No Buy Valentine's Day

The universe, or at least American society, conspires against a "no-buy" pledge. The car needed a new drive belt. Otherwise, that's it. I have the same $40 in my wallet today that I had on Feb. 2.

No buy Valentine's Day is actually a breeze, comparatively. I made pie.

I used this recipe for the filling (although I cut the sugar in half), and a standard lard-based crust, using honey liqueur instead of water.

This is also a Dark Days recipe-- the only non-local ingredient was the sugar, which I purchase at a locally-owned mom-and-pop.

What's a little cold between friends

At the ice rink where I teach, there are two vending machines. One of them is full of candy and dorritos; the other one has what the snack food industry likes to call "healthy snacks"-- things like granola bars, and sun chips, and those "reel froot jelly" things that kids insist isn't candy. I refuse to call it "healthy" food, so I tell the kids that one of the machines has "junk food" and the other one has "snack food."

A fine distinction.

In fact the distinction should not be "healthy" or "snack" or "junk" but simply there is food and then there is that edible stuff that they sell in all the pretty boxes. Why not have a vending machine full of "food"-- yogurt mixed with jam, and only jam. Apples and pears. Nuts. Milk. Raisins. If you have to say "this is healthy food" chances are it isn't food at all because saying "healthy" food is like saying "cold" ice or "metal" steel-- it's simply redundant. Food is healthy. That is its purpose.

It seems appropriate to start October Unprocessed with snack food, since it's snack food where we find the most processing, and the most resistance to the idea that you can snack on something that's not bad for you.

And since it's a balmy 40 out right now, I thought I'd start with ice cream

Autumn ice cream
1 pear, roasted
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 T home-powdered maple sugar
1/2 teaspoon maple extract, if you're cheating on the unprocessed thing

So, powdering your own sugar turns out to be a giant drag when you only have a little coffee grinder to do it in. I put a tablespoon at a time into a standard coffee grinder, and let 'er rip. It's not exactly powdered, but it's very very fine. Mix this, the cream and extract, and stick them in the freezer about 30 minutes (this helps with the aerating process).

Roast the pear at 350 for about 40 minutes, peel the skin off, then grind it in the blender, and put in the fridge until chilled.

When the pear is chilled, start up the ice cream maker (I have a little 2 cup one) and pour in the cream mixture. When it starts to resemble ice cream, add the chilled pear, and aerate until it turns into ice cream.

I tried this with maple syrup for sweetener, but it makes the mixture too watery and it doesn't aerate properly.

Soup

At this time of year, all I seem to make is soup.

Roasted squash, pear and leek soup
1½ pounds sqash (I used delicata)
2 pears
2-3 leeks
2-3 cups leek stock
Creme fraiche
Honey

Heat oven to 350/170

Halve and seed the squash; halve the pears. Prepare a baking sheet with spray oil, and place the pears and squash face down. Trim the greens off the leeks, and also place the leeks on the sheet. Bake for 45 minutes or until a knife slips easily into the squash. (Save the seeds and greens.) Allow to cool.

While the vegetables are roasting, use the greens from the leeks, and the squash seeds to make a stock: boil about 20 minutes in 4 cups of water, with a handful of green peppercorns and salt to taste. Boil down to 3 cups. Drain and set aside.

Peel the squash and 1 pear, and grind them to pulp in a blender or food processor, using a little of the stock. Transfer the pulp to a large soup pot, and add stock until it's a little more watery than you want in the finished soup. You will probably have stock left over; conserve it. Blend the squash soup smooth with an immersible blender. Simmer for about 10 to 15 minutes, until it's the consistency you like.

Cut up the leeks and the other pear (peel on), and gently fold into the soup. Garnish with freshly ground nutmeg and a dollop of creme fraiche. Drizzle very lightly with local honey.

Toasting eggshells

This is going to have to be the title of my gardening memoir, as a metaphor for some of the crazy things I do. Not that I think they're crazy. My garden friend Jen knew exactly why I was toasting eggshells the other day. My husband, on the other hand, gave me one of those "there's probably a good reason for this that does not involve an adjustment to her medication" looks.

Anyway, in case you haven't figured it out I was toasting eggshells to dry them out, so that I could grind them fine and put them around my broccoli. Well, for heaven's sake, so the slugs will leave them alone!

Just looking around from where I'm sitting I see the following slightly odd bits of evidence that a gardener lives here:

• hot peppers soaking in oil (anti-rabbit spray)
• pop bottles cut in half (for wintersowing, duh)
• saved broken pieces of ceramic pots (plant labels)
• seed heads in the blender (It's pretty much all I use the blender for)
• frozen used coffee grounds
• cut up mini-blinds
• boxes of drier lint

This does not even begin to cover the things that anyone could figure out-- windowsills devoted to seedlings, grow lights clamped to every available location, bags full of unidentified green things in the freezer, piles of rocks on the porch to throw at the rabbits.

