apple jelly

Apple Madness Part Deux: Pies, More Jelly & Cookies

November 5, 2009

Guest Starring Michelle Sandquist!!

Like the pies, I procrastinated this post as long as was humanly possible. You know how people piss and moan because the high temperature for the day might be in the 30’s here in Minnesota? In October? Well I was like, “YES! The apples in the cooler outside will be JUST FINE! I can procrastinate another day!” And since our average daily high during October was about 10 degrees, I was ‘just fine’ for an awfully long time. For the record, I was the only one bemoaning our two sunny October days in the high 50’s.

But I made it! As of yesterday at 9 pm, I am done with the apples! Well, to be honest, I still have this stash, which I completely forgot about behind the pine tree. Which, now that I look at this photo closely, I see that, aside from the mouse-chewed ones, it looks like there might be quite a few more ugly but useable apples that I can…

Let’s not think about that right now.

Last weekend, I had my 2nd annual pie-fest with my friend Michelle. She’s not that into cooking, but she likes being able to take home a bunch of pies, does what she is told, and is very fun. So I let her into my bubble. Aren’t I nice? It took us about 5 hours to make 11 pies, but we sure used up a lot of those damn apples. Win, win.

I won’t belabor this pie making thing. Don’t get me wrong, it was a labor to make them, but I’m not going to belabor the process. There’s a kazillion recipes for apple pies out there and mine is nothing special. I, personally, use the one from Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipe cookbook. I make the crusts myself, not because I’m good at it, but because I am too cheap to buy 15 boxes of Pillsbury All Ready pie crusts — which, I swear, are delicious and taste home made. Maybe I’m just not a crust aficionado, but they do seem to fool an awful lot of people who eat them.

At any rate, I use the same book for my pie crust recipe. Someday, I’d like to try the whole lard/leaf lard route with crust to see if I can really appreciate the difference, but I suspect, for me, it will be much akin to the taste between cuts of steak. I like them all. And I actually almost prefer a good chuck roast to a filet. Anyway, I digress. Again. So, sometime in the future, when I ‘m not working full time for every tom, dick and harry charity out there, I’ll give lard a try!

Our process is that Michelle (and Morgan if she deems us worthy to be graced with her presence) peels, slices and mixes the apples.

I have already assembled the crusts ahead of time and they are in the fridge. Then I roll, she assembles, and I top and crimp the crusts.

The pies are made to be frozen. So I add about 1/4 cup more flour than the recipe calls for to the pie innards to combat all the juices that are inevitable with frozen pies. Oh, and I hate allspice so I skip it. Well, yes, I do also add some butter to the top, too. Then, I mound the apples as high as they will go.

My helper, however, did not really grasp this concept, so the pies are a picture of evolution as I bossed her around telling her “maybe a little more” at least five times.

I use a mix of my apples: Honeycrisp, Harlson, and 2 mystery apple varieties. I slice them thin, because I like to use the mandolin or food processor. Because I’m lazy. And because they seem to cook more evenly. (Hate hard apples inside of pies!).

Besides being lazy, I’ll tell you something else. I am miserable, I mean really horrible, at decorative pie crust crimping. Sitting here and thinking about this utter failure on my part, I’m hard-pressed to come up with another thing (well, except hand made artisanal breads) that I have tried very hard to succeed at and failed. Really. I don’t get it, but I can NOT achieve a pretty, fluted crust edge.

It looks good when I’m done, but it flops down in the oven. Yes, I’ve tried all the tips and tricks. Don’t insult me with your well-intentioned suggestions. I’m just plain bad at it and I give up. Hence the pathetic forked edges. They work. Better, they fit in the stupid freezer bags! So, we basically make the all the pies and instead of cooking, we freeze them. To cook, you bake from the frozen state in a 400 degree oven for at least an hour. You’ll want to always place them on a cookie sheet to bake though, unless you like cleaning burned sugar off the floor of your oven! So that’s the pies.

And then there was the JELLY!

The food miser refused to throw out any peels or cores.

She boiled three huge stock pots full of the garbage and was left with over 40 cups of pure pink juice. Seriously? Forty? Yes. Forty. I told her to just throw some away. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. The upside is that she now has enough to share with almost anyone who knocks on her door. So, if her UPS man ever comes across this blog, he will understand that she isn’t hitting on him. She just can’t waste anything. Not the juice from the garbage. Not the jelly she made from the juice from the garbage.

Why wasn’t I a writer? It just pours out of my fingers like rain from an October 2009 Minnesota sky.

