every fall, sometime in october, a horde of mit students travel in a bunch of long yellow cars to an orchard an hour west of campus. like sleepy ants we straggle out of our buses and crawl over the apple-laden hills; as the sun starts to descend towards the horizon, and winds shake flame-red leaves on limber branches, we make our journey back home.

that is to say – apple picking! yippee!

apple picking is a yearly activity sponsored by dormcon,⁠01 short for dormitory council - idk why this makes sense mit’s student government body for everyone who lives in dorms. they host biweekly meetings where they discuss dorm policy, as well as interfacing with mit admin to advocate for student quality of life in the dorms. they also sponsor fun activities! 

this year, apple picking was a source of some consternation for my dorm, east campus. we’re one of the bigger dorms on campus, with around 400 people, but we received what some people felt was an unfairly low number of spots to go apple picking – indeed, we only had space for about half of the people who were interested. forms went around asking people what the maximum amount they would be willing to pay to go apple picking was. in the end, it stayed free, but a lottery and a five-dollar commitment fee made it slightly higher stakes than it otherwise would’ve been. 

on friday, october 9th, i was emailed saying i’d been selected through lottery! yay. 

day of!

i wake up super early.⁠02 by super early i mean like 9:00am, which is really not early but whatever… i put on a sweater and meet other ec people and start heading westside; then we realize it’s pretty cold, so me and a few other people run back in to get more jacket⁠03 i grab the brown jacket i bought off dormspam!

we go to maseeh⁠04 another dorm, our designated meeting spot and wait. we turn in a liability waiver that says “i know if i fall off a tree and die it’s my fault”. i wave to various friends from various other dorms. i realize that in my rush to leave the dorm, i hadn’t brought any tangerines⁠05 a typical breakfast for me is three tangerines, two if i’m feeling not very hungry to eat. i start to feel hungry. 

food time! first, i realize that my pocket still holds a couple pieces of pita bread yoinked from terrascope lunch the thursday before. yippee! unfortunately i do seek more, so i run over to concord market⁠06 the somewhat expensive small grocery store located in the student center and buy two things of yogurt. one of them is a yogurt drink that i fell in love with while staying the summer here in 2025. nowadays it’s a rare treat, but whatever! i deserve it.

i run back and realize there was no need to run back, because the buses are not moving at all. some of the tetazoo seniors are also going to concord; eric and an, two tetazoo sophomores, go to dunkin. i wait in line and talk to jsin. 

finally we get in the bus and start moving! the buses are sorted by dorm, so i sit next to jsin from florey and try my best to sleep. i’m…not sure how successful that was? like it’s a yellow school bus, so it’s quite uncomfortable and bouncy, but you know i try my best. i get some nice pictures of fall foliage too

okay in hindsight this picture is bad for showing the pretty colors

growing up in southern california we don’t really get these reds and oranges and yellows – i’m sure it’s obnoxious every time i point it out to the easterners around me.

we finally arrive at the orchard! it’s really pretty. we all pour out of our various buses and scramble to enter the orchard. i get a bit confused about who i’m going in with, but eventually i find a group of five: me, jsin, serena also from ec, charles burton-connor, and freddy french house. after receiving our maybe ~4 gallon bag, we enter the orchard!

how this orchard is set up is basically there are like 20 different varieties of apple trees, organized into neat little lines that sprawl over the ups and downs of the hills. unfortunately no one in my group was an apple connoisseur, so we kind of just wandered around tasting different apples and deciding which ones we liked. “oh these are nice!” “these are pretty sweet.” “i don’t like how mealy these ones are…” eventually if an apple met a certain (low) criteria of goodness, its fellows went into our bag. 

i was feeling kind of sleepy but i got woken up by the prospect of climbing things. i climbed lots of trees! very fun. there were also a bunch of very rickety, very scary ladders, but i mostly avoided them. 

look how happy!

and so we wandered ‘round the undulating hills, collecting apples. every once in a while at mit, i find myself thinking of the end of the third lord of the rings book, where the newfound prosperity of the shire is described by something like pyramids of peach pits like stacks of conquered skulls, or something like that. apple picking did make me feel like that like wow look at all those apples

cheese!

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there’s some fun things at the orchard, like the apple blasters (where you get to shoot apples out of these huge air-powered cannons at targets) (sorry i forgot to get pictures) or this big windmill thing, or trucks pulling big carts with haybales that you can sit on.⁠07 you had to pay for this so we didn’t do it eventually we ran out of things to do and made our way towards the exit. 

we bought some apple cider donuts⁠08 for those not from the northeast, apple cider donuts are like a big thing here for some reason; they’re just little donuts with sugar on the outside that don’t taste particularly of apple and then walked back to the bus, where they had two big boxes of apple cider donuts for free. so i ended up eating like 3 of them! yay. 

long bus ride back. i sleep (this time i have the window seat so that makes it easier). our bus gets back a bit later than the new house and bc buses, so me and jsin and selena have to rush to the stud to find freddy and charles. we pour out our wealth of red-and-green gold on a table. charles has some sort of interview (??), but we go around in a circle around and pick the ones we like. then i have to go to dance practice lol…⁠09 expect a dance blog soon!

