About this time every year I start thinking about apples, having grown up pretty much in the middle of NY Apple Country. Particularly, I pine for the apple cider that was so ubiquitous in NY – there’s nothing that says Fall more than a glass of cold apple cider (medium brown in color, opaque and unfiltered, tangy) with a white powdered donut.

Tidbit #1: New York has 71 cider mills that turn 250 million pounds of apples per year into juice and cider.

Tidbit #2: “Cider” is what you get when you take a bunch of fresh apples and put them through a blender.  Cider is unprocessed; appears dark, brown, and cloudy; and usually contains the pulp of the apple.  If you then take this cider and process it to clarify the juice, you get “apple juice”.  (American cider does not contain alcohol, while cider in England and Australia does – Americans call that ‘hard’ cider.)

Think I’ll go see if there are any more Granny Smith’s in the fridge….