Prairie Fare: Does an apple a day really keep the doctor away?

“Are there any apples on our tree this year?” my older daughter recently asked.

“There are lots of ripe apples high in the tree,” my husband responded.

I thought about past autumns when she and our other two kids used an apple picker to harvest apples from our Haralson tree. Our excited dachshunds attempted to nab the ones that hit the grass.

One year, we attempted to make perfect apple pies with various types of crust recipes. The flakiest crust came from old-fashioned lard. Yes, you read that correctly.

We used an apple peeler-corer-slicer device to prepare the slices. My daughter always enjoyed any type of garden or kitchen tool. I’d buy them to keep her interested in helping me.

We needed to start freezing the extra pies.

“You can have as many apples as you’d like,” I responded a