Crusty the Clown and Other Apple Misadventures

Roger's Orchard, a fall tradition

There is possibly nothing better on a clear, sunny, fall day than a trip to the apple orchard.  The air is crisp and clean, slightly tinged with that edge of coolness that September brings, the grass is still slightly wet with last night’s dew in the shady spots under the trees, and S-man is illegally dangling from the branches, trying to reach that one beautiful red Jonamac that is just out of reach, while my ever-paranoid-about-authority-figures self cringes and looks around hoping that nobody sees him and kicks us out of the orchard.  

Heading out to Roger’s Orchards in Southington, is one of our favorite fall traditions, and one that invariably leads to the heavenly scent of cinnamon and apple wafting through the house from the kitchen.  When we went for our yearly romp through the orchard recently, and returned with our two and a half bajillion pounds of Macs and Jonamacs (those were the only two available for picking at the time – I personally favor the tart Macouns), I got all nostalgic and decided to whip out some apple pie with homemade crust.  Granted, this is mostly because I didn’t have the store bought crusts in the fridge, like I usually do, and I did happen to have a crapload of butter, but still… 

So I thought to myself, “Of course I can make pie crust.  I made pie crust when I was a kid.  My pie crust won a blue ribbon in a 4-H contest one time.”  I’m also pretty sure that they gave out blue ribbons for just about anything.  Wow, you painted a cat face on a pumpkin?  Blue ribbon!  Ooooh, those brownies were actually edible!  Blue ribbon!  I’m not actually trying to belittle my pie.  It was really good, I’m sure.  And the crusts were basically the Betty Crocker recipe minus the Crisco and plus more butter, so why not just tweak the Joy of Cooking Deluxe Butter Crust recipe by, again, ignoring the Crisco and replacing it with my favorite fatty substance?  

And so I did.  I cut the butter into the flour with the “dual butter knife technique.”  I felt very Shaolin Temple.  Very secret technique.  May cause instant death to your unwitting enemy.   Don’t mess with them!  Yes, two of them.  At once! 

Unfortunately, I started mixing the water into the dough with my hot little hands, which of course got the butter all melty, plus I was working right next to the preheating oven, so when I started trying to roll out my dough it just turned into a gooey buttery disaster stuck to my rolling pin.  Ew.  So I somehow managed to ball it up again and stick it in the freezer, then roll it out, and transfer the flaking, cracking, gaping-hole-in-the-crust pieces to my pie plate.  The bottom crust I pieced back together, thinking, no one will see the big hot mess of that crust because it will be under the apples.  No big deal.  The top crust went much smoother, but of course I put it on top of the apples crooked, and then had to try to move a crust that was disintegrating every time I touched it.   There was no secret Shaolin Temple technique to help me with this one.  Finally, I was able to manuever it close enough to lined up, and just folded the edges under and squished them with a fork and then stabbed the crust with a knife.  And even though my Macs turned into a tasty soggy mush in my pie and flattened out ridiculously, and my crust was almost a complete miss, the pie was absolutely delicious, and if I hadn’t told you, you probably wouldn’t have known about all of the antics involved in trying to get that darn pie crust on the stupid pie.  I’m really not sure how my middle school 4-H going self did it.

In the days after making the pie, I still had approximately 3 tons of apples left, so I pulled out some apple “bread” mix  (also from Roger’s Orchards) that my sister-in-law had given to me about a year ago and again, decided to replace the vegetable oil with butter.  I know, I know, I know.  But really, I ran out of canola oil and I HAD to.  This was mostly a bad idea because it turned the “bread” into more of a “cake.”  I think they just call it bread because it sounds healthier and because you bake it in the shape of a bread loaf.  But believe you me, there is nothing bready about this bread.  It is sweet like heck, and crumbly, fatty and delicious.

The other reason, though, that replacing the oil with butter was a bad idea, was because then I ate about half of it in one sitting.  With butter on top.  Yikes.   Maybe I should go get MYcholesterol checked.  It did have apples and walnuts in it, though, so I get some health points for that, right?

The remaining half...

Tofunky Tuesday

Tasty enough to take to work...

