Better. Yes.
I’m better. No, really. This time I really am better.
I had thought I went to bed last night at least a little more cheerful, even if I still couldn’t breathe and I think my back hurts quite so relentlessly and godsblattingly as much because of sleeping sitting up as because flu always makes me ache in places that the rest of the time I mostly forget are places, although the forgetting part does not in fact include my back, which has been a ratbag since I started falling off horses at the age of eleven. Anyway. I ache like fury, in both remembered and forgotten places, and the only reason to look forward to going to bed is to keep reading, since sleeping is an issue like global warming or the destruction of rainforest or the Republican nomination for president is an issue, and therefore if I was somehow feeling a little more cheerful this must be a good sign.
I got out of bed first try this morning.* I was, furthermore, hungry. How great is that. My stomach has been convinced that we have been involved in a highly unpleasant storm at sea the last week or so, involving much pitching and yawing, and has behaved accordingly. Calm seas today.** I got dressed. I had a cup of tea. I had an apple. I had . . .
. . . I wasn’t hungry any more. Oh. Well. Okay. Hellhounds and I went for a hurtle. We’ve been going out for about the right amount of time, the last few days, but somewhat less than the right amount of mileage. Today we were hitting nearer the mark. Yaay.***
Went down to the mews for lunch. I’m HUNGRY. And . . . I won’t eat anything. What. The. Frell. It’s like I woke up in the body of a hellhound or something.† Fed hellhounds. Even they are eating. Me . . . nah. Food. Nasty. OH COME ON. I’M OLD, I HAVE ME, I’M JUST GETTING OVER FLU, I NEED FOOD. I NEED PROTEIN.
Come any nearer with that olive/frond of dill/blameless scrambled egg and I will grow violent. Why yes, thank you, I would like another cup of very strong black tea.††
ARRRRGH.
So I was thinking, okay, what do you do when you have some stupid little cow who’s been sick for so long she’s forgotten how to eat? What might not only tempt her but provide something nearly enough resembling nutritional value as might draw her further back toward sanity . . . and protein? How about . . .
Carrot Cookies
Even with my history of telling you to judge your own ingredients and your own batter, this one is a bit mad. I’ve got notes all over the margins of wildly varying quantities. Note that both grated carrots and honey can have SPECTACULARLY variable water content. If your batter is runny, stop. Do not bake. Add flour or oatmeal. You want the batter sticky. These are drop cookies. They should behave like drop cookies.
2-3 c flour. Half wholewheat/meal is good
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
pinch to ¼ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon (I round it up pretty generously)
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cloves
2-3 c quick oatmeal
1 c raisins (I like golden in this recipe)
1 c chopped nuts (I recommend pecans)
½ c soft butter
1 c grated (raw) carrots
½ to 1 c honey, depending on how sweet you want it, including how sweet your carrots are. No, really. Taste your batter.
2 eggs, beaten frothy
Mix the dry stuff together: I’d start with 2 c flour and 2 c oatmeal. I don’t think I ever start with the full cup of honey; I usually start around the scant ¾ c level. Now beat the honey into the butter. Usually I’m a little carefree about the whole ‘soft’ butter thing, but if you want to beat it into honey your life will be a lot easier if it’s genuinely soft. Then beat in the eggs. Then the carrots. Now beat in the flour mixture gradually, as your arm or your electric whizzer can stand the strain. (If you’re using electric, you want it on slow enough it doesn’t pulverize your raisins and nuts. Ask me how I know this. I think food processors are a mixed blessing and I’ve mostly gone back to the wooden spoon technique, but then I don’t bake a lot any more.) If the texture is right, taste. If you need to drizzle another ¼ c of honey into the batter, it’s not rocket science, just do it, and beat it in, maybe with a few more flakes of oatmeal. If it’s too runny . . . well, you’re going to need more honey too because of the more flour/oatmeal you’re going to be adding, and if you’re adding more than a sprinkly handful you’ll probably want to cast in a little extra cinnamon.††† Practical Physics in Your Kitchen. You just want instructions, right? Sorry.
Drop in biggish globs on greased cookie sheets. 350° F, about 15 minutes.
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I wish to note for the record that I ate a large piece of fish for supper. I’m sure strength is pouring back into my valiant cells. Feh.
* * *
* There was some whimpering and clutching of bedposts, but we can’t have everything.
