Apple Butter

If you want your home to smell absolutely delicious for an entire day (or two!), make some apple butter this fall! I love making recipes like this. It's one of those that people remember their parents or grandparents making when they were young, sometimes in huge cast iron pots in the back yard. Other people say "you can MAKE apple butter??"

Slather it on toast, swirl it into oatmeal, make a little sandwich with cream cheese and apple butter, put it on pancakes or biscuits, or make Apple Butter Hand Pies - recipe coming up next!

Note: when sharing apple butter with your friends who have small babies, and you pack it in baby food containers, please do them a favor and label the containers!! Sorry for the tummy ache Emmy :o(

Apple Butter
Recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook
Makes about 2 cups

6 1/2 lbs apples (I used McIntosh and Granny Smith), peeled, cored, and quartered
1 cup sugar
2 T. apple brandy
1 cup apple cider
2 T. lemon juice
1/2 t. ground cardamom
1/4 t. ground mace
1 large cinnamon stick
1 pinch ground cloves
1/2 t. nutmeg
1 t. ground ginger

Combine all of the ingredients in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Place mixture over medium-high heat, and simmer, covered, stirring often with a large wooden spoon to prevent scorching, until the apples are broken down and saucy, about an hour.

Now, either:
A) Reduce heat to medium and continue to cook for at least 2 1/2 more hours, stirring often until very thick and dark.
OR:
B) Heat oven to 200 degrees. Uncover pot, transfer to oven, and cook overnight until very thick and dark.

Let stand to cool. Store in an airtight container for up to one month in the refrigerator or up to 6 months in the freezer.

This pot started out filled to the brim with apples!

Spinach Dip Olé

I don't have a picture of this recipe, but I do have a picture of the man who requests it every time I see him! Here he is with Erol at the cabin that weekend, enjoying their favorite pasttimes of laughing and eating:

I got this recipe from Anna, my friend and former co-worker, and I've also seen it other places so I don't know where it originated. Anna had a good point when she mentioned that this recipe is so simple because it uses whole packages of only four ingredients, so it's a cinch to shop for and no leftovers of ingredients. You'll rarely have leftovers of the dip too because it's so good! Serve it with sturdy crackers like melba toasts or sliced baguette, toasted or not. You could add 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar and salt and pepper to taste, but I thing these are unnecessary because of the salsa.

Spinach Dip Olé
one 10oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
one 16oz jar salsa
one 8oz package cream cheese, cubed (more like pinched off into the bowl)
2 cups grated Monterey Jack cheese

Combine all ingredients and pour into a shallow baking dish. Bake at 400 degrees for aprox 35 minutes until bubbly and top is brown. Serve with bread, crackers, or chips.

Cracker Bits

These are a yummy snack for anytime! My grandma has a similar recipe using oyster crackers, and my sister has also done a similar thing with broken pieces of large hard pretzels. Everyone always loves this kind of snack!
Cracker Bits
recipe from Paula Deen

2 (10 1/2-ounce) boxes cheese crackers (recommended: Ritz Cheese Bits, not peanut butter flavor)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 (1-ounce) package salad dressing mix (recommended: Hidden Valley Original Ranch)
1 heaping tablespoon dried dill
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon celery salt

Place the crackers in a large sealable freezer container. In a bowl, mix the oil, salad dressing mix, dill, garlic powder, and celery salt. Pour this mixture over the crackers, cover the container, and invert it to coat the crackers with seasoning. Refrigerate for at least 24 hours, turning the container every so often to keep the crackers coated. Let the mixture come to room temperature before serving. Store in the covered container in refrigerator.

Classic Pot Roast

From the "All-Purpose Cookbook": Joy of Cooking! I love this cookbook. I googled this recipe so I might copy and paste the recipe (I cheat, I know), and didn't find it, but found a really cool blog that seems kinda similar to mine (as in lots of crazy pictures of each step): The Joy of the Joy of Cooking. Definitely gonna have to check that one out more later, I only glanced through.