Please don’t think I was serious about that last sentence. What I meant to say is that it is so easy. What’s hard is going back and deleting at least half of it. What? You thought I hadn’t edited this? Well I have.

I think the Apple Rosemary Jelly is my single greatest culinary achievement. If you don’t know me to ask for some, please try making it. It’s so easy.

And then, the Cookies!

And now for something that isn’t mine. It’s my friend Sheila’s. And she would say that it belongs to Sandy Moore who posted it on allrecipes.com and she is right. Got to give credit where credit is due. And credit is due. Sheila had been moaning about these cookies for a good month before I asked her to hand over the recipe. Amazing. Sheila’s spin on them was to replace the 1/4 milk and 2.5 tablespoons of cream with cider.

To be fair, I made them both ways. The cider was so much more apple-y. Everyone liked them better. My take on the recipe would be to get rid of the shortening, but only because of the trans fats. I had shortening, so I did use it. The cookies are super soft and good eaten all day long, with all types of beverages, in any company. Get the point?

Here is the recipe:

Glazed Apple Cookies

1/2 c shortening (or butter)
1 1/3 c packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 c flour
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ground cloves
1/4 t ground nutmeg
1/2 c chopped pecans (original recipe calls for 1 c walnuts)
1 c diced apple (I used 1.5 c)
1 c raisins (ish)
1/4 c apple cider
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 T soft butter
1 t vanilla (original recipe calls for 1/2 t)
approx 2 1/2 T apple cider (original recipe calls for half and half)

1) Cream shortening (or butter) and brown sugar, then beat in egg.

2) Stir together dry ingredients.

3) Add half of dry ingredients to creamed mixture. Then stir in apples, nuts and raisins (ish). Stir in remaining dry ingredients.

4) Add 1/4 c apple cider. Mix well.

5) Drop from heaping tablespoon onto lightly greased cookie sheet (or silpat mat). Bake in preheated 400 degree oven 10-12 minutes. Careful toward the end. they get brown fast and burned bottoms just won’t do!

6) To make glaze, combine powdered sugar, butter, vanilla and enough cider to make spreadable glaze. Beat until smooth and spread over warm cookie.

7) Try. Seriously, try, not to eat them all in the same day. Save one for coffee tomorrow.

And that, my friends, is the conclusion of my own personal Apple Hell. Now it’s on to window washing, which is even worse.

Apple Madness, Part One. Ugly-But-Useable-Apples Recipes.

October 21, 2009

Ugh.

I wish I could be more upbeat about this whole harvest thing, but MAN. I’m ridiculously SICK of it. How do orchard people stay happy? How does anyone stay happy? It’s just one thing after another thing after another… it’s never over. I’m never done!

aah. I digress. Again.

Not only do I sit and think “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to deal with those _______.” (fill in the blank with apples, peppers, eggplant, kale plants, beets, carrots, parsnips, etc.) But then I think “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get that apple post up on the blog.” And then I wonder “What the hell am I even doing this stupid blog for?” For which I do not have an answer.

Aside from my petulance about all the harvest things I have yet to do, I am really, really excited smug about this pairing of apple recipes.

First, know this: I grow organic apples.

Second, know this: I grow organic apples because it is the easiest way to grow apples. You basically do nothing, versus spraying chemicals on the apples every two weeks. I can’t be counted on to do anything “every two weeks.”

Third, know this: my organic apples are very ugly and hard to give away.

Fourth, know this: I hate to waste garden food and therefore I have a lot of ugly apples. Very tasty, ugly apples. Hence this combo of recipes.

Backstory
We had two hard freezes before September was over. Normally we have a few frosts, things wind down slowly and the apples are about the last garden item to be harvested, along with carrots and parsnips. This year however, our first frost was not a frost, but a freeze. The apples were mostly OK that night (26), but a week later the temps dipped down to 20. Not 25, but 20! So I spent the day picking all the apples and sorting them into 3 piles: compost, really ugly but useable, and maybe-I-can-eat-this-apple-fresh piles.

I use the “Really Ugly but Useable” apples for pies and sauce. I basically just cut away everything gross and use what I can. Last year, I was making tons of pies to freeze. I had a bucket of peels and cores under the sink in the compost bucket. I think I might have even emptied some coffee ground on top of them. Then I read something about boiling the peels and cores to get juice that you use for apple jelly. Honestly! That’s like making food from garbage!