** I might even try putting my belt back on. This would be a good thing, since I’ve been eating so little the last few days my jeans are showing some alarming signs of falling off.
*** Mind you, I still can’t breathe, and I am terrifying on the phone.
† I thought I was having more trouble typing than usual . . .
†† How many hours before I can start on the cider?
††† Or you can shout, Wrangledabnag it!, and then pack the whole sloppy mess into a big baking dish. I think 13 x 9 will do it—I know I have done this but I didn’t bother to write down what size pan I used. It’ll probably take kind of forever to cook and be a trifle fragile. But it’ll taste just fine.
Summer fruit and squishiness
Before I forget: here’s the definitive photo record of the signing at Forbidden Planet last week from our forum’s CathyR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marmitelover/sets/72157627054561095/
She’s also @CambridgeMinor on Twitter, so if anyone wants to ask her for a copy of any of the photos, please tweet or DM.
Shattered again. How boring. Today’s excuse is that I took Peter and me to see Tabitha, my Bowen massage lady, and I always come out of one of these sessions feeling like overcooked oatmeal.* Happy, peaceful overcooked oatmeal, but still, speaking/blogging in complete sentences and walking upright and all that is a strain, and I keep wanting to subside gently into a nice bowl-shaped piece of furniture. A hot bath, say. An American friend said to me dubiously, presumably you feel like a million dollars** the next day or something? There has to be a reason you keep going back? No, I just like pain . . . It’s nothing as spectacular as being able to leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive the horses of the sun across the sky***. It’s more like having fewer pebbles in your shoes or fewer unmitigated morons giving you blood-pressure headaches. Over the course of the next few days you realise that your shoes are comfy again and most of the morons are only morons and you can ignore them. It’s subtle enough that I periodically fall out of the habit of going, and it’s not till I rack myself up again and have to go back so she can tease my spine out of its granny knots and level my pelvis till my legs start behaving like they’re more or less the same length again—or the ME starts shoving me back on the sofa—that I remember why I go even when I’m not crippled.
I’ve off and on tried to persuade Peter to go to Tabitha too but he belongs to the Stoic No Fuss category of British male—but I got him while his defenses were down a few months ago after that bad fall he had. For a while I took him along oftener than I needed to go, and lately we’ve settled into a nice monthly double act. The last two appointments I’ve brought hellhounds too and we are exploring a fresh new piece of Hampshire countryside I’ve previously only driven through while Peter is on Tabitha’s table. And then if she’s running late I knit. Mmm. What a pity this only happens once a month.
Meanwhile it’s high summer, and the fabulous, paradisal, dizzying glut of high-summer fruit is upon us. I’m eating handfuls of cherries, nectarines and peaches for breakfast every day and it makes getting out of bed WORTH it. Which is saying a lot. I mean, caffeine is crucial, but the joy it occasions is a rather grim, real-world variety. Summer sweet cherries . . . convince me that the Elysian Fields and Valhalla and so on do exist. Nothing to do with swords and willing virgins though—but it’s a lot about food. Some of you may or may not remember that when I first started posting recipes I said that this was going to be a good opportunity to dust off old once-loved recipes of things I can no longer eat . . . but in fact I almost never do post any of these because as I’m leafing through my books and notebooks I get all cranky and resentful about my limitations. Also, summer fruit is so amazing fresh off the tree or the bush or the wings of the angel that it’s mostly criminal or at least superfluous to mess with it. But I did use occasionally to make cherry ice cream and I’m feeling so mellow after a dose of Tabitha that I thought I’d post the recipe.†
Cherry (Almond) Ice Cream
2/3 c milk
1 egg plus one extra yolk
½ c granulated sugar
¼ tsp vanilla
1 lb sweet cherries
1 ounce slivered almonds
2/3 c whipping cream
Scald milk, set aside to cool. Mix the egg and the yolk in the top of a double boiler/bain marie with the sugar and beat like mad, till it turns pale and ribbons off the spoon. (Your electric mixer is your friend.) Pour on the slightly cooled milk; place over gently simmering water and stir till thick. Stir in the vanilla and leave to cool.
