Food & Fun Recipes
Apple Lady Bugs
Ingredients
- apples
- peanut butter
- raisins
- miniature marshmallows
- toothpicks
- licorice or fruit twists
Instruction
- Cut an apple in half. Use ½ of the apple for the body.
- Dot peanut butter on apple skin, and place raisins on peanut butter dots for lady bug spots.
- Use a marshmallow on a toothpick for a head.
- Use pieces of licorice twist for antennas.
Writing Activity
Use five descriptive words to describe your ladybug. Use these adjectives in sentences. Underline the adjectives. Ex: My bright red ladybug snack is juicy. Use a search engine to look up "ladybugs" on the internet. Summarize what you learned.
Apple Trivia
- The apple tree originated in an area between the Caspian and the Black Sea.
- Charred apples have been found in prehistoric dwellings in Switzerland. Apples were the favorite fruit of ancient Greeks and Romans.
- In the US, the Pilgrims planted the first apple trees - in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In colonial time apples were called "winter banana" or "melt-in-the-mouth."
- Newton Pippin apples were the first apples exported from America in 1768, some were sent to Benjamin Franklin in London. One of George Washington's hobbies was pruning his apple trees.
- Pomology is the science of apple growing. The apple is a member of the rose family.
- The top apple-producing states are Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The average size of an apple orchard in the US is 50 acres.
- The world's top apple producers are China, the US, Turkey, Poland and Italy.
- Apple trees take four to five years to produce their first fruit. Most apples are still picked by hand in the fall.
- Apples harvested from an average tree can fill 20 boxes that weigh 42 pounds each. The largest apple picked weighed three pounds.
- Some apple trees will grown over 40 feet high and live over 100 years.
- It takes the energy from 50 leaves to produce one apple.
- Apples are fat-, sodium-, and cholesterol-free and are a great source of pectin, a fiber. A medium apples is about 80 calories and has five grams of fiber.
- Americans eat 19.6 pounds or about 65 fresh apples every year. Europeans eat about 46 pounds of apples annually.