Apple Pie: Two Ways

About a month ago I got all these apples at an Amish farm about 1/2 hour from where we live. Some of them were delicious and we made applesauce with them. Then others were just plain . . . plain (this is not an Amish joke).  They were bland. And I've been thinking of ways to use them (I think there are actually about a dozen still left). One of my ideas was to use them for jazzed-up pies. 

The first pie (pictured on the right) was traditional, the way my husband makes them: sliced apples piled high, then dumped out and tossed with lemon juice, sugar, and cinnamon and dumped back in. Or something like that. He usually finishes his apple pies off with a crumb topping, but I had plenty of pastry dough so I double-crusted mine.  Spoiler: this turned out to be the better of the two pies.  If it ain't broke, right?

The second way was an experiment for peanut-butter apple pie. My idea was to simply make crumbs as for a peanut butter pudding pie (peanut butter mixed with powdered sugar) and layer that with the apple slices. Sounds good, right? It turned out okay. Which is to say the crumbs kinda just got wet, and the apples didn't seem to cook through as well as they did in the traditional pie. Was it too many vents (cute hearts though they be?) that let the steam out instead of trapping it to cook the apples? Who knows. But I think if I tried this another time, I would make some sort of creamy peanut butter sauce and just put it under the apples because--as my apple-pie-expert husband points out--when you eat apples with peanut butter it's normally just a smear of peanut butter on one side of the apple. At least that's how we do it around here. 

 Any other suggestions?

Meze Plate

I had to go back a ways to find this.  All the way back to August 23.  It's not that I haven't been cooking, it's just that I've been doing too many other things I guess, like moving and traveling and celebrating my child's first birthday.  You know.  

So back in August I made some killer hummus.  No, I did not write down the recipe, but it had plenty of lemon juice and tahini and not too much garlic (my usual downfall).  I restrained myself and was very pleased with the result.  Unfortunately, I decided to serve it up with dollops of pesto and hot pepper paste which makes it look like a weird mask in the photo and really overpowered my hummus.  Ugh.  Live and learn.

I added some toasted homemade flatbread, colorful local carrots, cucumbers, a roasted squash salad and some marinated mushrooms for a quite satisfying lunch. 

I've also got a great idea for a fast healthy food restaurant.  Meze.  That's the Turkish word for appetizer.  Serve a great basic core of Mediterranean meze (flatbread with hummus, tabbouleh, baked goat cheese, olives, stuffed grape leaves, spanakopita, etc.) and add seasonal salads during the summer.  Customers pick a plate of 3-5 meze and it's a meal!  I would eat there.  As long as they didn't muss up the hummus.

Pop!

Well, I'm not entirely sure it was worth the time and effort, but I wanted to try out a collage sometime, and here it is!  (Don't look too close at the edges--Atticus is about to wake up, and I don't feel like going back into the project and changing it again!)

I made some peach yogurt pops last week to freeze in my cheap-o mini pop molds.  As you can see, I like to eat mine by scraping my teeth down the sides.  The yogurt melts slowly, allowing you plenty of time to enjoy the creamy fruity goodness as you take a break from washing dishes or sneak outside to satisfy a mid-afternoon food craving.  Who, me?

Once I'd worked my way down to about a 1/3 of pop's original size, I stashed it back in the freezer for someone else's afternoon craving.  It was well-enjoyed both times.

Really, these pops are just yogurt, peaches, a teensy bit of sugar, and vanilla.  So there's no harm in eating one for breakfast and no need to feel sneaky about eating one any other time of day!  Plus, mine are small.

Yogurt Fruit Pops

Equal amounts:

fresh or frozen fruit

yogurt

sugar to taste

dash of vanilla or other complimentary flavoring

Do it!  Whiz all together in a blender and pour into molds.  If you don't have popsicle molds, just use a cup or small yogurt container, cover with foil, and put a popsicle stick in it.  Freeze and enjoy!