Stone your cherries. Ugh. This is the worst bit. You will need more than a pound, of course, because you’ll eat some of them to sustain morale. I’m not sure how to allow for this, since the original weight includes the stones, which you are discarding. Make your best guess. The original recipe tells you to put the stoned bits in a food processor and buzz them to puree, but I think this is unsporting. I just kind of rip them up some in the stoning process. You do want enough pulp to turn your ice cream red, but I don’t think you can avoid this with dark expoding-sweet high-summer cherries. Stir them, in whatever form, into the custard. Whip the cream till it forms soft peaks. Fold into the cherry mixture. Pour the lot into your ice cream maker and do what it tells you to do to produce ice cream.
While your custard is becoming ice cream, toast your almonds. The original recipe tells you to fold them into the finished ice cream, but unless you’re going to eat it all in one go, I wouldn’t; the almonds will go soft. I sprinkle them on per serving. This will, I admit, probably mean that you need more almonds, but hey.
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* She looked back in her big fat McKinley folder today and we realised I’ve been coming to see her for ten years. Intellectually I know this; someone had recommended her as a straightforward physical massage therapist when I was having repetitive-strain trouble with my hands as a result of the ME.^ But—ten years! I know there are people who live their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born, but I’m a Navy brat and my reincarnation as a middle-aged stay-at-home still regularly amazes me. And I’m coming up on my twenty year anniversary here—with Peter as of 26th of this month, with England the end of October—and our 20th wedding anniversary is the 3rd of January. I actually do love looking out at the same landscape year after year—groundedness, what a concept, I like it—but it’s one more thing that makes me feel that my life before the age of 38 happened to someone else.
^ Not only am I extremely relieved that my ME has turned out to be the negotiable-with variety but I’m very glad not to have to go through that early learning-to-negotiate phase again. A lot of you, unfortunately, will know what I’m talking about: that first really harsh running-into-a-wall experience. I went from being someone who ran 25-30 miles a week, rode horses, hurtled hounds, rang bells, and dug up old tree stumps in order to put more rose-beds in, to someone who couldn’t get off the godsblasted sofa. Dear heavens. The shock and bewilderment are almost as bad as the fact. And with the zero energy comes a whole lorryload of other nonsense, which in my case included aching hands.
** That would be £631,592.12, which doesn’t quite have the ring to it. But then a million dollars doesn’t really have the ring to it any more either. A trillion dollars. £631,592,128.80: Feel like six hundred thirty-one million, five hundred ninety-two thousand, one hundred twenty-eight pounds and eighty pence. . . . No, it’ll never catch on.
*** I have hellhounds. I’d do a better job than that vainglorious wuss Phaethon.
† I have a chocolate cherry ice cream recipe somewhere. Although it may not be suitable for a family blog.
Really Ratbaggy Weather and Suitable Distractions
It’s more of the sunny blue/falling wall of water business today, and very annoying it is too. We went on what ought to be one of our favourite hurtles this morning and . . . it was raining when we got there so we sat in the car a little longer while the roar of the meteorological tumult drowned out Radio 3, which didn’t disturb the hellhounds so much but didn’t improve my temper any. When we finally started off anyway it was rain = sulky hellhounds. Then steambath sun = sulky hellhounds. Then more rain = sulky hellhounds. More sunny sauna = sulky hellhounds. AAAAAUGH. The weird visuals included sky so black it really looked like Thor or Odin or someone was about to clap the lid over us alternating with a fuzzy white sun about half the size of the sky—plus the ankle-level theatrics. When the rain was coming down in thwacks if you were on a hard surface you were walking through a tiny geyser-garden as the water-balloons of rain hit and burst upward again. When the sun came out everything did promptly start steaming—probably including myself and the hellhounds, but I wasn’t at a good angle to see this—I can vouch for the steaming sheep however, and steaming sheep are . . . bizarre. Plus the dry-ice boa constrictors of murk coming off the road and the trees, including fallen logs. I was starting to worry about barrow-wights. It was totally possible that some of that wreathing smoke drifting off the bigger logs was going to solidify, stand up and come after us. Maybe the hellhounds really had our best interests at heart. They didn’t give the impression of having our best interests at heart. They gave the impression of having gone more or less limp in their harnesses and requiring me to frelling carry them. *
Of course I have been thinking of Ajlr’s bees. I hope the weather has been better where they are and they are not already telling each other the story of their origins in a bright and beautiful place from which they were evicted without warning for displeasing their gods . . . in some manner they wot not of, which is usually the way with displeased gods. Despairingly they wonder, what can they do to regain their gods’ favour? Pssst—make honey. Make lots and lots of honey.
