Canning Applesauce

Finished rose applesauce, awaiting entrance into my belly.

I’ve already professed my love for applesauce and let it be known how easy it is to make.  For happiness, everyone should try to make applesauce at least once.  If it’s for your happiness, why not do it?

Prepping the Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples.  It's best to core and quarter your apples.  Don't be lazy like me.

Something that I admire in others is the ability to eat seasonally.  I have not mastered this and one of the best ways to be able to eat seasonally, or at least not go to the grocery store as often, is to can.  I love applesauce so much that it is a main priority to save when apples are in season.

An Ode to my Great Grandma and Applesauce

As a kid whenever my family visited my great grandma Murphy's house in Indiana she always made a feast.  It didn't matter when we visited, there would always be a spread on the table and everyone remotely related to us gathered around.  One dish that she would make that I adored can't really be thought of as a "dish".  It was homemade applesauce.  It was incredible.

I remember eating it hot.  It was sweet and chunky and I never had anything like it before.  Sometimes I wish really hard that I could remember those days better, visiting with my great grandma in her kitchen.  But I was young and more concerned with playing hide-and-seek with my cousins and exploring the edges of her yard that opened up to a field.

We Need to do Something about these Bananas

While in Minneapolis (land of many, many good book stores) I couldn’t help but pick up a book that I had heard about on Design Sponge while browsing at Magers and Quinn. I am currently reading it, A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, and to be honest, at first I really didn’t like it. The structure of the book is a memoir that ends every chapter with a relevant recipe or two, sort of like how most food blogs work (and that’s how the author got her start). I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like the book, after all I love stories and food, and this book combines both with humor and emotion.

After some thought I realized I didn’t like the book because I was jealous, and that’s a tough thing to admit. The author isn’t that much older than me and she’s much more accomplished and well versed in cooking. Did I mention that she spent considerable amounts of time in Paris and speaks French? And, oh isn’t Paris just wonderful? But really what it comes down to is that I would loved to have spent considerable amounts of time in Paris and speak French. Though I did learn to cook for myself in Dublin (and I can count to ten in Gaelic), much of my short time abroad was spent studying (shock!), adventuring, and focusing on the liquid culinary offerings of Ireland. If I really thought harder about it too, if I went to Paris now and spent most of my time eating at wonderful French bistros, cafes, and bouchons, I would probably fawn over the food too, and perhaps even don a scarf. With my jealousy aside I was able to read with an open mind and appreciate the meld of food and stories.

One vignette in particular that I enjoyed was about how the author struggled with improvising and straying from a recipe. For a time I was like that and I reveled in my carefully controlled little food world. Then Andy walked into my life and scoffed at my dedication to a recipe and can whip up a delicious dinner completely off the cuff. It takes practice to be able to improvise well, which sound a bit contradictory but it’s true. Figuring out what flavors go well together means cooking more and if something doesn’t work out, generally it’s still edible.

The following recipe is one that I improvised a bit (not much actually) and is taken from A Homemade Life. This is the first time I’ve made a recipe from a book that I was currently reading. Which goes to show you how wonderfully this banana bread was described. I improvised this recipe on purpose and on accident. I didn’t have candied ginger at the time, though I did have piece of ginger root. Initially I was going to candy my own ginger but that took more time than I wanted to devote to cooking. My second, accidental improvisation came when I realized there wasn’t enough liquid. Adding some more yogurt solved the dry problem. I thought everything was going well until I was sliding the loaf pan into the oven and discovered I hadn’t added the melted butter. There sat my melted butter on the stove, explaining without words why the loaf was a tad dry. In the interest of not wasting good melted butter I fashioned up a new bread recipe using the formula from the book. An accident of de-panning caused the bread to end up more like cobbler than bread, so a second attempt will be made before sharing that recipe with the world.

Here is the delicious Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger recipe from A Homemade Life.

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
¾ cup sugar
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup semisweet chocolate chips (I didn’t have much ginger, so I made up for it with 1 cup of chocolate chips)
⅓ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger (Here is where I used about 2 inches of fresh ginger root, minced)
2 large eggs
1 ½ cups mashed banana (about 3 large bananas)
¼ cup well-stirred plain whole-milk yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

The How To:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan (9 x 5)ish. In a small bowl melt your butter (we don’t have a microwave so I do it on the stove. Don’t forget about it!) Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl whisk together flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Add the chocolate chips and crystallized (or regular) ginger and whisk well to combine. Set aside.

In a medium bowl (let’s hope you have a set), lightly beat the eggs. Add the mashed banana, yogurt, melted butter, and vanilla; stir to mix well. Pour the banana mixture into the dry ingredients and stir gently, scraping the sides. Do not over mix. The batter will be thick and somewhat lumpy, but there should be no unincorporated flour. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake until the loaf is a deep shade of golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean, 50 minutes to 1 hour. If it’s browning too quickly, make a tent over the top with tin foil. Cool the loaf in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes (10 might even be better). Let it cool completely before slicing (I did not wait and therefore my slices were smeared with melted chocolate. Yum!)

There are so many delicious recipes from this book that I’m just giddy with waiting to make them. Next up, this weekend I’ll be baking the Winning Hearts and Minds cake in honor of Independence Day and our Minnesota visitors! It sound decadent and I can’t wait.

Here's a taste of the apple bread to come!

We be Jamming

Nothing says spring has arrived better than fresh strawberries! Yesterday Andy and I, and our friend Allie ventured north to pick strawberries at Bottom View Farm. It was super fun plucking my own berries and seeing my basket fill up. The last time I picked berries I think I was about the same size as the blueberry bush and ate more berries than I collected. This time around all the berries made it to the basket. With our fresh berries Andy wanted to make 2 batches of strawberry jam. Our poor judge of quantities and fuzzy memory of the amount needed led us to pick and purchase roughly 2 gallons of strawberries. It wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, and we weren’t daunted by our gigantic leaking bag of berries.