Basically, I know something came out all right when not only does my husband (for the rest of this post, I will refer to him as S-Man, since last time I called him “my husband” I was mocked thoroughly) eat what I’ve cooked, but also asks for some to take to work the next day.  My hus… aherm, S-Man is one picky dude.  When we first started going out to restaurants together I was horrified and terribly embarrassed when he critiqued EVERYTHING in the restaurant, not just the food.  In my family, growing up, someone could order stuffed sole fillet and get a mooingly rare filet mignon with mad cow disease and still say, yes, sir, everything’s fine, just to not make life too difficult for the waiter.  But not the S-Man.  The waitress would come by and ask how things were, and he would not only tell her that his papaya salad was too salty, but that the soup wasn’t as good as usual, the music was putting him to sleep, and that they might, actually want to get some new light fixtures.  So when the S-Man eats something I cook without commenting on the overly burnt chicken skin or the overall lack of flavor in my pasta, I take it as a compliment.  Today was one of those nights, and it wasn’t really anything complicated.  Just simple ingredients, with some Secret Spice #3 thrown on top (I’ll explain that later). 

To continue my foray into occasional vegetarian cooking, I’ve been cooking with tofu about once a week.  I’m not 100% sure why.  Maybe my consciousness is evolving to a higher plane.  Maybe it’s to save the planet.  Maybe ever since I read that Time Magazine article about animals and their thinking abilities, I’ve been wondering what my meals would think about being served up with pineapple and fried rice. 

Whatever.  I’m actually just trying to get more veggies into my diet.  And, somehow, in the past month or two I have developed a craving for tofu, so here I am, messing around with a seemingly flavorless white cube and seeing what can be done with it.  A friend of mine (you know who you are!) is doing a three-week vegan diet and mentioned the idea of having a Meatless Monday, anything to reduce the amount of animal protein in your diet.  Well, Monday is past already, and having eaten some of that afore-mentioned burnt chicken, Meatless Monday was out of the question.  So here it is:  Tofunky Tuesday.

Tofunky Tuesday included small cubes of tofu, marinated with a bit of soy sauce, sesame oil, sweet chili sauce and white pepper and browned up in a pan with my favorite seasonings, garlic and grated ginger and the white bits of a couple of scallions.  After the tofu was nice and browned, I chucked in the white, thick stems of bok choy, followed shortly thereafter by the leafy shreds, some more soy sauce and some ground roasted peanuts.  Last, I tossed in the finely sliced green scallions.

In order to serve my tofu with something equally as healthy and fiberful, I had to make peace with the rice cooker.  I learned how to cook rice in a small saucepan, and have always been a bit baffled by this wacky device called a rice cooker.  For one thing, why does it need to have pastel pansies on the outside?  Maybe if our rice cooker was a bit more IKEA-esque I’d be okay with it, but, seriously, pink and purple pansies every time I make rice?  Plus, in the past, the technique for getting my rice to come out as something other than a gooey blob in the pansinator always eluded me.  This whole measuring the amount of water with the knuckle of my index finger thing was just not working for me.  On the whole, I’m not really a measurer when I cook, but with rice, it pays to be precise.  Well, I finally just switched over to using my normal measurements of brown rice and water (one cup to three cups, respectively), adding some olive oil, salt, and sesame seeds.  The benefit of the purple pansies in this case is that it cuts down the cooking time on the brown rice by quite a bit.  This produces a fairly fluffy pilafy type rice dish with a great texture and flavor.  A perfect match for my too funky tofu.

The last detail is not for those who find medium spice jarred salsa to be a bit too hot.  Secret Spice #1 is dried, fried and finely ground tiny chili peppers.  Secret Spice #2 is dried, fried and ground chili peppers in oil.  Secret Spices 1 and 2 are the intellectual property of my mother-in-law, and I’m sure she has some kind of ingredient like fried buffalo skin in some of these, so I won’t really try to explain how to make them.  They will also just about kill you when you are making them if you don’t wear a gas mask.  

Since we are out of Secret Spice #1 and I am scared of Secret Spice #2, I’ve opted to use my own version of#1.  I call it Secret Spice #3.  I grew my own tiny Thai chilis one year, and dried them, but since I only water my plants like once a month, I didn’t get very many of them and had to supplement with larger dried chilis that I bought at the Asian market.  The difference between 1 and 3 is that I don’t own a gas mask and instead of frying up my chilis, I just put the dried ones into an old coffee grinder that we no longer use for coffee.  And, voila, you have a finely ground orange spice that will also double as a self-defense weapon should you run out of mace, or not be good with a knife, or not have a baseball bat on hand.

So, brown rice pilaf, bok choy tofu stir fry, and some Secret Spice #3.  Good enough to take to work.