This recipe began life using milk and maple syrup. I stopped using milk a long time ago and then when I moved over here maple syrup became gold dust and the Fountain of Youth**. Which is when I started using tea and honey. Yes, tea. I make it STRONG, but even so you’re getting comparatively little per muffin and unless you’re very susceptible to caffeine I wouldn’t have thought it would buzz you. One of the pleasures, to me, of these muffins is that they’re different every time because both tea and honey vary so immensely. Well, okay, I like messing about with teas of character† . . . and there are teas that are good with honey and teas that, in my capricious opinion, are not. But then I like honey with character too, and when you get two assertive entities together you have to be a little careful. So if you’re going to go down this route, you’re going to want to do your own experimenting. Which is part of the fun. I will point out however, before you decide instead to pop round to the corner shop and buy some doughnuts, that the fact that there’s flour and so on involved in the actual muffins means that the match between the tea and the honey does not have to be perfect.
Mettlesome Muffins
1 egg
3 T butter
¾ c strong tea
1/3 to ½ c honey: this is going to vary both with how sweet you want your muffins and how runny your honey is. I’m always going on in my recipes about how individual ingredients vary††. Honey more so than most. Honey is actually fairly tricky to bake with, but muffins are pretty accommodating.
Melt the butter, let cool; beat the egg, add the honey, then the tea, then the melted butter.
1-2 c wholemeal/wholewheat flour. You want about 1 ½ c flour total, but if you want to use some white flour to lighten it, use up to ½ c.
½ c (dry) oatmeal
1 T baking powder
If you like cinnamon (I often put cinnamon in my tea), you can add 1 tsp ground
Mix all this dry stuff together, then stir in quickly to the wet. I recommend using a whisk. It’s true that lumps will (probably) bake out, but they make me nervous.†††
Plop in about 12 muffin cups, which you’ve either buttered first or put paper muffin cups in.‡ About 20 minutes at 400°F. They should puff up beautifully, and the tops should be pretty hard. And if you wanted to brush them, when they come out of the oven, with a little honey thinned with a little water, that would be good too. If you want to you can run them back in the oven again for just about a minute more, to get a nice crackly effect from the honey wash.
And you want a good book to read while you eat your muffins, right? And what more suitable . . . Look what a friend in Cambridge (. . . Massachusetts) sent me‡‡:
* * *
* Speaking of not being at a good angle to see if they were steaming. My eyeballs were probably steaming.
** Yes, all right, you can buy it in the shops here. At £100/thimble. And you can only get the pale polite grade A, not the darker more interesting ones.
*** For example, the following. I’ve been a teaholic for forty years, but the serious fannying around began about twenty years ago when a friend living in Paris came to visit us at the old house bringing several tins from Palais des Thes. Wow. My world changed.
http://www.palaisdesthes.com/en/
http://www.bristolteacompany.co.uk/
† And let us not forget one of my favourite Wondermarks: http://wondermark.com/557/
†† And that it makes me furious that cookbooks rarely acknowledge this. I wonder how many nascent cooks and bakers had their nerve wrecked early on by recipes that were a disaster despite having been followed exactly, down to the last basilisk eyelash. In the real world there is no exact. There’s only a general principle applied to your basilisk.
††† I personally think the whole ‘don’t overbeat your muffin batter’ is kind of a bugbear. But it’s true you beat only minimally, unlike a cake batter, say, where you want to see the batter change colour.
‡ Hint: I think paper muffin cups are one of the great discoveries of modern science.
‡‡ And yes, if you’re having trouble reading it on your monitor, that does say Harvard Book Store.
Happy New Year*
Roll on 2011. I like the look of ‘2011’. A very nice collection of numbers nicely arranged. May it be a Year of Multifaceted Wonderfulness.**
I think we need a sticky celebratory pudding. A little late for tonight, but it’ll be excellent tomorrow too. If you’re not too the-day-after-the-night-before-ish for getting your eyes to focus on a recipe.