What do you have in your house that a non-gardener just wouldn't understand?

Blueberry thumbprint cookies
1 1/2 sticks butter, room temperature
1 (8 oz) pkg cream cheese, softened
1 c granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/3 c blueberry syrup
zest from 2 limes
3 c flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 salt

Whisk dry ingredients together, In another bowl cream butter and cream cheese until smooth. Gradually beat in sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in juice and zest. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined (over mixing will make this dough tough). Cover and chill until dough is firm.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Roll into balls using about a tablespoon of dough for each. Place on cookie sheet. Make indent with thumb in center of each cookie and fill with blueberry jam. (Yes, make your own)

Bake 12 to 15 minutes or till edges are just turning a light golden brown.

I accidentally made these with 1 1/2 CUPS of butter. They're okay, but a little rich, and they don't have the buttery shortbread texture that makes these cookies so wonderful. Also, the blueberry syrup makes the dough a lovely blue, but it "bakes out" leaving the cookies slightly gray looking. I'm thinking food dye.

Baking for a friend

I love doing things for people. This is one of the things that continues to annoy me about my son, who resists having things done for him. My daughter is not so reticent, and is perfectly willing to accept help in cash or in kind.

I started doing things for my young friend Kristen, and lo and behold, she started doing things back (really, I wasn't expecting anything, but in case you need to know, I wear a large and I like the color pink). I've been promising her these brownies for a couple of weeks.

Apricot cornmeal brownies
1/2 cup butter
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
3 eggs at room temp
2-3 T honey
1/2 cup apricot (or other fruit) compote

1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup white flour
1/2 cup stone-ground cornmeal

Glaze:
1/2 cup apricot compote
1 teaspoon corn syrup
1/2 cup crushed nuts

Melt chocolate with butter with a double boiler or microwave oven, combine with honey and compote and allow to cool. Beat eggs till foamy, then add to chocolate mixture by hand. Sift flour with cornmeal, salt, and baking powder and fold into the chocolate mixture. Before completely mixed, add nuts if wanted. Turn into a greased cake pan.

Heat the compote and corn syrup for the glaze until pourable, then spread over top of brownies. Cover with the the crushed nuts. Bake 20-25 minutes at 350F, until an inserted knife pulls out clean. Cool completely before cutting.

Leisure Time

I spend at least one day a week cleaning.

No, wait, cooking I mean I spend a day a week cooking.

It just seems like it's a day spent cleaning.

Make the bread dough, wash the dishes. While the bread is rising, make cookies, scones or crackers; while they're baking, wash the dishes. Make stock items- baking powder or trail mix or mayo, and then lunch. Wash the dishes. (As you may have realized by now, I don't have a dishwasher. For my soapbox on appliances, see here.)

I'm not sure what it was I used to do with my "leisure" time. Did I go shopping? Walking? I never had a dog so it wasn't that. I suppose I used to spend this time with my kids, but doing what? Shopping? Playing? Commuting from lesson to lesson (not so much, actually- we never got caught onto that particular treadmill, thank heaven).

Once upon a time, we didn't have "leisure" time-- all of our time was spent householding. The cooking and washing and making and growing. The funny thing is, these activities are not unenjoyable. Yes, there's drudgery. The fourth time I have to wash the dishes, I'm thinking a little true recreation might be just the ticket. But cooking, and gardening, is fun, and everything has some level of drudgery to it. Humans are simply not designed for non-stop fun, Charlie Sheen notwithstanding.

What we have done in our society is replace these creative activities with so-called "leisure" where we do nothing but consume. Leisure time now is intimately associated with spending money: movies or shopping or water park or theme park. It's about gratifying personal desires that are disconnected from personal, family or community needs

Our leisure time is now spent consuming and extracting instead of creating and nurturing.

So here's your next challenge: next time you have "free" time, don't go to the mall, or flick on Netflix. Make some crackers.

Sourcream-honey crackers with cranberry
1 cup plain flour
1 cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon seasalt
2 tablespoons softened butter

1/3 cup milk
1/3 cup sour cream
1/3 cup honey
2-3 tablespoons of cranberry sauce

seasoning: 1 teaspoon each seasalt, white peppercorns

Preheat oven to 150'C/ 300'F.

Grind the seasonings together in a mortar; whisk the milk, sour cream, cranberry sauce and honey together to form a little more than a cup of thick liquid. Add the salt to the flour, and in a mixing bowl or food processor, cut the butter in until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. (I start this with a knife or pastry cutter, then finish it with my hands.) Slowly mix in enough liquid to form a soft, but not sticky, dough.

Divide the dough into three to four portions and roll out one at a time, until paper thin. Some people recommend a pasta press, but I did it fine with a rolling pin. Keep turning the dough over, and lightly coating it with flour so it doesn't stick to the pin or the board.

