There's a deep honey-brown syrup in Mark Rosenstein's kitchen that he cherishes. One taste and you'll know that it is, indeed, a treasure. The owner and chef of The Market Place restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, has captured the essence of apples in a drizzly syrup that he uses whenever he wants to uniquely enhance a food he is preparing.

Mark created his prized syrup and many of his other delicious ideas at a time when he was at the height of his apple euphoria. It all began with an effort to include regional foods in his cooking.

"I started wondering if there was a cuisine in this neck of the woods where I live. But there wasn't really a western North Carolina cuisine," Mark says.

So he sought to find foods that epitomized the region. "We've got a lot of trout and apples around here, but I decided to start messing around with apples," he says.

His goal was to find something that would thicken and add rich flavor to vegetable stock. And he found it by gently simmering apple cider until it reduces and thickens to the consistency of maple syrup.

With a hint of cinnamon and cloves, the syrup is an incredible treat on ice cream of waffles, of drizzled over scones. Adding herbs or chile peppers gives the syrup a spicy-sweet kiss that enhances pork of seafood.

Mark's apple experimentation became almost an obsession. "But that's the way I do everything," he says. "I just do it over and over and over until I figure it out. I did apple stuff at home. I did stuff at the restaurant. I would test it on anybody that would try it."

His concentration on apples resulted in enough recipes and information to fill his cookbook, In Praise of Apples. And he works apples into his menus when the fruit is available locally, as he does with other seasonal produce. Part of his philosophy is to support local growers, a method that began out of necessity at his first restaurant 31 years ago. That restaurant was so far off the beaten path that suppliers refused to send delivery trucks down the one-lane dirt road. "Every day I went out with a basket and my pocketknife to three or four gardeners in the area and literally picked from their gardens," he says. Although the restaurant has moved, his philosophy hasn't changed. He uses fresh, organic local produce whenever possible. And he's still the apple man.

THE APPEAL'S IN THE PEEL