Apple Onion Sauté

End of August. The light starts coming in golden at five-thirty in the evening now, that fall light that some places never get and Montana has for ten weeks of the year, and the swallows are starting to gather in flocks before they leave for wherever swallows go. I do not know where they go. I should know. I have been meaning to look it up for fifteen years. Maybe this year. Probably not.

Third cutting started Wednesday. The grass had come back enough to justify it after the cool nights of last week, and the second growth was good, denser than I expected. I will get four hundred bales out of it if the weather holds. Forecast for the next ten days says it holds. We will see. Forecasts in August in Montana have the credibility of a politician's campaign promise, which is to say, slightly better than a coin flip.

Patrick rode out with me Tuesday morning. The first time since June. The medication has been good for two weeks and his hip is quieter and he wanted to see the south fence line where I had repaired a section in July. We went slow. Two hours in the saddle for him, which used to be a coffee break and is now, at sixty-eight with Parkinson's, a feat. I watched him ride and I watched my own hands on my reins and I had a moment, on the rim of the south pasture with the Bulls in front of us and the river below, where I understood that the time we have for this exact configuration of things is finite and probably short. Not in a sad way. Just the way. Patrick on a horse next to me on a August morning with the grass golden and the swallows starting to gather. There will not be many more of these. I made a point of memorizing it. The exact light. The way his back stayed square against the saddle. The sound of the horse blowing. The smell of sage. I am thirty-one weeks from my thirtieth birthday and I am banking memories like a man who knows winter is coming. Which I am. Which we are.

Marcus has made it twenty-eight days. He came over Wednesday evening to tell me. We did not have a cookout planned. He brought a lemon meringue pie his sister had made because he said he did not know how to thank me and his sister had told him to bring food. I said, Marcus, you do not need to thank me. He said, Yeah I do. He said, Most days for the last twenty-eight, the only thing keeping me out of the bar at five o'clock has been knowing you would notice if I started missing Saturdays. I told him that was probably how Gary got me through the first year, although I had not known it at the time. I told him eventually you keep going for yourself. He said, Yeah, but right now I keep going for you. I said, That is fine. We sat on the porch and ate pie. The pie was good. His sister can bake. I told him to tell his sister thanks. He said he would.

Tom Whelan and I shod two big draft horses out at the Donnelly place near Two Dot on Friday. Belgians, both of them, eighteen hundred pounds each, the kind of horse that if he stepped on you, you would just be done. They were sweet. Drafts almost always are — the bigger the horse the gentler, in my experience, because they have nothing to prove. We had them done by two in the afternoon and Mrs. Donnelly fed us a late lunch — beef stew and her own bread and three kinds of pickles she had put up that summer, served in jars, eaten with a spoon, the way pickles should be eaten. Tom said it was the best lunch he had had in a year. Mrs. Donnelly is seventy-eight. Tom is eighty-one. There was a moment at the table where I felt like the youngest person in the world and also the oldest, both at once, the way you feel when you sit at a table with elders who have known each other since high school and are eating soup their grandmothers taught them to make.

Sunday I made elk meatballs from the last of last year's ground in the freezer. The new elk season opens in five weeks and I am starting to clear the freezer. Meatballs in a tomato sauce I made from the last of the garden tomatoes — fifteen pounds of paste tomatoes I had cooked down all afternoon Saturday into a thick sauce I could freeze in jars for the winter. Spaghetti. Parmesan. Bread. A meal that says go ahead, fall, we are ready. Patrick had three meatballs. Mom had two and called it a triumph. The garden is winding down. The fall is coming. I am thirty in three months. The work is the work. The fire helps.

The meatballs were the main event that Sunday, but it was the side I keep thinking about — something sweet and savory to set next to the spaghetti, something that used what the end of the garden and the start of the cellar had to offer. An apple onion sauté is almost embarrassingly simple, but on a night when you’re cooking to say go ahead, fall, we’re ready, simple is exactly right. Apples coming in, onions out of the bin, ten minutes in a hot pan — it belongs at that table.

Prep Time: 5 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 17 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium yellow onions, halved and thinly sliced
2 medium apples (Honeycrisp or Braeburn), peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (or 1/4 teaspoon dried)
1/4 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Instructions

Heat the pan. In a large skillet over medium heat, melt the butter with the olive oil until the butter is foamy and just beginning to subside.
Cook the onions. Add the sliced onions and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 6–8 minutes until the onions are soft and beginning to turn golden at the edges.
Add the apples. Add the apple slices, brown sugar, thyme, salt, and pepper. Stir to combine and cook for another 4–5 minutes, until the apples are tender but not mushy and the onions have taken on a light caramel color.
Deglaze. Pour in the apple cider vinegar and stir, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Cook for 1 minute until the vinegar is mostly absorbed and the mixture is glossy.
Taste and serve. Adjust salt and pepper as needed. Serve warm alongside pork, poultry, elk, or any hearty fall main.

Nutrition (per serving)

Apple Onion Sauté — A Side for the Last of the Garden and the First of the Fall