Lightly brush the sheet with oil, then grind sea salt onto it. Using a sharp knife or pizza roller, cut the dough into crackers. Line cookie sheet with parchment (or just put them directly on an ungreased sheet), then transfer crackers to the cookie sheet if you rolled it out on a board.

Bake for 20 minutes, until lightly browned and crisp. Allow to cool on the tray and then store in an air tight container for up to a week. This recipe made about 200 1" square crackers.

Time

One of the things I hear most often when I preach, ahem, talk about how I eat, is "oh, I don't have time for that." To which I always want to respond that more accurately, they don't want to devote the time to that.

As an excuse for feeding your family food that is nutritionally suspect if not actively unhealthy, it's a bad one. It's not how much time you have, it's what you do with it. People often use the excuse that cooking "cuts into family time," as though family time must be consumption oriented in the worst sense-- trips to shopping malls, or theme parks, or even cultural activities, where you leave your home and part of the point is to spend money (I believe we're supposed to call it "stimulate the economy). Family time can also be spending the day, like I did today, in the kitchen with your kids, your friends, your siblings, your spouse, prepping food for the week or the season.

And yes, it takes a lot of time. I started this morning at 8 a.m. and I'm not quite done (still have soup to make). I have washed 6 sinkloads of dishes (we don't have a dishwasher). I have washed every pot I own at least twice. I'm exhausted. But my daughter went home with a quart of tomato sauce and a pint of hummos. Last week my son got tomato sauce, pickles, corn relish, and candied winter melon. I prepped 15 pounds of food for the food pantry. I've got three dozen muffins which will last this small family nearly a month (I froze two dozen for later, saving more hours for that elusive "family time").

I've been doing this every Sunday for more than a month. But I have a freezer full of food that looks to get me through the winter. I won't need to cut into "family time" in January to go to the grocery store, and I'll generate almost no trash, meaning less trekking to the alley with garbage when it's 20 below.

So before I share the recipe, here's what I did today:



































Cornbread with fruit purees
1 1/4 cups cornmeal
3/4 cup unbleached wheat flour
1 Tbsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. autumn spice of choice (cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin pie spice, clove, etc.)

3/4 cup maple syrup (for apple) or 3/4 cup honey (for pumpkin or pear)
1 egg
1/3 cup yogurt or sour cream
3/4 cup apple, pear, or pumpkin puree
1/4 cup butter (melted)

Sift together all dry ingredients. Add egg, milk, applesauce and melted margarine. Mix until dry ingredients are well moistened. Batter will be lumpy. Bake in greased 8 inch square pan or muffin tin, in 425 degree F oven 18-23 minutes or until golden brown. Makes 3 dozen muffins.

You need a farmer to run a farm

Last June, through a miscommunication at Peterson Garden, we put in 12 "farm" plots-- four that we called "Farm4You" and 8 that we designated "Farm2Give." The F4Y plots were sold for $100-$250 to individuals who had time to harvest but not to care for a plot; the F2G plots were installed as teaching plots with all the produce donated to local shelters, community organizations, and food pantries. The original intention was to have as many F4Y plots as we could sell, and 4 demonstration plots (a Vintage plot, a Three Sisters, an Heirlooms plot, and a Bee Plot) from which we'd donate food. One day, in a fit of enthusiasm, I put in 3 more, then took on a fall plot as part of an outreach project.

Because the miscommunication was mine, I felt somewhat obligated to be the one caring for these plots.

Each plot is 24 square feet, for a total acreage of less than 1% of an acre. By way of perspective, an average, commercially-oriented truly family-owned farm is 180 acres, or some 1000 times the area I was taking care of.

While I did end up harvesting nearly 200 pounds of produce just from the F2G plots, I'm sure that we lost a lot of the yield to lack of care and missed harvests, so that produce rotted or dried before it could be picked. Because we didn't have a farmer, whose job it was to nurture these plants, plots didn't get watered, didn't get picked, didn't get pruned.

My lesson from this? As the title says, if you're going to have a farm-- a commercial enterprise providing food to other people-- you need someone whose job it is to grow things, in other words, a farmer. I know how much work goes into a garden--I plant twice that area in my backyard every year. But that's a few steps outside my door, and if I miss a harvest, I can rationalize that I'll just turn that into compost. No one starves or loses income because I let a few tomatoes rot on the ground.

But I feel bad about the yield we lost at Peterson. Good intentions and a green thumb don't make a farmer. What makes a farmer is an investment of time, and effort; it's a job that you do every day, not just when you can get there in your spare time. Not that I didn't already have all kinds of awe and respect for farmers, but this experience has hugely reinforced that.

Apple Carrot Bread

1 cup white flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. soda
1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 cup butter
1/2 tsp. orange extract (optional)
2 eggs

2 medium apples, peeled and shredded (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 medium carrot, peeled and shredded (about 1/2 cup)
1/2 cup + 1T honey or 1/2 cup maple syrup+2T molasses
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Heat oven to 350F/175C. Grease or line with parchment, bottom only of 9 x 5 or 8 x 4 inch loaf pan.