LOOK AT ALL THOSE APPLES

overall fun time! i am glad to have frolicked outside among smiling friends. would do again :) 

pie time yay

i go home, apple-laden.⁠10 also an and eric had a bag for themselves, so they brought back SO MANY APPLES to tetazoo what else is there to do but bake a pie?

i’ve been doing a LOT of baking recently – it’s probably the main non-academic thing that i find myself doing over and over again. it’s just calming to do something with my hands and then have a tangible result that i can give to people that i care about. so with all of this raw material with me, obviously there is a thing to do!

i kind of got outbuzzed on the pie thing because on the day of apple picking, george (a senior on my floor) hosted his event fallazoo, where he bakes a bunch of autumny desserts and puts on over the garden wall in the lounge. that day i was a little busy so all i could do was help peel and slice some apples before i had to go somewhere else. but later that day i was able to make some crust!⁠11 here's the recipe i used: https://natashaskitchen.com/easy-pie-crust-recipe/ i’d never made pie crust before – usually i just buy the premade ones from the frozen section in the grocery store – but since tetazoo has communal flour and butter and sugar, i figured why not. i dug up a food processor from our appliances cabinet⁠12 this kitchen is like the most well-stocked kitchen i could’ve ever asked for and made two big balls of dough, which i then put in the fridge.

the pie-making⁠13 recipe here: https://natashaskitchen.com/apple-pie-recipe/ itself would have to wait a bit, until monday night. that day i got hot pot with some friends; after we got back, i recruited one of them (yale, class of 30) to help me make the pie! i cooked up the sauce while he sliced the apples; after i rolled out the dough, we carefully ladled our apples into the pie, stacking them tall and high and then draping the other pie dough over it. the effect was somewhat like a gently-rounded ufo, or perhaps a lava dome. 

this went into the oven. approximately 20 minutes in someone came into glounge to tell me that the oven was filled with smoke. this is bad! it turns out that some of the pie juices had dripped onto the floor of the oven and were starting to burn; hua helped me clean it up. but at least the pie was gorgeous…

look at how prettyy

i held a brief eating party for this pie in tetazoo kitchen, complete with leftover coolwhip from fallazoo. the guests were:

• everyone in my apple picking group 
• bunch of tetafrosh and tetafroshfriends in the kitchen 
• freddy’s roommate will

thank you will for looking enthused

although this was a pretty good pie success, there were definitely some lessons i learned. first of all, the dough is significantly easier to roll out if you give it a bit more time to warm up after taking it out from the fridge; second of all, PUT A PAN UNDER THE PIE SO THAT THE JUICES DON’T LIGHT ON FIRE. these lessons i kept close to my heart as i prepared for the Second Pie. after all there are soooooo many apples left 

pie 1.5 – distracted by pumpkin pie

in preparation for the 2nd apple pie, i made another batch of pie crust. unfortunately this pie crust was called into action by a birthday celebration, where we made audrey a pumpkin pie! so my apple pie plans got slightly delayed. 

okay there was supposed to be a picture here but i guess i forgot to take a picture :skull:

apple pie 2: electric boogaloo

i made yet another batch of pie crust to prepare for this pie. ngl this pie crust sat in the fridge for a while – i had a pretty busy week where i had to write 2 earth science tests for huso-india, had a 12.004 pset that was bothering me, and generally felt kind of overwhelmed. but after i got past that, and after i realized that the apples were starting to become elderly, i felt a new wind on my back pushing me towards making more pie. 

this time i felt somewhat inspired – i wanted to make a bunch of mini pies in a muffin tray. i would roll out little circles, fill them up with some apple, and then bake them. unfortunately it became REALLY annoying to roll out the pie crust into little circles so i gave up after three of them. but they also turned out really cute! (except for i forgot to eggwash them so they weren’t as pretty as they could’ve been)

the other two were eaten before i took this picture

yeah so i gave up on that idea. instead i remade another big pie! once again i rolled out the pie crust and stacked the apples nice and tall. even after cramming as many apples as i could in, i still had some left over… so i put them into the uncrusted muffin tray to make little apple crisps. i think i had to go somewhere after i put the pie in the oven (don’t exactly remember why ??) but my delightful floormates removed my adorable child at the perfect time. yay 2nd pie!

this one is less golden brown but still delicious

also shoutout to sage who made the crisp topping for the apple crisp using our communal oats. look at how nice it looks too

they are browning

fully baked!

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and with that i was able to use up all of my apples i think! these various sweet treats went to a wide variety of people – the small pies were consumed by me, liam, and hua; the apple crisps by various tetazoans in the early morning hours. for this big pie, it, too, went to a multitude of friends – some for scarlet, kian, and charles from burton-connor; some for rukevwe from slugfest; and the rest for starving tetazoans seeking a piece of warm sun in the cold harsh reality of midterm season.