When I was looking up strawberry canning options the “old fashioned” strawberry jam caught my eye (this is Antique Modernism after all). Old fashioned just means that the jam is made without pectin and utilizes the fruit’s natural pectin. This sounded appealing to me so we attempted this as our first batch. After about an hour we realized that “old fashioned” actually meant boil the crap out of it until you can’t stand it any more, then fill jars and process as usual. From the way things look in the jar it has set nicely and our patience lasted just long enough. The book claimed that this jam caramelizes more and has a different taste than pectin-made jams. It certainly turned out a beautiful deep burgundy color.

Just keep boiling, and boiling, and boiling...

It ends up turning this scrumptious color!

Next up, Strawberry Sauce. I was doubtful about the utility of this one since we don’t put a lot of flavored sauces on things. However, Andy said it sounded delicious and we brainstormed other uses for strawberry sauce. It could be made into to frosting, muffins, tarts, perhaps even a layer in a cake. So strawberry sauce could be versatile. The recipe called for using corn syrup and our corn syrup has high fructose corn syrup, which isn’t something I want to use in my cooking, so I swapped it for honey. I wasn’t sure how it was done, but it turns our you can swap honey for corn syrup one for one. In addition to honey there was apple juice, orange juice and zest. This one was very fragrant with the honey and orange scents. I’m excited to try some leftovers over some pie later this evening.

Strawberry sauce is a brighter red.

Last we made strawberry jam with pectin. Andy concluded that powdered pectin was a worthwhile invention as this jam took only about 20 minutes to make. I’m glad we made both kinds, so that we could learn what it spoon tests were all about and learn to fully appreciate powdered pectin. This was the batch where we finally remembered to let the jars sit in the canner for 5 minutes after processing. So, hopefully the lack of sitting doesn’t affect the jam and sauce too much. I’m feeling confident though that it’ll turn out okay.

Right to left: Jam with pectin, jam without pectin (old fashioned), and sauce.

If you didn’t think that 3 batches of jam/sauce was enough to use up 2 gallons of strawberries you’d be wrong! We had enough berries left over to fill a cookie sheet for freezing. These little guys will be used for smoothies and... well, probably nothing else since smoothies are awesome.

I’m jazzed about the success of our first canning adventure of the season. We came out with 20 jars of jam/sauce and only 1 serious jam burn. On our list for other canning adventures include tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, peaches, blackberries, and applesauce. This is a good start; however, 3 batches in one day is a lot of canning activity and we were both dog tired after the kitchen got cleaned up.

Our new dog Cotton! He's tired from jamming too much.

Muffin Madness: Toffee Apple Muffins

While I did my study abroad in Ireland I frequented a coffee shop on the UCD campus called Insomnia which had the best Toffee Apple Muffins. I craved those muffins. When my brother came to visit I was really excited to introduce him to these muffins. Forget the historic sites of Ireland, Book of What? I need a muffin. The day came and Insomnia was out of muffins, which caused me much distress, so I wandered Dublin with my brother in search of other Insomnia shops for far too long. It actually shouldn’t have been difficult as one block in Dublin has two such shops, but my sense of the city wasn’t so good. My hunger-induce hallucinations didn’t help either.

At any rate, these were were muffins I was willing to go out of my way for. Since I’ve returned I’ve been searching for toffee apple muffins and to my dismay none have appeared. In honor of Muffin Madness, it became time to make them myself.

Since my last batch was a not as successful as I would have liked, I decided to play it safe with these guys and only slighly adapt a recipe. Once again my copy of 500 Best Muffins proved invaluable and I adapted the basic apple muffin recipe. These ones turned out very tasty with soft toffee and sweet apples. Andy (the Official Muffin Taster) ate 2 mini muffins and demanded I take the rest to work, lest he eat them all.

Not quite toffee, just melted butter, sugar and lots of stirring.

The end product! Delicious, buttery toffee.

Toffee Apple Muffins
Makes a dozen and 3 mini muffins (if you so choose)

First, some notes: Andy made the toffee for us, which is quite simple to do. Take equal parts sugar, butter, a little salt and put on low heat. Stir, stir, stir! One everything gets up to 300 degrees F, pour it out into a greased pan with tin foil and let cool. Before it’s all cool score it into squares to break apart later. Also, I think more baking powder will improve the shape and fluffiness of the muffins, so I’m increasing it. And my streusel topping managed to slide right off and onto the pan, so I’m altering it a bit so that won’t be an issue.

2 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
⅛ tsp nutmeg
2 eggs beaten
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
3 tbs butter, melted
1 diced apple (you can peel it if you want, I’m not into that. If you want to dice ahead of time, mix apple chunks with lemon juice to prevent browning)
¾ cup toffee crushed (it was about 1 cup uncrushed with lots of empty space, just put toffee chunks into a plastic zip bag, think of something that makes you angry and smack the bag with a pan! It’s a lot of fun)

Topping:
⅓ cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

1. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Make a well in the center.
2. In smaller bowl beat eggs. Whisk in milk, vanilla and melted butter. Pour mixture into dry ingredients. Add apple and toffee and stir carefully together.
3. Mix together cinnamon and brown sugar for the topping.
4. Pour batter into paper lined muffin tin (you’ll appreciate having the paper cups later), fill about to the top. Sprinkle with the topping, saving any extra for yourself.
5. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, turning once.

Enjoy!