Whisk dry ingredients together; set aside. Beat eggs, add and beat in softened butter, honey, and molasses. Add fruit, mix thoroughly, then add dry ingredients and beat until smooth, about 3 minutes. Stir in nuts. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake 50 to 60 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove from pan to cool. Refrigerate any leftovers. Makes 1 loaf.

Bloom Day, September

What do blooming flowers have to do with common sense food? Nothing, really. I also have a large ornamental garden and I like to share the pictures with the crew that participates in Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (15th of every month).

But in a way, my take on Bloom Day is like my take on food-- there are flowers that anyone can grow, just like there are meals that anyone can make. So here's some flowers that grew because I stuck a seed in the ground, and a soup that looks like gourmet fare, but tastes straight off the farmer's table.

Above, right: Nasturtium "Spitfire" from Renee's Seeds for the Seed Grow Project.

Left, Cosmos "Rose Bon Bon" from Renee's Seeds for the Seed Grow Project, below, Caryopteris, traded with a contact on MyFolia.com and bottom, Hyssop.















For the full September Bloom Day photos check out my flickr! Thanks to May Dreams for coming up with and hosting Bloom Day!

Squash-apple Soup with roasted ginger

1-2 pound squash (I used pattipan today, but butternut, acorn or pumpkin also work)
1 large apple
about 1" of fresh ginger root
Olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 pound of bacon, chopped (optional, for carnivores)
4-6 cups stock
2 teaspoons white pepper
salt, to taste

Quarter and seed squash, brush lightly with olive oil. On a separate baking sheet (or in a pie pan), place about a 2 inch chunk of fresh ginger plus two large apples, cored and peeled, and brushed with olive oil. Roast apples and ginger for 20 minutes, and squash for 35 minutes in a 350F oven, or until a knife slips in easily. Allow to cool and then peel both the ginger and the squash. Put in food processer and puree. Make a stock with the peels (add all peels-squash, ginger, apple- plus a few white peppercorns and salt to 2 quarts of water, boil down to 1 1/2 quarts).

Sauté onion and bacon lightly in large pot. Add squash/apple puree, water, apple cider, brown sugar, stock, salt, and spices. Cover and simmer for 1 hour. Stir frequently. Blend to thicken in blender-size batches. Serve with sour cream: one teaspoon on each serving.

I relish the summer!

No words of wisdom today, just a wonderful summer relish, and a really bad pun

Spicy Peach Relish
for every 4 medium peaches:

1 bell pepper (red is the best aesthetically, but any sweet bell will do)
1-2 hot pepper of choice (I used Shishito because that's what I have growing)
1 small sweet onion
1 medium cucumber
Zest from 2 limes

Brine:
1/4 cup peach preserves
1 T balsamic vinegar
Juice from 2 limes
2 tablespoons minced fresh mint or cilantro (flavor will be quite different depending which one you use)
1/4 teaspoon salt

Peel, seed and finely dice all fruits. For a hotter relish, don't seed the hot peppers. If you don't want your relish too hot, seed the peppers, or use only some of the seeds.

Heat the brine, pour over fruit mixture, put in fridge overnight. Ladle into sterilized jars and heat seal.

A tweep asks "okay to put in fridge overnight, rather than hot mix into hot jars?" Someone correct this if it's wrong-- do I need to reheat? Don't want to kill anyone! @Canvolution says "make it a fridge relish; can't tell how acid it is with all those veg!"

Serve with chicken or seafood, or over a leafy salad.

Lammas Harvest

True to the promise of the festival, today I had the first harvest too big to bring in as a single basketful or armload. The festival’s counterpart, Beltane at the beginning of summer, the planting of the crops and the marriage of the god and goddess, is full of promise and joy. Lammas is full of bounty and joy, but melancholy too, as the god begins to prepare for his yearly sacrifice and death, and the goddess begins to remember her anger over the loss of her daughters.

In modern patriarchal theology we think of lightning as a phallic manifestation, but I like to think of August storms as the fury and despair of the goddess who cannot save the earth her daughters from their imminent death, year after year after year. She brings us daily bounty, more than we can use, as both fruited gift and fruitless bribe. It means the downward slope towards the frozen midwinter is beginning.

Lammas Salad
10 Golden beets, blanched and sliced thin
3 small Chiogga beets, blanched and sliced thin
1 cucumber, seeded and sliced
1 green pepper, sliced very thin
1-2 ears of corn, nibletted and blanched
3 apricots, diced
1 Shishito pepper, seeded and diced

Macerate (i.e. soak) the cucumber in a couple tablespoons of honey and salt for 1-2 hours. Macerate the apricots and shishito peppers in cider vinegar for 1-2 hours. Drain and rinse just before mixing up the salad. To blanch the beets, trim the roots and stems (peeling optional), and drop them into actively boiling water for no more than 5 minutes. Allow to cool, then slice. To blanch the corn, slice the niblets from the cob, and drop them into actively boiling water; leave until the color deepens (a couple/few minutes at most).

