Author Archives: admin

Apple Sauce

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By this time, nobody in the family was reaching for apples. I still had a huge pile of them, so I decided to do my first experiment in canning. Apple sauce. I have made apple sauce before, which is ridiculously easy, but I have never canned it. I have the book Putting Food By, which is great, but should be subtitled Scaring You Silly About Salmonella. It gives very detailed directions about canning to ensure success. Here’s a site that gives some simple instructions for hot water bath canning, which is what you use when canning fruits, tomatoes or other items with high acidity.

I wasn’t really following a recipe and since this was the first time canning, I made a guess as to how many apples to use. Turns out that I could have double the amount, because in the end I only had 4 1/2 jars worth of applesauce. That was a disappointing yield coupled with the fact that I still had some leftover apples. Not too many though, so I think my work is donee!

Recipe for Applesauce (very loose guide)

Peel and core as many apples as you have. Add to a pot with some liquid like apple cider, apple juice or water. The liquid keeps the apples from scorching. Cook slowly over med-low heat. Stir often. Spice how you like your apple sauce. I used plenty of lemon juice and grated ginger. You could be more traditional and use cinnamon.

Stir and taste often. You can run it through a food mill if you like a liquid applesauce. I prefer mine chunky, so I attacked the apples with a potato masher once they were soft.

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Apple Cake

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Next stop in tackling apple mountain was an apple cake. This recipe can be made with almost any kind of fruit. It’s delicious and not overly sweet. And it comes out looking gorgeous. The pieces are apple quarters that are sliced thinly, but not all the way through. You place them on top of the batter, cut side up. They sink in and fan out and look amazing. I just sprinkled the top with some sugar and cinnamon.

European Fruit Cake

2  Sticks of butter

1 1/2  cups Sugar

2  Cups Flour (all purpose)

2  teaspoons baking powder

teaspoon cinnamon or cardamom or vanilla, or any other spice you might like

Zest of one lemon

1 pinch of salt

4 eggs

Any fruit you like: plums, peaches, apples, or mixture

Lemon juice for mixing with fruit

1 to 2  tablespoons of sugar mixed with spice to sprinkle over fruit

  • Preheat oven 350 F
  • Butter your springform pan (10 to 12 Inches) well;
  • In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time; mix.
  • In another bowl mix your flour, baking powder, spice, lemon zest and salt.
  • Prepare your fruit, cut in pieces or halves. Use some lemon juice for your fruits – to taste.
  • Add your flour mixture to your egg-butter mixture. Spoon batter into your springform pan; add all the fruit on top of batter (fruit will sink through the batter as it cooks). Remember you can add as much fruit as you like but the cooking time will vary slightly. Sprinkle the top of the fruit with some sugar and spice.

Place in oven for approximately 45 to 65 minutes, test with a skewer, it should come out clean.

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What to do with a million apples

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After about a week of non-stop apple eating, I decided that I would have to be more creative to use up all the apples we had picked. I cut up about a dozen apples, dropped them in lemon water and packed them off with Lindsay for her class snack. I still had a mountain left.

We went over to a friend’s house for dinner, so I decided to bake an apple pie.

I used the recipe from The New Best Recipe cookbook. The crust was amazing, but I thought the pie itself could have used more pizzazz. Next time I will add a lot more lemon zest.

There was still a mountain of apples…

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Apple Picking

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This is the time of year that many urbanites decide they need to drive out to the country and pick apples. Give me the smallest excuse to get some fresh air and see something green and I will take it. The fresh air and apples sang its siren song and off I went with Lindsay and my friend Victoria and her son Theo.

It was a gorgeous, warm day at Masker Orchard, with no hint of autumn in the air (which felt a bit odd for picking apples). We decided to skip past the red delicious apples in search of the mutzus, empires and cortlands. As it turns out, a freshly picked red delicious apple bears no resemblance to the mealy ones in the grocery store. The orchard charged by the bag, so we stuffed ours ridiculously full. Lindsay and Theo had a system set up where Theo would climb in the tree and pass the apples to Lindsay. She would then inspect them and then hand the good ones off to me and Victoria. It was so much fun that we didn’t really think about the mountain of apples building up in our bags.

It was a great day. We all ate our weight in apples and then packed our weight in apples in the back of the car and headed back to the city.

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My chickens on HouseSmarts TV

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Take a peek at the link to HouseSmarts to see an interview with my chickens (it’s the “Back to Basics segment). Lou Manfredini came and talked to me about raising chickens in Brooklyn. It’s on right after the segment about canning. The girls were well-behaved and put on a good performance. All in all I think it turned out well. Lou was really nice and curious about keeping chickens. I think I see chickens in his future, but of course with a wonderfully designed coop!

