Crockpot Apple Butter

Wow it's been a while...

So about a month and a half ago I went apple picking with my parents, and came home with a half-bushel of mixed apples. That's a crapload of apples. And most of them, while delicious, were godawful ugly - clearly made for cooking rather than eating. So I made apple muffins and apple bread and squash-apple soup and cheddar-caraway apple pie, and munched on the few that looked presentable. And still I had leftover apples. So I made apple butter, two crockpots full. And it's awesome. Here's what I learned in doing so:

1) All those recipes that say to cook your apple butter for 11 hours in the slow cooker? They LIE. 36 hours seems to do the job.
2) You can use apples for this that have started to go soft, because you're cooking them for 36 hours so who the hell cares whether they were crisp to begin with or not, because now they're mush. Delicious, delicious mush.
3) Be careful peeling those soft apples though, because the vegetable peeler will be prone to slip, and peeling your fingertip is a painful experience, especially when you've got another 5 apples to get through and juice gets everywhere and it stings like a motherfucker. On the plus side, your apple butter will turn out dark brown anyway, so nobody will notice a few drops of blood. Consider it 'iron fortified'.
4) Leaving town for a week with a garbage can full of apple peelings is a surefire way to grow a fruitfly colony in your kitchen. Rice vinegar plus orange juice in a cup topped with a funnel is a good way to destroy said colony. Vacuuming up stray fruitflies also helps, and is way more fun than you'd expect.

And the recipe... (as always, amounts are approximate and everything is optional, except maybe the apples. But I bet it would taste good with pears or something instead.)

Halfway cooked.

Crockpot Apple Butter
A pile of apples, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks, enough to fill the crockpot (~1 gallon?)
1 cup or less of maple syrup and/or brown sugar
1 cup apple cider and/or orange juice
1 tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice, or a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and allspice, mostly cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla
Zest from 1 orange*
Pinch of salt

*My personal favorite citrus-zesting method: Peel the orange with a vegetable peeler, which gets you the nice orange part without any bitter pith. Then mince with a sharp knife. Saves you grating off your knuckles, especially if you've already managed to peel your thumb.

1) Toss everything in the crockpot. Mix. Cook, covered, on the high setting for an hour or two.

2) Stir. Turn to the low setting. Cook covered for another 12 hours. Stir occasionally.

3) Move the cover to one side just a little so steam can get out. Cook another 24 hours, or until you get sick of waiting. Scrape browned bits from the side and pour condensation from the top whenever it occurs to you. (The point here is to cook off the excess moisture. If you're really impatient you could probably shave off 12 hours by boiling on the stove for a while, but that kind of defeats the whole 'slow-cooker' idea.)

With homemade flatbread instead of a bagel.

4) Spread on bread, muffins, apple cake, bread pudding made from stale apple cake, etc.

Update: My absolute favorite way to eat apple butter: with garlic-chive cream cheese on a toasted pumpernickel or everything bagel, with a little salt and maybe some caraway seeds sprinkled on top. Heaven. 

Vietnam in advance

I'll be in Southeast Asia next week, but I made this the other day so I'm posting anyway. I discovered sweet potato noodles through a package of Korean ramen I bought a while back, and I love them because a) they've got a wonderful stretchy chewy bouncy wonderful texture and b) they're made just from sweet potato starch, so my celiac mother can eat them. We had a lot of mint in the house, so I improvised this, based loosely on the flavors of Vietnamese spring rolls and laarb, and served it with grilled pork loin and those mint potatoes from two posts ago. Lovely summer dinner.

Vietnamese Noodle Salad
1 package sweet potato noodles (from Asian markets, probably the Korean section)
Handful (preferably fresh) mint
Handful basil
garlic
soy sauce
a few shakes of fish sauce
sriracha to taste
Optional firm or fried tofu and/or shrimp, if you're into that

Cook the sweet potato noodles til done. Set aside to cool.

Roughly chop the herbs. (Cilantro would probably also go well.) Mince the garlic or put it through a press. Toss everything together, making sure the noodles are coated with dressing. Serve room temp or chilled.

TastyKakes

Um, yes. This. (Plus ~1 tbsp ground fennel seeds, just for kicks.)

www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Orange-Scented-Olive-Oil-Cake

ETA: Here's the actual recipe, straight from the Saveur website. I skip the glaze and the sea salt, and add the fennel seeds with the flour, eggs, etc.

Orange-Scented Olive Oil Cake

2 oranges
2 1⁄3 cups sugar
Unsalted butter, for greasing the pan
2 1⁄2 cups flour, plus more for pan
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
4 eggs
6 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄4 cup fresh orange juice
1⁄4 cup confectioners' sugar
Sea salt, for garnish

1. Trim about 1⁄2" from the tops and bottoms of oranges; quarter oranges lengthwise. Bring 6 cups water to a boil in a 4-qt. saucepan; add oranges. Bring water back to a boil; drain. Repeat boiling process twice more with fresh water. Put oranges, 1 cup sugar, and 4 cups water into a 4-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat. Cook, stirring often, until sugar dissolves and orange rind can be easily pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Remove pan from heat and let cool to room temperature.

2. Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 10" round cake pan with butter and dust with flour; line pan bottom with parchment paper cut to fit. Set pan aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl and set aside. Remove orange quarters from syrup, remove and discard any seeds, and put oranges into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until oranges form a chunky purée, 10–12 pulses. Add remaining sugar, reserved flour mixture, vanilla, and eggs and process until incorporated, about 2 minutes. Add olive oil; process until combined. Pour batter into prepared pan; bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 40–45 minutes. Let cool for 30 minutes.

3. In a small bowl, whisk orange juice and confectioners' sugar to make a thin glaze. Remove cake from pan and transfer to a cake stand or plate. Using a pastry brush, brush orange glaze over top and sides of cake; let cool completely. Garnish cake with salt.

Phnom Penh & Potatoes

Recent recipes I don't want to forget:

Khmer Samla (with thanks to Carol Henderson)
(serves 10)  

10 stalks fresh lemongrass 
1/4 of a lime (kefir, key, or regular) 
1 tsp ground turmeric 
several pinches of salt 
1/3 cup minced galangal or regular ginger 
2 cups chopped shallots (sweet onions work well too, like vidalias) 
10 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed 
4 Tbs shrimp paste  
2 lbs chicken or tofu, cut in small pieces 
1 small eggplant, quartered & thinly sliced 1/3 cup olive oil 
5 c. coconut milk 
1 Tablespoon salt 
2 tsp sugar  

Blend the first 8 ingredients together in a food processor, until they
form a smooth paste. (Traditionally, this would be pounded in a
mortar, so you can try that if you like!)

Heat the oil in a large pot, and saute the blended mixture a minute
or two. Add chicken or tofu, and cook 7 minutes over medium heat.
Add half the coconut milk, salt and sugar, and simmer 10 minutes.
Add eggplant and remaining coconut milk. Simmer half covered
until eggplant is tender, about 10 minutes.

Serve over rice.

Mint Potatoes
new potatoes
crushed garlic
lots of chopped mint
salt, pepper, and olive oil

Cook potatoes. Add the other ingredients. Use a combination of
regular and sea/kosher salt for a nice crunch and distributed salt
flavor. Mix well. Let cool. Tastes better the next day.

Blizzard food

Next in the Things I Made For Dinner series: breakfast. This is what I think of as perfect snowstorm food - it's warm, it's rich, it's cinnamony, it's vaguely tropical, and it tastes really damn good. Also, it makes your kitchen smell freaking awesome while it bakes. Good for giving you the stamina to trudge through those 3-foot drifts to class. Also it's lactose-free. Don't let that deter you; coconut milk has enough fat in it that you won't miss the butter & cream. (Damn you, milk allergy!)

Blizzard Bread Pudding
4 un-iced cinnamon-raisin buns, or 10-ish slices cinnamin-raisin bread, or cinnamon, raisins, and challah
1 can coconut milk
2 cups almond milk (or milk, but I actually like the almondy flavor)
3 eggs
cinnamon
cardamom
cloves
vanilla
salt
(Brown sugar to taste, but I didn't use any)

Preheat oven to 350. Chop the bread into 1-inch cubes. Spread them in a glass baking dish big enough that they just peek over the top.
.
On the stove, warm the milks. Beat the eggs in a bowl & add them. Add a pinch of salt, and roughly a 1:3:5 ratio of cloves:cardamom:cinnamon. Maybe 1 shake cloves, 3 shakes cardamom, spoonful cinnamon? I dunno, I don't measure these things. Also add a little vanilla. 1 tsp-ish? (And sugar, if you're into that.) Mix well.

Pour the liquid over the bread crumbs. Mix it a little so all the bread is covered and it starts to soak up the milk. Bake at 350 for roughly an hour and a half, but start checking after an hour to make sure the top doesn't burn. If you cut it open and the bottom is soggy, bake some more. Eat warm or cold, with a little maple syrup if you like. Go make a snow fort.

Almost Hungarian

Last week, some friends and I made chicken paprikash from a family recipe. (The friend's family, not mine.) This weekend I wanted to make it again, but I didn't have the recipe, or chicken, or paprika, and besides I don't really like bell peppers, which we'd used plenty of. So I made this instead.

Un-Chicken Paprikash-ish
4 links hot Italian sausage, cut into big-ish pieces
2 medium onions, chopped
lots of garlic, minced
2 big carrots, diced
1 jalepeno, diced
1 can diced tomatoes
1 cup chicken broth
cayenne pepper
Armadillo Rub or other smoky pepper mix, if you've got it
Salt & black pepper to taste
Corn starch

Saute the onions in olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic, carrots, S&P, and sausage. Cook til the sausage is not quite browned.

