The taste of fall: Easy homemade apple cider without a juicer!
Here in Israel, we miss lots of the familiar tastes of the seasons, but mostly, we get by. We adapt and learn to enjoy new flavours, like the way Naomi Rivka will stash a few fresh dates in the freezer for a couple of hours and then take them out and mash them into “sorbet.” Or like chummus – NOT! One of the things I love in the sukkah, besides a cool breeze (since there’s no hope for that where we are) is real apple cider. We drink it, but it’s also a crucial ingredient in my Yom Tov Squash Soup. Or at least it WAS, before we moved to Israel. There really is no substitute for cider. If you’re from the Northeast or some other fall-colours, cool-weather kind of place, hopefully you’ll agree. They sell alcoholic cider in the liquor stores here, but it’s more like bubbly-sweet apple juice than anything I would call cider. Apple juice is kids’ stuff, but cider has sass – it’s all grown up. It’s sweet but spicy; spunkier than apple juice and fuller in body and texture. And