When we first moved into our house 5 years ago, I noticed that we had a crabapple tree in our side yard. Some years it has bloomed beautifully and produced a good amount of apples; other years, it hasn't done much. The deer frequently come up to munch on the dropped apples or eat them right off the tree (like last winter when there were somehow still apples on the tree in February??) We trimmed back a bunch of the branches last year and the apples came in full force this year. Tom and I had discussed doing something with them rather than letting them go to waste, but crabapples are quite sour. Tom had though about making a hard sour cider out of them; looking up crabapple recipes was still on my to-do list. A friend was over recently and asked about the tree. She said she had a recipe for a crabapple cobbler -- so I decided, why not try it?  We picked a few of the better looking apples and started chopping them up. After taste testing a few, I came to a shocking conclusion: these were not crabapples after all -- they were real, regular, sweet apples! Although, I still don't know what variety they are...