Vixxie goes on an apple adventure

Vixxie's Mabon Apple Adventures (Part 2)

Missed the first part of my Mabon Series? Check out this post.

Getting immersed in everything Autumn

In autumn, Vixxie the kitchen witch wakes up from her lazy summer slumber. The season features some of my favourite ingredients for cooking and baking: making desserts with apples and pears, sipping blackberry and rosehip tea, squeezing fresh pomegranate juice, preparing corn salad, carrot crock pots, cauliflower oven dishes, mashed potatoes with pumpkins and squash, purees with chestnuts and walnuts….
And the spices this time of the year are incredibly fragrant and delicious too! Rosemary, sage, cinnamon, nutmeg,… Mmm!
I also love the scents of cedarwood, clove, fig and frankincense.

My kitchen is currently in scaffolds as I’m installing a new cabinet with a bigger work bench, so my season’s altar will have to wait a bit longer. Shame, because I had cool plans for my crate decorated with acorns, pine cones and sprigs 🙂
Look at these wonderful centrepieces I found on Pinterest!

Search for balance and getting out of the covid melancholia.

As Mabon is traditionally a time of balance, it’s obviously also an impeccable time to get some cobweb-cleaning done in that dustpan of my brain. There’s been a lot of feeling spiritually lopsided lately. Because of Corona and the inability to still my wanderlust, being locked inside my house, far away from my loved ones. But also because of a growing doom-saying feeling that we will never see the end of this isolation. I am starting to lose hope and getting increasingly infuriated with the way this crisis is being handled. I feel on my own. I feel unsafe, I feel unprotected. I feel abandoned. I’m getting increasingly moody, I feel worn-out. The threshold to step outside is growing with every day I choose to remain inside. Getting out of bed becomes more and more difficult, while staying in the sofa all day feeling like nothing matters anymore becomes easier as the days go by. But that is not the person I want to be. That isn’t going to bring me closer to my goals in life.

It’s time to stop going on verbal crusades that lead nowhere. It’s time to stop trying to educate my trespassing friends with common sense. It’s time to climb out of my pit of self-isolation. It’s time to leave the house and take back control over my body and mind. I haven’t left the house since March, with a few exceptions when I was expected at the office for a meeting. It’s time to stop reading every possible article about Corona and getting increasingly agitated. It’s time to stop feeding my anxiety. It’s time to stop working it out on the person I love. It’s time to get over Covid, not let the darkness rule my life and accept the consequences should I fall pray to the virus. It’s time to grow strong and start living again. I just have to figure out how exactly I’m supposed to do that. I think writing about it, is a good start.

Plucking fresh apples and pears from the orchard (Plukdag)

It’s one of those things I look SO much forward to every year. It started a lot of years ago by getting back in touch and meeting up with N., an old high-school friend. Turned out we both graduated as designers from different universities but as the years went by, he started a side hustle – or maybe more like a passion that grew out of proportion: a small fruit orchard. He inherited a beautiful piece of land in my former home region “Pajottenland”, with a couple of apple trees. Then planted some more, fell in love with the agricultural life and expanded his orchard with pears and prune trees. I was fascinated by his stories about the flowering spring orchard being a five star hotel for birds and small animals! For many years, always around September, we used to meet up for a drink and he would sell me fresh fruit from his orchard (very cheap!). Those were the best apples and pears I ate in my entire life. A couple of years ago however, he met the love of his life. Bless him. A Canadian man who owns a small ranch with dairy cattle and he decided, 3 years ago, to move to Canada permanently. The orchard got sold to an organic fruit growing company and my opportunity to buy fresh fruit there vanished in a puff of smoke. T_T

Apples and pears that you buy in the supermarket are delicious, don’t get me wrong, but fresh fruit taken off the tree only a few days ago, is something else entirely. If the fruits have no bruises and are intact with their stalk (and thus less vulnerable to rot), you can wrap them in paper and store them for months in a cold, dark space without them losing taste or going mush.

After N.’s relocation to Canada, I went on a search for local fruit orchards. I found plenty in my region up North, but the fruit never tasted as good. I guess friendship really does add a little bit of flavour :). Plus, Pajottenland and Zennevallei are well known for their very fertile soils and legendary fruit and vegetable produce. The North where I live now … not so much. Shortly after, I found an article in the newspaper about a big orchard “Fruithoeve Picard” in Horebeke, 45-ish minutes away from me, opening up several harvest days to the public. Now what could possibly be more fun than picking your own consume! Still needed a vehicle, in this case a taxi, because orchards are typically located in the middle of Nomansland 🙂

The public harvest day for Jonagold and Greenstar apples, and Conference pears were a blast. Especially with a virus lurking in every closed-off space and stressing me out wherever I feel like going, harvesting fruits in an open air orchard, in the middle of absolutely nowhere was very relaxing. It’s a very beautiful region, too.

Another of my favourite bio-locations is “De Pluktuin” in Edegem, which is right around my corner. I like to call it the garden of Eden. Same concept as the harvest orchards really -pluck what you need, weigh it and pay for what you harvested-, but instead of apples you can find raspberries, red currants, blackberries, gooseberries and cassis. (And a whole lot of other berries too, but the ones I just mentioned are my favourites!). And instead of harvesting in Autumn, you face the scorching suns of Summer. But it is magical on a somewhat cooler, breezy summer day.

Fruit orchards are seriously a little bit of paradise on earth.

Ah maaaaan! It reminds me so much of my time in high-school and all the times I got my ass handed to me for being late in class. My cousin who rode bikes with me in the morning used to think I was hiding secret summer boyfriends from her when I told her to drive ahead and I’d be fine on my own. The truth was a lot more creative ^_^. I snuck away into the bushes on the way to school in the morning to pick blackberries and stuff my face for breakfast 🙂 What can I say, Vixxie always loved her food 🙂