So this recipe is for your basic pot roast, nothing extraordinary but very delicious and exactly what you want pot roast to be. You never know where inspiration is going to come from, and I got the idea to make this for dinner from the show Desperate Housewives last week; there were several references to pot roast and it sounded good to me!

Beef Pot Roast
from Joy of Cooking

3 to 4 lb chuck, shoulder, top or bottom round, brisket, blade or rump
Flour
2 T. vegetable oil
1 carrot
1 rib celery
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
1 small onion
2 cups vegetable stock or part stock and part dry red wine
1 bay leaf

Heat the vegetable oil in a large, heavy stockpot. Dredge the meat in flour and brown on all sides. Roughly chop the carrot, celery, green pepper and onion, and add to the pot when the meat is about halfway browned. When the meat is browned, spoon off excess fat and add the stock (or stock and wine) and bay leaf. Cover and bake 3-4 hours in a 300-325 degree oven, or simmer on the stove. During this time, turn the meat several times and, if necessary, add hot vegetable stock and salt and/or pepper.

I made this one day to have for dinner the next - I let the big pot cool a bit after cooking and then just stuck it in the fridge, and the next day I took out the meat and cut a few slices, just what we'd eat that night. I put the slices in a small saucepan with some juice from the large pot and heated it up on the stove.

I served it with little potatoes that I cut and roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon zest and rosemary. Usually I think of potatoes as something that takes a long time to cook, but I cut them small and under the broiler they took just a few minutes. Just enough time to heat up the pot roast.

I added a new tag called "DINNER" and will go back and add that to the appropriate recipes to make searching for dinner ideas easier on this blog.

Chocolate Cream Pie

One day at home I decided I'd like to make a simple chocolate pie, so I searched the net for a recipe that used ingredients I already had. I got frustrated quickly, even though I have a pantry stocked for baking. But this recipe I can make anytime, with the exception of the Oreo Crust because we don't usually have those on hand. A regular pie crust is perfectly fine; the Oreo Crust just puts it over the top. Everyone's pantry is different, but I think it's more likely that someone will have a can of sweetened condensed milk on hand than a quart of heavy cream. Since I made this pie a couple of different ways, I can offer some optional ingredients because I know it will work either way, and I want to keep it simple and try to avoid trips to the store.

I used my sieve, or mesh strainer, twice in this recipe: once for the egg yolks before they were added to anything, and then again for the entire mixture before it goes into the crust. I ALWAYS sieve eggs before adding them to any cream or custard pie, like pumpkin, coconut, etc. I absolutely hate those little globby bits in the egg and find it necessary without a doubt to remove them. Have you ever noticed one in a forkfull of pumpkin pie? They don't just melt away! Yuck! Secondly, when making a custard on the stovetop, you always run the chance of curdling the eggs, resulting in little globs of cooked egg inside the mixture. Sieving after cooking ensures a super smooth and creamy pie every time. Call me anal, but I promise I'll never make you eat the glob!

Chocolate Cream Pie with Oreo Crust
recipe adapted from recipezaar.com

1 2/3 cups water
3 tablespoons cornstarch
5 tablespoons Dutch process cocoa (I only tested with Dutch, but will work with regular cocoa powder)
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped (optional, but this adds richness)
1 (14 ounce) sweetened condensed milk
3 egg yolks
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso powder (optional, and won't make the pie taste like coffee, only gives it a richer flavor overall)
1 (9 inch) Oreo pie crust

Put the 3 egg yolks in a sieve and press through into a small bowl. In a medium saucepan, whisk the cornstarch and cocoa with the water until smooth. Sir in sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and chopped bittersweet chocolate, and cook on medium until chocolate is completely melted and the mixture becomes quite thick, stirring constantly. Stir in 2 tablespoons butter, vanilla, and instant espresso powder. Press through a clean sieve into the baked and cooled pie shell, and chill in the refrigerator for 3 hours. Serve with whipped cream.

Oreo Pie Crust
recipe adapted from epicurious.com

21 Oreos (about a row and a half)
1/2 stick unsalted butter, cut into pieces, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter 9-inch-diameter pie dish. Finely grind cookies in a food processor. Add butter and process until mixture is evenly moistened. Press crumb mixture onto bottom and up sides of prepared pan to form thin crust. Bake crust 5 minutes. Transfer crust to rack and cool completely. Can be made ahead of time and refrigerated.