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How to make acorn flour

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When you are interested in foraging, you really have to pay attention to the seasons. If you read about ramps in the winter, you are going to have to wait until spring to find them. Shopping at grocery stores seems to have made us forget that certain things grow at certain times of year. At least locally, that is. I had read about making acorn flour a while ago, but it wasn’t acorn season. I forgot all about it until I saw Stephanie mention it in her blog. I was going up to the Berkshires for the weekend and it was the right time of year for acorns.

We went on a hike and I brought a backpack along to gather nuts. I had no idea how many I would need, so I summoned my inner squirrel and kept gathering and filling my bag. When we got home, I weighed the nuts I had found and had 8lbs. After pulling off the tops and discarding the ones that had worm holes in them I had 6lbs. I read in a couple of places that you place the acorns in water and the ones that float aren’t viable. I tried that and almost all of mine floated. I decided to check inside and see what they looked like. Some were bad, but most were good, so I decided to skip that theory.

Now comes the gross part…grubs! Many of the acorns had grubs. The fat, white, wiggly things totally grossed me out, so I decided to bake the acorns at 170 degrees F to kill them. A dead grub is still gross, but a wiggling one is much worse.

After discarding the acorns that were discolored or had grubs in them I think I was down to about 2-3 lbs. Acorns are full of tannins, so you have to soak them for several days to remove the bitterness. I tried soaking them when they were chopped, but thought that the water wasn’t getting to the inside of the acorn meat. I ran them through a meat grinder to chop them smaller.

Directions for how to make acorn flour:

  • Gather a ridiculous amount of acorns
  • Discard any that have obvious problems (squirrel bites or worm holes)
  • Bake acorns at 170F for 1 hour to kill grubs
  • Shell acorns tossing out any that are discolored or have grubs. It is pretty obvious which ones are good and which ones aren’t
  • Grind acorns in a food processor, or a meat grinder
  • Wrap in several layers of cheesecloth and soak in water. You will need to do this for several days, until the meat isn’t bitter.
  • Lay the acorn flour on a pan and either dry in the sun, or in the oven on the lowest setting. Make sure it’s completely dry or it will mold.

I will post some recipes within the next few days.

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Still here

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Although you might not know it, I’m still alive and kicking. I’ve been working quite a bit, which has kept me away from posting. Here’s a recent photo to show what’s been going on here. Hail. Twice in a month’s time. Weird. These were the size of cherries and tore our garden to smithereens. It looked like a giant came and did a can-can dance on all of our plants. And then took a chipper to the trees. Leaves didn’t fall down. Tiny pieces of leaves fell down. Saves me the trouble of running the fall leaves through the leaf blower to compost more quickly.

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Slower-Paced Compost Pickups Increases Composting Rates

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The article below is from cleantechnica.com.

When we first switched from horses to horsepower at the turn of the 20th century, the move was hailed as one of modernity, cleanliness and efficiency. After a century during which we’ve discovered that the “auto mobile” brought with it a far more dangerous environmental assault than horse droppings, now more than 60 French  towns are once again returning to the old horse-drawn cart, at least for picking up compost for recycling.

Interestingly, in towns that employed horses to pick up the compost, the composting rates have increased measurably.

“By using the horse for garden waste collection, we have raised awareness. People are composting more,” says the mayor of one of the French towns that has succeeded in making the change.  It is actually cost effective, cutting costs by almost 60%. “Incineration used to cost us €107 a tonne, ridiculous for burning wet matter, now we only pay €37 to collect and compost the waste.”

Perhaps the increased composting is related to the slower pace of the horse-drawn cart. The sound of the clip clop of the horses hooves is a reminder that “there is no away anymore“. It also is a soothing reminder of a slower pace of life, in which the patience and consideration needed to make recycling compost second nature doesn’t seem so out-of-kilter with today’s frenetic pace.

It doesn’t work everywhere. Some French towns tried the new clean technology, and abandoned it after a few months, due to picking the wrong equipment, the wrong kind of horse (cart-horses are needed to pull carts), untrained workers: inexperienced with horses, or just too many hills. But others have had several years of success now, and outside of France too.

“Compared with €5,000–7,000 annual running costs for a diesel truck, an ass costs €1,000–1,500 and can live 25-30 years,” says the mayor of a 14th-century Sicilian town, who has been using donkeys for three years.

“A truck costs around €25,000, lasts around five years and can’t reproduce.”

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Sad Snack

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Have you ever seen such sad and depressing snacks in your life?

Tweety doesn’t look nearly as happy as he did before he was frozen solid.

And seriously what sick-o came up with this idea? Clear-cut candy. Really it will be fun for the kids! And the poor rabbit running for its life because all its  habitat has just been destroyed by the pipe-smoking lumberjack isn’t depressing. It’s cute and appropriate for children.

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