You should have told me it was chicken…

Still operating under the assumption that anything fried is good (no wonder I still have those extra 10 pounds!), and still trying to experiment with vegetarian cooking, I decided to whip up some tasty tofu filling, wrap it up, and fry it.  I used this same filling a couple of days ago for a family barbecue, fried up in wonton skins  (Him – “What’s in it?” Me – “Tofu.”  Him – “You should have told me it was chicken”). But the leftover filling I have chucked into some spring roll wrappers and bathed the rolls ever-so-gently in a vat of boiling oil.  The golden crispy spring rolls are delicious dipped in a sweet chili sauce.  Water it down if it’s too sweet.

The filling, more or less, went like this:

cooked brown rice, cubed extra firm tofu, sesame seeds, finely grated carrot, thinly sliced scallions, soy sauce, sesame oil, sriracha chili sauce, white pepper, black pepper, diced straw mushrooms mixed together in a large bowl

Place minced garlic, grated ginger, and diced shallots in olive oil in a pan and cook them over low heat until they are nice and fragrant, then dump in the filling and swish it around until it is warmed through and nicely blended. 

Since I was using leftover filling, mine was cold and fresh from the fridge when I placed them in the spring roll wrappers.  I’m not sure if this is necessary, but hey, it’s what I did, so…  Anyway, it’s important to use the right kind of wrapper.  I like the really thin ones, because they are the ones that don’t get made fun of by my mother-in-law.  The first time I made spring rolls, I used the Na Soya ones from Stop and Shop, and my mom-in-law definitely did not approve.  So the next time, I opted for the thin thin thin ones from the local Asian market – find them in the freezer section.

So, I spread out my thawed-out wrappers (oriented like diamonds, not like squares), plop down a couple of tablespoons of the filling right in the center, and then roll up the bottom corner, forming a tight roll.  Roll it up once or twice from the bottom, then tuck in the side corners and finish rolling up to the top. 

Last but not least, get your oil wickid hot (that’s a shout out for my Rhode Island and Mass People), and drop them in, a few at a time.  Too many at once will cool down the oil too much, so take it easy already!  Geesh.  Take ’em out, either with tongs or with chopsticks and place on paper towels to, ah, em, drip dry.  Then dunk them in said sweet chili sauce and chow down.  Nice.

Phony Pesto Salmon

I have a few things to confess before I write this entry.  First of all, I stole this idea (minus the phony part – that part is mine) from my friends, the ChamberFlynns, some of the foodiest Foodies I know.  Second of all, I don’t even OWN a food processor.  Thirdly, I’ve never made this dish before, and I really hope it tastes good, because it is cooking right now on the grill, and it would truly be a shame to spend 20 minutes in anticipation for a dish that ends up tasting like doody.  But, hey, that’s the price of experimental cooking.  I guess worst case scenario, I can just scrape the green doodiness off of my salmon and scavenge what is left over below.

So, with the hope that this salmon comes out nice and tasty like it did when the MasterChef ChamberFlynn cooked it up a couple of weeks ago, let me give you the rundown on what’s cooking.  The idea is to get some yummy salmon and cover it in green goop and then throw it on the grill on top of some tin foil and hope for the best.  The MasterChef cooked his salmon up with some local pesto from Whole Paycheck and grilled it on a charcoal grill with real charcoal.  I, on the other hand am using the cheapest gas grill ever that we got at Home Depot for 88 bucks.  Not quite as glamorous, but it should still do the trick.

Also, as I have a serious lack of basil in my garden, I’ve opted for some pesto of the phony variety.  By which I mean that I picked a couple of herbs that I do have (lemon thyme and a bit of mint) and threw it into my blender (I think a food processor might work better, seeing as my blender left some big ole chunks of garlic in my pesto) with garlic, pignoli nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil and (ack!) butter.  Yes, the Butter Queen strikes again.  I’m no Paula Dean, y’all, but I do love my butter!  Also, I think a touch of lemon juice and red pepper might have been a nice touch, but, alas, my kitchen was all out.  Oh well.

So, I got a nice salmon fillet (always wild caught… my Alaska people, do not fret… I know, I know, farmed fishies are BAD!!!) and covered it with my green pasty pesto, and threw it on the grill on top of some foil and left it there for, oh, say… um, I dunno, ’til it was done??? 

We ate it with brown rice and sesame seed pilaf.  And for those who were wondering if it turned out alright… the plates were clean.