Spicy cranberry gingerbread pudding
The original recipe wants you to make eight individual puddings. You must be frelling joking. You’re already going to have to make the sauce as well as the pudding. Life is way too short to spend that much time buttering pudding basins, not to mention cleaning the suckers afterward, since in my experience putting them through the dishwasher is pretty futile. I don’t know, are there Miniature Pudding Basin Liners like there are paper muffin cups? The latter entirely revolutionised my baking half a million years ago when I discovered them, or someone started making them, which I think is what happened—some muffin-eating industrialist’s wife told him that paper muffin cup liners would not only mean he could have fresh muffins every day but that they would thereby be made wealthy***.
Anyway. In the absence of miniature pudding basin liners, you can make it in an 8” square pan, although a 6-cup Bundt is ideal because it looks pretty without being nearly so much work.†
1 ¾ c all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp (ground) ginger
¼ tsp allspice
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
2 medium/large eggs, room temp
5 T soft butter
¼ c blackstrap molasses
¼ c dark brown sugar. If you’re a wimp you can use white sugar
1 heaped teaspoon freshly grated ginger root
4 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
about 1 c water
Sift the dry stuff together. Squash the butter and sugar together thoroughly, then add molasses, then eggs. Beat well. Then start adding flour alternately with water, and mixing each time, starting with flour: half the flour, then half the water, then half the flour . . . then stop. At this point add the two gingers (the ground went in with the spices in the dry), so you can judge how much water you’re going to need to make a good batter. I have found I need slightly less than the full 1c. Beat well again. If you are an electric-mixer person, use it. The batter should get very homogenous and very slightly paler.
Pour in your chosen WELL BUTTERED pan, and bake about half an hour at 350°F/moderate. It should look done like a cake looks done. Use a toothpick if you’re nervous. If it’s a Bundt, you’ll want to let it cool a bit and then turn it out; if it’s in a boring old brownie pan, you can just serve it from there.
Sweet Cranberry-Cider Sauce
1 lb cranberries
16 fluid oz British cider. Which is to say, alcoholic. If you can get British/hard cider, use whatever kind you like to drink, which is to say this is not the time to go cheap. If you can’t get hard cider, use about 1 ½ c ordinary cider and ½ c port, Madeira, sherry, or whatever of that kind of thing you have around. You ought to have something of this sort because it’s great for enlivening dull food. You could certainly use Calvados or some such but I think that’s getting on for apple overkill myself.
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp (ground) cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
about ¼ c, somewhat depending on how dry your cider/etc is and how sweet you like your sauce, dark brown sugar
2 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
Put the cider in a pan with everything else except the preserved ginger. Bring to boil, boil gently till cranberries pop. Take off the heat, add the ginger. Let cool. Reheat just to warm to serve. You can warm the pudding too. I generally don’t, but you don’t want it cold from the refrigerator.
It’s five minutes to midnight as I write this. Tick . . . tick . . . tick. . . . ††
* * *
* We had ringing practise tonight. How sad is that? New Year’s Eve and we’re all in the bell tower making horrible crashing noises.^ There were even enough of us tonight to make a wide variety of horrible crashing noises. But I think possibly some of us had got a head start on celebrating.^^
^ Niall did suggest that if anyone wanted to ring in the New Year it could probably be arranged . . . but not by him.
^^ Which is to say that my Cambridge was perhaps more accurate than some others of those present.
** In the immediate future however . . . I have had a long detailed email from a professional photo geek, who says in essence:
(a) Yes, the Canons are too slow.
(b) Yes, the Panasonics’ jpeg handling isn’t good enough.
At present my choices seem to be:
(a) Learn photo editing after all and shoot in RAW mode.
(b) Give up on the compact idea and go for a full DSLR.
(c) Learn to draw.
How’s progress on cloning coming? I need two of me, whatever I decide. I need hours for photo editing and I need hours to write more books to pay for my renovated, upgraded and expanded camera habit. Or I need hours with my sketchbook. Hours and hours and hours and HOURS AND HOURS. And possibly a gene-splice from JMW Turner or James Whistler or John Everett Millais or Edward Burne-Jones.
*** And she could hire someone to make muffins while she got on with writing her great novel. He probably wanted a bigger car or a string of polo ponies or a castle in Spain. Men.^
^ Although I’ve always wanted my castle in Scotland which is manifestly insane. Winter? Darkness? Rising damp? Cold? I think the top ten most uncomfortable places on earth must include at least one paradigmatic Scottish castle.
† Although they don’t go too effectively through the dishwasher either. Butter it really well.