Mix everything together with a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise. (Make it yourself.)

I served this as a side with crab cakes.

Two summer slaws

No words of wisdom today! Just two delicious things to do with cabbage. The CSA sent GIANT cabbages this week. Had to do something!

Peach slaw
about 3 cups finely shredded or grated cabbage (1 small head or portion of large head)
2-3 peaches
3T homemade mayonnaise (from the wonderful Little Blue Hen blog. Really, follow her!)
Salt to taste

Shred or grate the cabbage, then mix with the mayonnaise. Peel the peaches (a potato peeler works great, if you're very gentle) then with your hands squeeze the bare fruit directly onto the slaw, shredding the meat as you go, so that chunks of mushed peach end up in the mix. If you are squeamish (you shouldn't be cooking) um that is to say, you can use a lemon press for this; just be careful you don't get pieces of pit in the slaw.

Taste, add salt and white pepper.

Greek lemon slaw
about 3 cups finely shredded or grated cabbage
juice from one half lemon
fresh zest from whole lemon
1/2+ cups olive oil (I like my lemon slaw very oily, so I err on the side of oops!)
salt and green pepper

Mix it all together. I grew up on this stuff and it is still probably my favorite salad.

One day a week

I've been getting on my soapbox a lot lately, because I lost a lot of weight recently, and people are noticing. They ask me how I did it, and my response is "by eating."

You heard that right, I lost weight by eating. I never set out to lose weight, and didn't care that much, as I wasn't terribly overweight for someone of my age (BMI 29, now down to 25). But in March, I started eating SLOW- seasonal, local, organic, whole. I actually increased the percentage of animal fat in my diet, without increasing the amount of animal products I eat. So- whole milk and whole milk products, grass-fed beef, sustainably farmed chicken, with !gasp! the skin on. I stopped buying food with ingredients, and have been making my own everything: crackers, salad dressing, bread, jam, mayonnaise, you name it.

I have not been eating any less. By eating SLOW and other efforts (walking a lot more, expanding my garden) I reduced my family's carbon footprint by an entire planet.

And when I tell people this story, the responses are predictable-- too expensive, don't have time, don't know how to cook, my kids won't eat like that (why, do they have an independent income for their own food?) and on and on.

So here is MY challenge-- change your eating one day a week.

Just one day.

Do you eat out all the time? Start cooking from scratch one day. I'll let you buy pasta, but make your own tomato sauce, and buy your lettuce in a head instead of a bag. Use oil and vinegar instead of additive-rich purchased dressing. Just for one day a week.

Do you already cook from scratch one day a week? Pick another day, and eat only seasonal, whole foods that day. I'll let you go to Whole Foods (if you must) or another aware market, and buy strawberry preserves in March, as long as they're organic. I'll let you buy pasta, but read the label and make sure it says "semolina flour, water" and nothing else.

Already doing that too? Make bread. Or jam. Or crackers (they're ridiculously easy, look for my recipe on this blog). Roast a chicken. Don't worry how it turns out the first couple of times, you're only doing this once a week, remember? Do you bake a lot? One day, don't use the mixer-save the electricity and do it by hand.

How often do you go to the grocery store? One day a week, right? Go to the local, organic market instead, or the nearest farmers' market, or Whole Foods if you must. Too expensive? It's only one day a week!

Are you like me, and way into this already? You can change yourself, and your family, and your planet one day a week as well. Eat vegetarian one day a week. Already doing that? Eat vegan one day a week (that's where I've gotten). Already doing that? Eat raw one day a week.

If you've taken your food as far as you're comfortable, then take your one day a week and walk everywhere. Use it to donate time to a community or school garden, or a political action group. Grow a tomato plant- that's way less effort than one day a week, and then use your day at harvest time to preserve the bounty. Use your day to write your elected officials and demand recycling, the end of Big Ag subsidies and work arounds, and fair rules for small family farms.

I believe it. I lost 25 pounds with literally no effort toward that goal. We can save the planet, folks. What will you do one day a week?

And yes, I know it's sconeday, one day a week. Here you go:

Rhubarb Cream Scones
(adapted from The Way the Cookie Crumbles, who adapted it from Gourmet via Smitten Kitchen)

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
½ cup oats
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¾ stick (6 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into bits
2 cups diced rhubarb (¼-inch cubes), about 3 stalks, macerated in sugar (abt 3 T)
½ cup honey
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup sour cream + 1/2 cup milk, whisked

Preheat oven to 400F and line a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Adjust a baking rack to the middle position. In a small bowl, mix the rhubarb with 3 tablespoons sugar.

Mix the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter with a pastry cutter, knife or your hands until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir the rhubarb into the flour mixture. Lightly beat the honey, egg, yolk, and milk/sourcream together in a bowl (use the same one you used for the rhubarb), then add this mixture to the flour mixture. Stir until just combined.

