Champagne Breakfast

Wednesday September 9th

Day 140

Slowly I’m diverting our apple river - chanelling it into gifts - “I’ll make apple pie,” says my father’s housekeeper. He finds them too crisp and sour to eat raw.

As an afterthought, I grate some - skins on, juice squeezed out - and add them to a banana cake recipe which I’m experimenting with. I’m making it vegan for our weekend visitors - using dried apricots instead of eggs and oil instead of butter. I’m not sure it works - I think too much fresh fruit in a cake can make it soggy. I could warm it up, call it pudding, and serve it with maple syrup.

What does work is making breakfast out of all the bruised and wormy and weevily ones. Every morning I rescue a jigsaw of apple pieces cut from these rejects - ten or twelve of them, and jam them down the funnel of my super-duper juicer, along with a handful of chopped spinach leaves, a quarter of a lime, a sliver of ginger root. Out pours a clear green, frothy, zingy stream which should taste horrible but is actually the champagne of all juices. And never gives you a hangover.