†† And I’m listening to Handel’s MESSIAH. Well, it’s festive. They’ve got the last night of the Proms running on Radio Three and I cannot take the blurky self-congratulation. It’s stickier than the above pudding, which is not appropriate on the radio. Get a grip, guys.
Pumpkin, winter, etc
This weather is starting to make me CLAUSTROPHOBIC. It rained last night, and walking home as a result was unspeakably delightful and I spent most of it murmuring paeans to the gallant yaktrax, or possibly begging them not to self destruct at this moment as I waded through ice-bottomed brooks.* Today has been a degree or two above freezing so the wet stuff falling from the sky is almost but not quite sleet. And it’s supposed to snow hard tonight which on top of today’s antics by tomorrow should be . . . whatever the next stage after unspeakably delightful is.
So to cheer myself up I thought I’d respond to some of the forum comments which I have been neglecting shamefully.** And of course the comments I’m the most drawn to concern food.
Tinned pumpkin varies, like so many things in this world. In years when I couldn’t face the whole roasting and scooping/peeling thing—to my mind the worst part of dealing with fresh pumpkin is the seeds: they don’t come loose when they’re raw, they still don’t come loose even after they’re cooked, and while they come looser, since the pumpkin itself is now all squishy it doesn’t give you any purchase—there is or used to be a French tinned, or rather jarred, pumpkin that was excellent. Not to mention seedless. I preferred dealing with a single too-large pumpkin, because the equivalent amount of seed-grappling produced a much higher yield of usable pumpkin than piffling around with the correct number of small pumpkins with their individual minefields of seeds. I could afford this attitude because at the old house we had a monster chest freezer and I could freeze the surplus pulp—in premeasured glomps. I always made pies from fresh, but frozen pulp works just fine for bread, cookies and muffins.
And you always, always, always have to look at what’s in your mixing bowl and make executive decisions about texture and runniness.
When I was laying on Thanksgiving, or some other megaspread, for more people than I had space for, I used to put a tablecloth on the piano. This habit pursued me through several house moves but reached a kind of apotheosis in Maine. That was where I had a baby grand piano in a sitting room that was . . . approximately the size of a baby grand piano. Have I told you this story? When I had overnight guests—for example, for Thanksgiving—and put them on my Beautiful Blue Velvet Fold Out Double-Sized Sofabed, which had been my first real piece of grown-up furniture and which I therefore adored irrationally***—their feet went under the piano. The sofa itself was wedged under the window. You had to take kind of a flying leap from the door: a bit like my bedroom now, although my bed is complicated by the fact that it’s an old four-poster and if you miss and hit a post. . . .
Grah. I keep meaning to look for my old apple butter recipe, and keep forgetting. However. You don’t really need a recipe: Take your apples. Core, peel and chop them—and you don’t have to chop them fine, just chop them—put them in a large, heavy, wide-bottomed pan with as little water as you can get away with—or better yet, apple juice—and boil, gently, till they go mushy. At this point use a potato masher on them. I personally find this a lot less effort than all that chopping-small stuff. Depending on the tartness of your apples and how sweet you want your butter you’ll need somewhere around ¼ to ½ c sugar (brown or white: I like brown) per cup of apple pulp, and if you mix it in with a whisk you’ll get the last of the lumps out. Again, depending on how spicy you like your butter, you’ll want anywhere from about ¼ to 1 tsp of cinnamon per cup, and about half that of allspice Then turn the heat down to low and let it cook forever. If you want to stand there and stir it you can have the heat a little higher, and it’ll take a little less time but . . . not enough less. Stirring is one of the most boring occupations on the planet.† You should be in the same house with it, however, your large, heavy, wide-bottomed pot with your future apple butter in it, because you need to stir it occasionally and make sure it’s not sticking. It will eventually congeal into . . . apple butter. I don’t remember how long it takes, but it’s one of these put it together before lunch and it’ll be done by dinner things, and then you’ll have fresh apple butter for breakfast tomorrow. As you’d expect with something that slow-cooks and is full of spices, it improves with a little age.
I never bottled it the way you’re supposed to. A couple of big jars of apple butter in the back of the fridge didn’t last long enough to be a nuisance. And the way I make it—without stirring—if you made it in a big batch it would take FOREVER to cook down to sludge. My way it’s simple enough that doing it again is not a big deal.