On a well-floured surface with floured hands, pat the dough into a 1-inch-thick round (about 8 inches in diameter). Using a 2-inch round cutter or rim of a glass dipped in flour, cut out as many rounds as possible, rerolling scraps as necessary. Arrange rounds about 1 inch apart on baking sheet and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until pale golden. Transfer the scones to a cooling rack and let them cool slightly before serving.

Sconeday experiment

Or, Trust Your Instincts, But Read The Recipe

On the last day that my daughter was home, I decided to have warm scones ready for her when she got up. I had the idea in the back of my head to try the apricot compote-for-honey substitution with scones, so I was pretty excited about these. I'm really a novice baker. I'm a complete ease around a stove top and a frying pan, and I can make a stew with my eyes closed. But baking scares me, and I tend to stick to the recipe closely.

Except of course, that's hard to do when you don't read the recipe.

"I can do these without looking up the recipe," sez I to myself sez I. "I've been making scones once a week for months now."

The dough looked lovely-- a gentle orange color-- and smelled divine. It was kinda stiff, I almost rolled it, but thought, no I like the rough "drop" scones. Just before sticking them in the oven, I glanced at the recipe and realized, oops.

Forgot the butter.

Yes folks, I forgot to put the butter in the scones. Too late to do it right now, the dough was all mixed. So how do I get butter evenly mixed through a dense dough filled with nuts.

I melted it folks. Kneaded it in, and reformed the scones. They're going in the oven now; I'll be back in 15 minutes to tell you how they are. In the meantime, here's a lovely picture from my garden.
Well, they're a little gummy, but they taste delicious! So the conclusion is, you can screw up a baking recipe, but I don't recommend it.

Apricot-walnut scones
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 Tbs cane sugar (or 1 Tbs packed brown sugar)
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 Tbs dried or fresh orange zest

5 tablespoons unsalted butter

2/3 cup fresh orange juice, with zest
1/4 cup apricot compote
1/4 cup sour cream, or plain or vanilla yogurt

1/2 cup dried apricots, diced and plumped or 1/4 cup crushed walnuts

Heat oven to 425F/218C

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Cut in butter (NOTE: DO NOT FORGET THIS STEP) using a pastry blender or by rubbing between your fingers until it has the consistency of corn meal. Whisk together honey, apricots, and sour cream in a measuring cup. Pour all at once into the dry ingredients, and stir gently until well blended. (Overworking the dough results in terrible scones!)

To prepare the dried apricots, plump them by boiling them for about a minute on stove top or microwave. Drain and pat dry, mix into the scone batter.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and drop batter by generous spoonfuls. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven, until the tops are golden brown, not deep brown.

Cracker Wednesday

My crazy Chinese-Greek-French-Swedish-Irish-Hungarian heritage has major benefits, one of them being that uncle-in-law with a farm in Hungary. He brings homegrown goodness back to the States a couple of times a year, including at various times, shelled walnuts, apricot compote, honey, cherries (packed in homemade whisky) and wine. This month's bounty was 3 quarts of walnuts, with which I made walnut butter, and a quart of apricot compote.

So I'm substituting the apricot for honey in all my recipes this week:

Sourcream-apricot crackers

1 cup plain flour
1 cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon seasalt
2 tablespoons softened butter
1/3 cup+2 T milk
1/3 cup sour cream
1/4 cup apricot compote (a very thin apricot jam, essentially.)

seasoning: 1 teaspoon each seasalt, coriander, 1 T dried orange zest

Preheat oven to 150'C/ 300'F.

Grind the seasonings together in a mortar; whisk the milk, sour cream and honey together to form about a cup of thick liquid

Add the seasonsings to the flour, and in a mixing bowl or food processor, cut the butter in until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. (I start this with a knife or pastry cutter, then finish it with my hands.)

Slowly mix in enough liquid to form a soft, but not sticky, dough.

Divide the dough into four portions and roll out one at a time, until paper thin. Some people recommend a pasta press, but a rolling pin works fine. Keep turning the dough over, and lightly coating it with flour so it doesn't stick to the pin or the board.

Lightly brush the sheet with a flavorful oil (nut or olive); if you like your crackers salty, sprinkle ground sea salt on the oiled crackers. Using a sharp knife or pizza roller, cut the dough into 1" square crackers. Line cookie sheet with parchment (or just put them directly on an ungreased sheet), then transfer crackers to the cookie sheet if you rolled it out on a board.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until lightly browned and crisp. Allow to cool on the tray and then store in an air tight container for up to a week. This recipe made about 200 1" square crackers.

The apple tree

My son's oldest friend used to live down the block from us. About 15 years ago, they asked us if we wanted a crab apple volunteer that had popped up in their yard.