Add everything else. Simmer for a while, until the veggies are soft and the sausage seems cooked. Use plenty of olive oil. Add some cornstarch and simmer a bit more, until the sauce gets thick and velvety.

Serve over rice, or pasta, or spaetzle, or mop up with bread. In any case, copious starch is mandatory. Some parsley might be nice on top too, if my herb garden weren't buried under a foot of snow.

Alone in the Kitchen with Some Garlic

Merry Christmas, all, or Happy Solstice, or whatever it is you celebrate. This year my sister, an excellent picker of books, bought me one called 'Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant', a collection of essays by marvelous writers on the topic of cooking for one and eating alone. In these essays, having dinner by yourself is by turns depressing, lonely, or heroic; it's a last resort, an act of independence, somehow subversive, always a temporary state of affairs until someone else comes along with whom to share your meals. And sure, it certainly can be all those things, but can't it also be, boringly enough, just ordinary? Solitary meals have been a fact of my existence ever since I graduated college nearly three and a half years ago and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan for my first job. I imagine they are the norm for a good chunk of my peers, as we tend to marry later than our parents often did and thus have a longer stretch post-college living and eating with no one but ourselves and maybe a pet turtle to keep us company.

So I've spend nearly as long at this point eating by myself as I did with a gaggle of friends in a dining hall, and, at least after the first month or so of acclimating, it's never felt like a statement or a burden or an accomplishment, just a meal. I eat probably as many meals that way as I do with others, certainly nearly all my breakfasts, many dinners, and a good number of lunches, on my own at the kitchen table with a magazine or on the couch with the turtle watching from across the room. And I don't mind it at all.

So what do I cook when I'm cooking for one? That's a major question in the book, and nearly every author has their own special recipe, like single-girl salmon or saltines with salsa eaten over the stove, or pickles and ice cream, or rice and beans every night, or anything so long as it's beige. Me? I cook everything. Most things I've written about here I've cooked just for me. I make sandwiches with tomato and tapenade, and sandwiches with tomato and olive oil, and sandwiches with bacon and cheddar and onions and apples on seeded rye. I make spaghetti with sauce from scratch or out of a jar. I cook elaborate stews or rice and beans. I defrost a veggie burger. I stir-fry noodles, make my favorite Szechuan tofu dish, or scramble an egg. Sometimes I make ramen, sometimes larb. I put garlic in nearly everything. No need to (depressingly) divide every recipe by four, I cook big batches and eat leftovers, since there often isn't time to cook something new, and when I get sick of something I freeze what's left for another time. Sure, I have my idiosyncrasies, as every eater does. I'm more likely to eat tapenade for breakfast than cereal, since I believe that delicious food is delicious no matter what the time of day. I oversalt, since that's how I like it. And in a refrigerator with three kinds of soy sauce and ten kinds of chili paste, you'll find no peanut butter or mustard whatsoever. There is always maple syrup, mostly for putting in tea, and there is quite a bit of tea. But I suspect that when I do move in with someone and start cooking for two or more my fridge and my cooking will look much the same, maybe with the addition of a bottle of mustard beside the soy sauce, if god forbid I marry someone who likes mustard.

It's not that I don't enjoy cooking for other people – I've got friends in many zip codes who will attest to my enthusiasm for throwing elaborate dinner parties. Making food for someone is absolutely a way to express caring for them, and it's ever so satisfying to get the compliments and see them empty plates after a day at the stove. No doubt. But should I not care for myself the same way? I like good food, and being alone for dinner is no reason not to eat it. Takeout gets pricey, and besides, I enjoy cooking. I like walling into a kitchen, working with my hands, and creating something delicious out of disparate parts. And while I'm cooking I'm not doing schoolwork, which is also often necessary, for the sake of my sanity.

And then there's always the question of eating alone at restaurants, something which seems to intimidate or depress even those brave souls who happily cook for just themselves on a regular basis. But why? Grabbing lunch out on my own is another bit of normalcy, and taking myself out to dinner is a singular pleasure. I can go somewhere fancy and order wine and dessert and not feel like I'm pressuring someone else to spend more than they want. I can take my time and linger over a cup of tea or eat and run, depending on my mood. I can order the polenta for an appetizer, the pasta as a main, and a side of potatoes, and have nobody but the waiter notice my carbofeast. Or order two appetizers, because that's what I feel like. If I waited for someone to be free and willing to join me every time I wanted to go out, my wallet would be fatter but I'd have missed out on a lot of good meals. (The same goes for traveling, but that's another essay entirely.) I always bring something to read, so I'm not sitting there twiddling my thumbs between when I order and when I get my food, but I usually don't read while I eat. There's never been any pitying looks or snide remarks, and it's always easier to get a seat at prime hours if you're alone. I'm not sure why people so strenuously avoid being a party of one. Maybe they think it makes them look lonely, pathetic, friendless. Well, if you're sitting there moping into your food, it probably will. But otherwise all it does is make you a person who enjoys a good meal and is willing to treat yourself well enough to go get it. Which sounds like not a bad way of life to me.