Grits: Take 1 & 2

Nothing makes me feel so southern as making a bowl of hot, buttery, cheesy grits for breakfast (except maybe frying green tomatoes!).  A little fresh-ground black pepper on top, and you need nothing more.

When we'd eaten all we wanted--baby LOVED the grits!--I put the leftovers in a small loaf pan and into the fridge.  The next morning I sliced the grit loaf up as you would for fried cornmeal mush and fried it gently in a skillet with some butter.  Topped with homemade syrup or fruit sauce, we enjoyed it as much the second day as we did the first.

Grits: Take 1 & 2.  Simple.

Hot, Blistered Corn on the Cob!

Have you maxed out your corn on the cob eating capacity for the summer yet?  Well, I was getting there.  We had eaten it fresh a few times, processed two big batches for the freezer (I'm not even sure how much corn I ate while cutting it off the cob!), and had about a dozen ears in the fridge, cooked and ready to eat.  If we could.

Something had to get me re-energized.

How 'bout a bottle of sweet chili sauce?  

In Israel, where they apparently don't grow sweet corn, a little sweet, spicy chili sauce and a few minutes on the grill made even field corn-like stuff go down yummly.

I had to try it.

Here's what you do:  Take cooked corn on the cob, slather with sweet chili sauce (like this--I had a homemade concoction I put up last year), and place it on a cookie sheet under the broiler of your oven until nice and blistery, turning as needed.  

Yep.  That's it!  Of course, if you have the grill all fired up you might as well throw them on that.  But the broiler works just as well.

Watch out lips!!!!  Wowza, I made some hot chili sauce last summer!  It gets all caramelized and gooey as it heats and just sticks to the lips--you know with corn on the cob it's hard to avoid lip-to-food contact.  But yum, yum!  Even my taste-tester (who normally doesn't offer up feedback) volunteered, "this is really good."  He liked it cold the next day too.

So if you're getting a little tired of corn already, try this to spice it up a bit.  Or a lot. 

Peaches & [S]cream

The morning started innocently enough.  Baby slept through the night [insert lots of "!" here], something I've been complaining about the last week.  So I awoke at 7:00, blissfully went back to sleep, and woke again at 8:00.  Diaper change, nurse.  

I knew David had been up awhile already so I told him I'd make pancakes and bring some to him in his office when they were ready.  Little A was happily entertaining himself with toys, the Bumbo seat tray, etc.  I began mixing up the pancakes from a recipe out of the "Luarel's Kitchen" cookbook.  As I was getting ready to add some sweet cream buttermilk powder to my other dry ingredients (I know this, because later I found the cup measure with buttermilk powder still in it sitting on top of the other ingredients in the mixing bowl) I heard a loud thud and scream.  

This is not the sound a mother wants to hear when she's had her back to her child for the last 10 minutes.  

I whipped around as I heard David also bounding down the steps.  In a moment I saw what had happened.  My son was sitting on the floor by the cookbook shelf with the object below lying next to his foot:

OUCH!  OUCH!  and OUCH!    Oh, my poor boy!  He was scrEAMing!  And rightfully so; I weighed the iron later at 6.5 pounds.  It fell on his left big toe, scraping a good bit of skin off and doing who knows what to his toe bone. Well, needless to say, pancakes were hastily abandoned as we phoned Dr. Grandpa and scrambled to gather gauze, children's acetaminophen, and ice for the ride over.  One of us had to hold Little A the whole time to keep him from grabbing/kicking his hurt toe.

We arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's still screaming and uncertain about what the rest of our day might look like.  Well, triage nurse Grandma and Dr. Grandpa quickly assessed the toe, bandaged it, and supplied animal crackers while I nursed to keep him as still as possible.  All in all, he seemed to recover well, especially when Grandpa got some of that acetaminophen down his throat.  