It was about 2-3 feet tall, so we dug it up and transplanted it. For years it didn't do much-- no blossoms, no fruit, although it grew beautifully. Then several years ago it blossomed for the first time, and the following year started producing fruit. Just a handful at first, but then more and more, until last year we ended up with several bushels. And not crab apples, but rather full baby-fist sized actual apples.

We started researching apple trees to see if we could get it to produce usable fruit, and to find out what variety we had.

Of course, it's not any kind of variety at all. It's a volunteer, so by definition it's wild. And there are no "wild" apples. All commercially grown fruits, including heirloom and organically grown varieties, are grown from grafted root stock; essentially all apple trees are clones, with an entire orchard producing identical fruit. There are experimental orchards that grow trees from seed, in the hope of developing a new commercially viable fruit, but all commercial growers, and the ones you buy for your backyard, use standard varieties, and just keep rooting/grafting the trees to get new trees.

This is one of the reasons that it's such a tragedy to lose heirloom varieties in apples. Once it's gone, it's gone. You can't just plant an apple seed and hope to get a Gala apple. You might; but more likely you'll get something entirely new and not necessarily edible.

Our apple tree grew from a seed. Possibly dropped by someone eating an apple in the backyard; perhaps by some critter, um, dropping a seed on its way through the garden. The apples we get are small and very tart, but edible. I thought I might be able to try making my own vinegar; unfortunately to get usable apples you really have to treat the tree, both to get rid of the many pests that apple trees attract, and to discourage fungus, a very common problem (our tree has some sort of fungal disease, in fact). Last year I used the apples to make a border to one of my vegetable beds, and then in the fall dug the apples into the dirt to compost.

I feel a foolish pride in my wild volunteer apple tree, despite the fact that I had nothing to do with its birth, other than transplanting it to a sunny spot. Maybe this year I'll try to save some seeds, and see if I can start another wild baby.

Apple Bread
more or less from foodgeeks.com

1 cup oil (I used hazelnut, but any nut oil, corn oil, safflower, or canola will work)
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 T. whisky, rum, or liqueur

3 cups apples, diced
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 T. orange zest
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 cup chopped nuts or raisins (optional)

In a large mixing bowl, combine and set aside the oil, eggs, sugar, liquor and vanilla. Sift flour, cinnamon, soda, and salt in a separate bowl. Add dry ingredients to the oil mixture gradually. Add apples and nuts/raisins, if any. Batter is very thick, because the apples will add a lot of moisture during baking. Bake in 2 regular loaf pans for 1-1/2 hours at 300°F. Cool 10 minutes in the pan.

If I get an apple corer for Christmas, I'm going to be pissed

My sister-in-law makes a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner every year, although she confessed this year that preparing these meals makes her terribly anxious. Which is amazing, because she is such a rock in my life, and such a wonderful cook (in fact, more or less wonderful at everything).

I rather enjoy conceptualizing, planning and making these big meals. I love to plan them and to execute them, for the full sensory onslaught-- taste, and smell, and sight. I got the idea to do a maple-themed meal from a recipe on that insomniac's savior, the show Cultivating Life. Their recipe for maple scones will be on the menu for Friday.

I have the luxury of spreading out the cooking over several days (plus I cheated and got a ham this year, which means no main dish worries), so I'll be making the meal in stages. Today I started with the things that will keep the best.

Apple sauce
4-12 large Granny Smith apples
1T light brown sugar for each 2 apples
1/4 c. pure maple syrup
1 cup water
small handful to 1/2 c. dried cranberries (depending on how much applesauce you've made)

Peel and core the apples. Cut the apples into smallish chunks, conserve the peels and cores in a pot of cold water (or two pots if you're making a larger batch).

Dissolve the sugar in the water in a small saucepan, and simmer until the water is clear. This will prevent the sugar from burning in the apples. You can also just leave the sugar out entirely, although use a sweeter apple like a Gala, Mac, or Red Delicious if you don't use sugar. The Grannies are quite tart.

Put the sugar syrup, maple syrup and apples in a large pot or dutch oven and bring to a light simmer, stirring constantly. Continue simmer and stirring until the apples are a uniform chunky mush, then blend in the pot using a hand-held immersible blender (my best new toy of 2009).

Simmer the cranberries in a little bit of water just until they plump up, then mix them into the applesauce. Serve warm, cold, or room temp. Delicious no matter what.


Apple-Maple syrup
a TorXani original!

Apple cores and peels
1 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup maple sugar (or, since it's hideously expensive, 1 cup granulated sugar)
2 cups water, plus water for the apples

Put the conserved apple cores and peels in enough water to completely cover them, and simmer until the skins are soft (about 20 minutes). Since I used 12 apples for the applesauce, I ended up with two 2-quart pots of water and peels.

Combine the sugar, maple syrup, and 2 cups water and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Run the apples and their water through the food mill, scraping the pulp into a separate bowl (it's applesauce) and discarded the pips, skins and cores. You should now have an apply juice; pour this into the maple syrup mixture.

