We are super excited to bring you another micro story, entitled‘Tiny Green Apples’, from the very talented Fiona Jones. A cute tale about loving your children through actions not just words. We hope you enjoy reading it and if you’d like to submit a story of your own, please see our submission page for more info.

Fiona Jones is a part-time teacher, a parent and a spare-time writer, with work recently published by Folded Word, Buckshot Magazine and Silver Pen. You may have seen other stories from Fiona on our site, including ‘Mud‘ and ‘A Place‘.

You can follow Fiona on Twitter or Linkedin

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TINY GREEN APPLES

SOS! What do you do with a large—a very large—bagful of wild apples, hard and green and sized like golf balls? Google doesn’t have a page for this.

Refusing the apples is not an option. Ten-year-old squidgelet took a shopping bag, put on jeans and wellies and fought his way through undergrowth and thorns to the back end of a desolate wasteland where someone must have thrown away an apple core decades ago. “It was difficult,” he says proudly, “and I got hurt and scratched.” He has provided for his family, like a cat bringing home what cats bring home, and my role is clear: to accept them, to cook them and to submit the results for his approval.

Did I bring this on myself? Ever since my children could walk I have taken them berry-picking, and as they’ve grown older we’ve discussed the advantages of wild-grown, pesticide-free, zero-carbon fruit. So here I stand with a load of wild-grown, pesticide-free, zero-carbon, rock-hard fruit, and I must make something edible of it if it costs me a week’s struggle.

I laboriously cut and peeled the largest of the hoard and made an apple crumble. I added a few more, cored but unpeeled, to homemade fruit smoothies—not too many, because of their acidity. A week or so passed as more bags of tiny apples piled up at the kitchen door. Finally I hit upon the idea I’ve used ever since: core the apples, boil them with sugar and put them through the food processor, skins and all. I use some of the puree for pies, combined with blackberries or plums, and I freeze the rest. It’s a year’s worth of apple crumbles and cinnamon-apple cakes.

Thank you, squidgelet. It was difficult, and it took some work on my part, but I’m building quite a reputation for the distinctive appley flavours in my home baking.

~ Fiona Jones

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