About an hour after the "thud" we were home with instructions to leave the bandage in place as long as possible and administer acetaminophen as needed for pain.  Little A got another diaper change and some more milk and went down for a nap.  David returned to his office upstairs.

And me?  

Well, it was back to the pancakes.  We all needed a little treat to help recover.  I finished mixing up the batter, adding a little extra flour to make it less runny.  While the first few pancakes sizzled in the skillet I thawed some peaches and threw some sugar/cornstarch/water mix on the stove to heat. Once thawed, the peaches were dumped in along with a little drizzle of almond flavoring.  And a few hours after they were promised, I had a stack of pancakes ready to take to David . . . 

And of course, one BIG one (the stack was just too messy to do twice) for me.  Little A, who loves pancakes and fruit got some for an early lunch when he woke up.  And now you know why this blog post title is "Peaches and [S]cream".  Here's to a hopefully uneventful rest of the day.

Fruit Sauce for Pancakes:

1 cup fresh or frozen peach slices (or any other fruit)
1 TBSP sugar
1 TBSP cornstarch
1/3 cup cold water
drizzle of almond or vanilla flavoring

Thaw peaches if frozen.  Dissolve sugar and cornstarch in water and set on stove over med-high heat.  When peaches are thawed add to mix along with flavoring.  Stir occasionally, and let bubble until the juices are clear.  Remove from heat.

Summer Cucumbers

Well, it's the time of year that, no matter how sparse your garden looked a month or two ago, you find yourself SWAMPED with some produce or other and looking for creative new ways to use it.  A few weeks ago, I made a quart and pint of refrigerator pickles from this recipe.  I forgot to harvest and add dill the first time through.  But the fun of doing pickles like this is you just keep adding more stuff (new cucumber slices, extra seasoning, etc.) to the brine and just keep on eating!  I think the flavor improves with time.

With pickles in the fridge and lots of cucumbers still to use (and more growing in the garden!), I made a goal to eat some cucumber at every meal.  This primarily took the form of a sweet-n-tangy cucumber/onion/mayo salad, but when we got tired of that I had to move on (and yes, we had raita once or twice too!).

Last night I tried another take on the cucumber, one that Asian cuisine is probably more familiar with than my native Menno-Americo-Germanic food culture.  I had a few pretty old cukes still sitting in the fridge that had gotten partially frozen (from the top shelf of the fridge being a little too cold).  While they might not make great pickles and definitely wouldn't be good for fresh eating, I thought they might do okay in something cooked.  Enter stir-fry cucumbers.  

Before cooking anything, I peeled and sliced cucumber halves which I salted and let sit to drain.  After it had sat awhile, I wrung the slices in a towel to get as much moisture out as possible.  In the meantime,  I made a cheater's spinach kimchi (cheating because it didn't ferment at all and had no cabbage in it) and prepped the other ingredients I wanted for my cucumber saute.  

I started cooking the dish by pan-scrambling a few eggs which I removed from the pan to add back in later.  In the hot skillet, I quickly seared my red pepper and onion chunks with some smashed garlic in a little oil.  When they started looking tender, I added the cucumbers and a soy-ginger-rice vinegar-chili kinda sauce I'd mixed up.  I didn't want the cucumbers to get mushy, so I really did not cook it very long once I'd added them.  I pulled the skillet from the stove then added the scrambled eggs back in along with some fresh-chopped cilantro and toasted sesame seeds.  We ate it over rice noodles with my spinach kimchi on the side.

Now.  The low-down.  While the flavor of the saute was good, the flavor of the cucumbers in it was not.  They were bitter, and I should have checked them out before cooking them.  On the other hand, there were so many other flavors happening, that it was still possible to enjoy the dish overall.  I think I would make it again with fresh, sweet cukes.  And I'm not sure I would use soy sauce again as it made the whole dish a rather unattractive brown.  Well, here's to experimentation!  

Got any stellar cucumber recipes to share?  We'll take 'em!