Boil the whole thing down to 2 1/2 or 3 cups (3 cups makes a thinner syrup). Strain it through a fine seive and cheesecloth. You can use this as an ice cream or waffle syrup, or add it to club soda for homemade apple soda.

I used the strained pulp as a glaze for a pan-fried catfish. Very nice.

By the way, these recipes are not for the faint of heart:

The endless warmth

It's a funny autumn season this year. It's not actually summer-like, and October was perfectly miserable, but the weather feels like it is never going to break. It looks like autumn. The sun is at that autumn angle that makes everything still and golden. Sunset comes at the correct time, and the leaves all turned, and fell.

But the gentle air goes on and on, not really warm, but zephyrous. There hasn't been a day yet where the sun is bright and painful, the winter sun that hits like a shard of glass, or the frozen crystal in your eye that enslaves you to the ice queen.

So for a fall day in this year's endless wait between equinox and solstice, a one-pan autumn meal.

Autumn pan chicken

One cut-up chicken
3-4 pats of butter
2 T flour
one medium onion, sliced
fall vegetables (I used carrots, potatoes, turnips, but you could also do this with squash or pumpkin)
dried sage
2 cups apple cider
salt
black pepper

Melt 2-3 pats of butter in a large saucepan. Heat the cider just short of boiling (about 5 minutes at 80% in the microwave.) Saute the chicken on both sides (to keep the skin from pulling off, wait for it to "release," meaning, when it's properly cooked on the first side, it will be easy to turn. If it resists and sticks to the pan, just wait until it wants to turn). Add the onions and vegetables and saute about 5 minutes. Add the rest of the butter, plus the sage, salt and pepper. When the butter is melted, dredge with flour, turning the chicken a couple of times. Add half the cider and reduce until it barely covers the bottom of the pan, scraping up the brownings. Add the rest of the cider, turn to a light simmer and cover for about 15 minutes, until chicken is cooked through.

Serve with noodles or rice and a fall vegetable like broccoli or brussels sprouts.

Please buy your chicken from a butcher or mercado, not from the chain stores, where it will have been chilled to 33F/1C meaning it will be tough and tasteless.

Thanksgiving

As our reduced family (two uncles and a daughter couldn't make it this year) sat around dessert yesterday, I vowed I would remember all the family stories that came up so I could include them in this post today. Naturally, when I woke up this morning, they were all gone from my head. There are psychologists that make a case for forgetfulness. There's the problem of the internet, which saves everything. I have thought about this often-- the value of the ephemeral--and applied it in our lives by not documenting every moment of our children's journey, as American parents do.

So meals like yesterday's become important, when everyone brings the stories out and you compare notes and hone the details. As I write I can't even remember the subjects of the stories. Did we talk about Seng Lim's time on the cruise ship? About moving the shop down the street? Did Uncle Lajos come up? I can't remember.

Nga Jee called from England after dinner, and we described the meal to her. Mary  had made the traditional meal, and described its provenance-- a complete Thanksgiving menu published in the late 70s in the old Betty Crocker magazine Sphere. Mary  and I have been making this meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas (and sometimes both) for more than 20 years. I have the old recipes that Mary wrote out for me long before the kids were born, I finally laminated them.

Turkey with apple-raisin stuffing

1 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. butter
1 quart chopped apples (I use Granny Smiths)
1 c. chopped celery
1/2 c. golden raisins
1/4 c. fresh parsley
1 egg
1/4 c. apple cider
1 1/2 tsp. poultry seasoning
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

Saute onion in butter over medium heat until transparent (about 5 minutes); stir in apples and celery, simmer uncovered over medium heat sitrring occasionally (about 5 minutes). Remove from heat, lightly beat egg and stir in, stir in remaining ingredients. Stuff bird. Oops. Find a recipe/instructions for roasting a stuffed turkey. Do that.

World's Best Cranberry Chutney
1 lb cranberries (these used to come in 16 oz bags, now they've reduced bag size to 12 oz, so just deal)
1 cup white sugar
1/2 c. packed brown sugar
1/2 c. golden raisins
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground clove
1/4 tsp allspice
1 cup water
1 c. chopped onion
1 c. chopped apple (Granny Smiths)
1/2 c. chopped celery

Simmer cranberries, sugar, raisins and spices in 1 cup water, uncovered, in a saucepan over medium heat, just until the cranberries release their juice (about 15 minutes). Keep heat low, and stir in remaining ingredients. Simmer until it thickens, about 15 minutes. Can be served warm or cold. I think it's best when made the day before and stored in the fridge, then served at room temperature for the actual meal.

Finished up with pumpkin pie, but enough with the pumpkin recipes already.

Cranberry sauce

Wonkette : Wonkette’s Actual Awesome Real Cranberry Business

This is how I am going to write all my recipes from now on. (Seriously, this looks delicious)

Posted using ShareThis