It was a Messy Kitchen weekend!

I am so backed up on this blog!! There is always a lot of cooking going on around here!

But let me just tell you about our awesome weekend - we went with 6 of our friends to a cabin at Deep Creek Lake and had the best time, and of course, had a lot of good food. A highlight for Erol was seeing his old kegerator again, which the Nelsons and Garcias brought with them! Eric had it filled with Sierra Nevada Anniversary Ale. We ate meatball subs, Marcelo's grilled chicken thighs (sorry, I cannot spill his secret recipe), bacon and eggs for breakfast, real s'mores around the campfire, etc. These were my contributions, and I will be posting the recipes although unfortunately I do not have pictures for most of them:

Spinach Dip Ole

Onion Dip

Chocolate Pie with Oreo Crust

Monkey Bread (aka Bubble Bread)

Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars

Brie en Croute

Challah Recipe

I am definitely putting this recipe in the keeper file! ESPECIALLY since Robyn showed me her recipe for Creme Brulee French Toast using challah. Thank you!! I will make this over Thanksgiving for sure! Follow that link and you'll also find her challah recipe, which makes 4 whole loaves! I used Martha Stewart's recipe, which makes one.

A few notes on ingredients and equipment for making this challah. I'd never bought or used fresh yeast before, so in case you haven't either, I found it in the refrigerated section of the grocery store near the butter, and this is what it looks like:It comes in 0.6 oz packages, so to get 0.75 oz I used my handy digital scale. I couldn't cook without this thing, I use it very often. It makes me so happy when baking recipes use weight measurements of ingredients because it's very precise. I've been known to weigh each and every single cookie in a batch to make them all the same exact size! I'm really a nerd about my kitchen equipment, but I love it!This recipe calls for using a digital thermometer to test for doneness, and while not essential for this, I wanted to mention it because if you're thinking of buying one and are unsure how often you'll use it, once you have it you will find yourself using it all the time. Same with the little scale; you'll wonder how you ever got along without it!

Challah
recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook

1 1/2 lbs bread flour (about 4 1/2 cups), plus more for dusting
3/4 oz. fresh yeast
1/4 cup sugar
3 T. honey
1 T. coarse salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil, plus more for bowl, plastic wrap, and baking sheet
8 large egg yolks
1 large whole egg

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour, yeast, sugar, honey, salt, vegetable, oil, egg yolks, and 1 cup water. Mix on low speed until the dough is smooth and stiff with a slight sheen, 8 to 10 minutes.
Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface, and knead to make sure any loose bits are incorporated.

The dough was very sticky and kind of rubbery.
Fold in the following manner: Fold the bottom third of the dough up, the top third down, and the right and left sides over, tapping the dough after each fold to release excess flour, and pressing down to seal. Gently gather the dough and flip it over, seam side down. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with oiled plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about an hour. Brush an unrimmed baking sheet with vegetable oil or line with parchment paper. Set aside.

Return the dough to a lightly floured work surface, and divide into three equal pieces.

I used my little scale for this, too! I'm such a nerd. Roll each piece into an 18 inch log, and place the logs parallel to one another.

In Martha's pictures, her dough logs at this point were perfectly smooth and magically not floury even though they are to be rolled on a floured surface.... Most cookbooks with pictures are intimidating and you can't trust them - they cause everyone to have those self-doubting moments.

Pinch the ends together at the top, and weave the three strands into a tight braid, tugging gently as you go. Press the ends together to seal. Place loaf on the prepared sheet. Loosely cover with oiled plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Before rising: After rising and brushed with egg:
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375. Lightly beat the remaining whole egg and brush gently but thoroughly over loaf, making sure to cover any seams and crevices. Bake until the crust is dark brown, 50-60 minutes. The bread should reach an internal temperature of 190 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, and should have a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. Transfer the bread to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing. Bread can be wrapped in plastic and kept at room temperature for up to 3 days.