic of the pail of apples, those of you living in more Mediterranean climates might be tickled to see the earth-toned fallen leaves already settling on the ground, officially only two days into Autumn.