So I brushed the coffee grounds off the browned peels and cores and dumped them in a pan with some water and started boiling. I got only 1 pint of jelly out of it, but oh MAN, it was so insanely good! In my opinion, it’s way better than my raspberry jam that everyone seems to want. The jelly was too runny last year, but I didn’t care. This year, I was hoping I could do it better.

So here is my process. And if I may be allowed to say so, it’s brilliant. I don’t know how many other people have ugly apples, but if you do, please don’t throw them away: try this!

Apple Sauce and Apple Jelly

The ugliest useable apples go into the Sauce/Jelly pile (this is a very complicated pile system) while the prettier ones go into the Pie/Jelly pile (that’s Apples Part Two, coming soon). Just for the record, my apples are a mixture of Honey Crisp, Haralson and two mystery varieties.

I take an apple, and cut it in half, then quarters, and assess the situation:

if looks OK, I cut the core out and put that in the jelly pot. The quarters go into the Sauce Pot.

If it looks über yucky, I use what I can.

Nice bright pieces go into the Sauce Pot.

Mottled brownish pieces (trails from the Apple Magot Fly) go into the Jelly Pot.

I do confess that we often just eat the less disgusting brownish ones. They are only trails of worms long gone. You can hardly see some of them. Just so you know: I like to think I’m preparing my family for some apocalypse that will take place some time in the future. My kids are going to be way more immune to gross food than yours will be.

I work my way thru the pile (which isn’t disappearing nearly fast enough). And yes, that’s a trash can and yes, it’s kind of dirty…

The pectin for the jelly comes from the peels and the seeds, so you need those for the jelly. The peels stay on the sauce apples because I will put those thru the food mill and they make the sauce pink, which is very pretty. I could leave the cores on the sauce apples as well, but they are helpful for the jelly and it’s easy enough to just cut those out. Is this as confusing as I think it is? It shouldn’t be…

Oh my gosh I have a terrible headache… But I still have 42% battery left on my laptop, so I must press on!

I basically just keep going until one or the other pots fill up. Then I add about 1 cup of water to the sauce apples and turn on low and cover. I almost cover the Jelly Apples with water and add a whole bunch of ROSEMARY (my favorite flavor). Do not skip this step. If you don’t have any, go buy some. Seriously.

Add 1/2 cup of fresh squeezed (not!) lemon juice. (I’ll squeeze up to 1/4 cup. More than that, and I use this stuff, kindly given to me by my friend Chris when I complained that real lemon juice — as opposed to RealLemon brand yucko — didn’t exist. She got this at CostCo.

Stir it up and turn on low, cover and cook till apples are soft, at least an hour.

Once soft and tender, line a strainer with several layers of cheese cloth (or use a jelly bag, whatever the Hell that is, if you happen to have one. I do not.) set over a large bowl and pour in. Do NOT push or force apples thru.

This mixture needs to sit a good long time, preferably overnight in a cool place. I’m thinking that maybe it’ll be cool enough on my porch tonight. Ya think?

Meanwhile, the Sauce Apples should be soft and ready to process. Put the Sauce apples thru a food mill to get rid of the peels and any seeds.

I put the food mill right back over the pot they cooked in because once you are done processing them, turn the heat back up, add 1/4 c lemon juice for about 4 lbs of cut apples and sugar to taste. I added about 1/2 cup. I also add about 1 teaspoon of cinnamon because we like that. Bring to a simmer and ladle into clean, hot sterilized canning jars.

Heat process (steam or boil) 10 minutes for 1/2 pint jars.

You are now done for the day, go to bed feeling like a superstar. Tomorrow, though, it all begins again, so sleep well.

In the morning (or several hours later), put the juice from the strained apple rosemary mash into a measuring cup.

I have just over 4 cups, so that means I need to add 4 cups of sugar. Put it into a big-ass pot, because the jelly needs to be cooked at a full rolling, foamy boil.

It took me about 20 minutes to reach the magic temperature of 220 degrees F. Be sure to skim off as much of the foam as possible because it makes a bigger difference for clear jellies. I don’t worry about it too much with my jam, but you can see it below, suspended in my jelly. As soon as it reaches 220, turn off the heat and ladle into hot, sterilized 1/2 pint jars, wipe the rims and seal. Heat process for 10 minutes. Refrigerate any jars that don’t seal.

See the foam? Really ticked me off, I have to say. But then, just another reason to keep it for myself.

Apple Sauce and Apple Jelly. Leave it on your counter to admire for a couple days, then trudge it out to the garage or basement or where ever you store that type of thing.

And this year, It’s the PERFECT consistency! So happy.