One more warning: you lose a lot of pectin—the stuff that stiffens the applesauce it into something you can spread—by peeling and coring. The first time I made it I’d automatically peeled and cored, because that’s what you do before you cook apples, and then I reread the recipe and thought, oh, frell . . . and besides, sieving the muck to get the peels and cores out is again to me way too much like work, like endless stirring. So I did it my way and it still came out butter, and has always come out butter†† every other time I’ve made it my way. I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky in my apples, or what. So you might want to follow a proper recipe.
. . . I’m interested by the crock-pot version of apple butter that a couple of people mention. That certainly solves the stirring problem. And apple butter is a good way to use up all those windfalls or cheap from the farmers’ market damaged apples—I have used any and all apples. You just adjust the sugar and the spices. If the apples are old and losing their flavour you can also add a little sherry or Madeira.
The chief thing I remember about making crustless pie with your standard pie filling is be sure you butter the baking dish.
I love squash and sweet potatoes, in or out of pies. Although I tend to think that pumpkin makes the best pies—stronger flavour—but I’m sure you could fool me if you tried. You could just say that you used more/less something-or-other than I’m used to: all these pies are very spicy, and if you’re using molasses or maple syrup or cream cheese or cranberry sauce (or apple butter) or all of the above, the base orange vegetable could be almost anything.††† There are dedicated squash (or sweet potato) pie recipes, although I think the ones I know are regional. What I think of as yams, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got my taxonomy wrong, tend to be sweet without a lot of other flavour; they don’t interest me much, although generally speaking sweet = good in my hierarchy.‡ But sweet potatoes don’t have to be treated as sweet—somebody mentions sweet potatoes and bacon; I also love them roasted, either whole or sliced up in coins or wands, drizzled in olive oil (possibly in company with parsnips, carrots and beets treated the same way) and put in the oven on medium-high till they start to dry out and brown a little. You might want a little salt and a few herbs. (You should turn them over once, if you can stand it. Boring.) They’re also excellent in a stir-fry.
I’ve just finished supper. Why am I hungry?
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* http://www.yaktrax.co.uk/ has restocked so I’ve ordered a spare pair. I cannot face the thought of more of this weather, the ineluctable facts of hellhound responsibility, and a single pair of exploded, fled, or eaten by wolverines yaktrax. I’ve been trying to remember what I did in Maine about walking in winter. Chiefly we had infrastructure. I was complaining to Peter that the mews, the barns and the Big Pink Blot are all a coop, they pay maintenance for stuff like the grounds and the driveway, where is the bloke with the snow plough hung on the front end of his pick up truck (with the bags of sand in the back to keep the rear wheels on the ground) to clear said driveway so we don’t all slew sideways and run slowly but irresistibly into the frelling wall coming in or going out? Peter looked at me as if I’d gone mad and explained loudly and clearly as to someone with suspected brain damage that we don’t have blokes with detachable snow ploughs around here. There’s no call for it. Huh. I predict that by next winter the local Scats^ will be selling bolt-on personal snow ploughs. Meanwhile the twelve miles^^ of frelling driveway is what you’d expect of four inches of unshifted snow being ground into titanium by passing cars and a few hellhounds and yaktrax.
In Maine there were tiny sidewalk/pavement-sized snow ploughs too, and after the plough went through somebody else laid sand. I was also younger. I didn’t worry about falling down as much.
^http://www.first4farming.com/scats/pages/homepage.jhtml
^^ Snow makes it longer. It’s part of the same physics that causes the toast to fall butter-and-marmalade side down.
** You’re glad really. It’s all PEG II time. I wish it were this simple, of course: if giving up the blog meant I would begin producing two novels a year—which is approximately the right word count, I regret to acknowledge—I’d do it so fast I’d break the world land speed record. Unfortunately I’ve not had a visit from the Really Good Bargains Fairy.
*** Yes. It’s in the sitting room at the cottage, which is even smaller than a baby grand piano. And was smaller even before the bookshelves went up.
† Note: why I almost never make risotto. All that stirring? Life’s too short.
†† It’s nothing like butter. It’s a kind of thick jammy gloop.
††† Heavens. I’d almost forgotten carrot pie.
‡ I used to make a fabulous brown sugar and orange juice and sweet potato thing for Thanksgiving. It destroyed lesser mortals.