One of the things that I love about Fall is that we get to go apple-picking!  This has been our family tradition for as long as I can remember and I always, always love it!  I love how the cold, crisp air smells in the apple orchard, how we can go for tractor rides even though it's easily walkable, how the sweet corn smells when cooked in the big, open cauldron and how it TASTES (mmm... sweet corn dunked in butter, with the juice running down your chin and the kernels getting stuck between the teeth-- ok, fine, I don't really enjoy the latter part!), how we can climb the trees to get that juicy, red apple right at the top, and most importantly, I love that we get to bite into as many apples as we want! 

My family has always been pretty conservative and always picks bags of Red Delicious but starting from a couple of years ago, I've tried to spice things up and started to pick a variety.  This year's new favourite is the Spartan (ask me or my brother to say "Spartan" in our Chinglish! hehehehe), a ruby red, white-fleshed, sweet and tart but ever so slightly.  They make great "eating" apples but they're also good for baking.  They're also good for people who are sensitive to the normal tartness of  other apples. 

After we leave the orchard, a usual tradition is to go buy fresh honey from farmers on our way home.  It's not much cheaper than from buying it in the supermarket but there's something about buying honey from a farmer that makes it appealing.

This year, things were slightly different as we went apple-picking one weekend earlier than usual (we always went on the Thanksgiving weekend).  Because it was earlier than usual, there were very few people there, which meant a lot more apples left.  But because there weren't that many people, the corn wasn't cooking!!!   We also didn't buy honey on our way home.  What WAS the same was that we all had fun and we came away with bags of yummy apples.