Apple Pie Filling: The Start of Something Good

So, it might not surprise you to hear that my family, besides getting our veggies through a local farm's CSA, is also a member of an apple CSA.  Which means that every other week in the fall, I get to head over to our friend Amy's and pick up a huge 10-pound bag of organic apples, picked earlier that week at Earth First Farms, a couple of hours away in Michigan.

Thing is, 10 pounds is a lot of apples.  And even though we love apples here...well, no matter how much I pack them into lunches and use them for snacks, they tend to start taking over.  I can barely close my fridge right now!

Applesauce is a given, and some day I'll get to posting my easy method for that, but this year, I've been looking outside of that.  I'm a big fan of those apples they serve at Cracker Barrel...you know the ones I'm talking about...the gooey, sweet, slightly spiced apples that taste like you're eating pie filling?  But I'm pretty sure that I don't want to know what's actually in them.  Something that good is bound to have something bad, right?

I haven't even tried making those on my own yet, because every copycat recipe I came across online had some ingredient that made my food morals set off warning bells.  But I did come up with my own apple pie filling, and some delicious ways to use it!

Strawberry Bonanza Part 4 - Basil Angel Food Cake with Strawberry Sauce

I am a total sucker for homemade angel food cake.  And lucky for me, the hubs is as well.  Angel food cake is one of those super-impressive-yet-not-impossible-to-make dishes that I love to whip out on a special occasion.  Like, say, a Thursday.  The week's worn you down, but you still have to get through more before the weekend...Thursdays should totally be angel food cake day.

Strawberry Bonanza Part 3 - Strawberry Pineapple Salsa with Black Beans

Again with the culinary mad science.  Faced with that 54 pounds of fresh strawberries that I may have mentioned before, my brain has been spinning out of control with ideas about how to use them.  It started churning as we were in the fields picking, and it continues to spin like a whirling dervish.  Last night, I started playing with the idea of strawberries and black beans together.  Because I really enjoy black beans.  But it didn't seem like a natural fit at first...until I started to think salsa.  Strawberries, black beans, cilantro, pineapple, green onions, and a little kick of pepper...awwwwww yeah.

Banana Snack Cake...No, Even Better...Banana BACON Snack Cake!

I'm not a huge baker, but I do love a good quick bread or muffin that I can throw together and see results quickly.  I love having something warm from the oven for an afternoon snack for my kids to come in from the cold to.

I also like recipes for getting rid of mushy bananas.  My family tends to go through banana phases, where sometimes I can't buy enough, and then other times, I'll get 5 and 3 of them will go brown.  I hate being wasteful, so I package and freeze the mushy ones for baking, if I'm not ready to bake with them right then.  I have quite a few bags of mushy bananas in my freezer at any given point.

Making the Best of Things: Green Tomato Jam

The weather's getting colder, and it's finally starting to feel like fall around here.  Which is both invigorating and depressing.  On the one hand, it's kind of a relief that the work-intensive gardening season is coming to a close.  On the other hand, I hate not being able to go out and grab something for dinner from the yard.  But, for now, I'm just doing my best to harvest and preserve whatever fresh homegrown veggies I can from my gardens.

Tomatoes are tricky things.  If it's not warm enough, they won't ripen.  And if a frost happens to hit, they pretty much roll over and die.  So, with this cooler weather, I had bunches of tiny green cherry tomatoes on my bushes, and not much hope for them.  I mean, I do love fried green tomatoes but that battering, dipping, rolling and frying is a lot of work for tomato slices that are only an inch in diameter.  My middle child, the adventurous eater and tomato snatcher, grabbed a green tomato and popped it in her mouth...and then immediately started spitting it out all over and racing for something else to get the taste out.  So naturally, I had to try it too.  They are pretty gross.  Bitter, astringent, a little sour, but not in a good way.  But then it came to me...currants, some gooseberries, things like that have those qualities too, and they make amazing jams and jellies.

I mean, what can go wrong with dumping a ton of sugar on something and cooking it down until it's a sticky, delicious mess?

Berries Are Red, Berries Are Blue...

Summer is just awesome, food-wise, here in the Midwest.

Once June hits, we know we're usually in for a stream of local fruits and veggies for the next 3 or four months.  From June's strawberry festivals to October's pumpkin patch adventures, it's all delicious.  And mid-July marks one of my favorites: blueberry season!

I've been going blueberry picking as long as I can remember, and started dragging my husband to the fields even before we were married.  (He should have known back then what he was getting into!)  Time went on, and one by one, we started taking the kids too.  Last year was a rough year for fruit crops, and the farm we usually go to was hit hard and had very little harvest, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because we discovered a patch with certified organic berries not too much more of a drive than then patch we usually went to.

Drink Your Citrus!

Some of you may follow From Scratch on Twitter or Facebook, and you might remember that I was experimenting a couple of months ago with making my own limoncello and blood orangecello.  Which was one of those ideas that could either turn out awesome or a horrible failure, with very little in-between.

I'm happy to say that, at least as far as the blood orangecello goes, it was a huge success!

So, I'm proud to share my method with you, so that you too can get a delicious, orangy (or whatever flavor you decide to try) buzz from your own homemade liquor.

I started by googling "homemade limoncello".  I know, total creative genius.  But, as it turns out, there are at least 487,000 different recipes on the internet in English for "homemade limoncello".  Huh.  So, not as easy as I thought.  Some of these called for Everclear.  Which my well-stocked liquor cabinet does not have.  And I was feeling too thrifty (i.e. cheap and lazy) to go out and buy some.  We did, however, have an overabundance of vodka, as a couple of friends of ours always seem to come over with a new bottle, drink a couple of drinks, and then leave the rest at our house.  Some of the recipes mentioned that you could substitute vodka for the Everclear, so good to go there.

The Best Things You Probably Aren't Eating Yet: Quince

Quince.  It's a great scrabble word.  Also handy for crosswords and alphabet games.  And, in addition to all of that, it's actually a pretty decent fruit as well!

Quince is not easy to find, but even if you do, you might simply pass it by.  It looks like a lumpy pear, or a weird yellow apple.  I happened to spot them in the "exotics" section of the produce area at our grocery store the other day, and I may have freaked a few other shoppers out with my yelp of excitement.  I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do with them, but I knew that I had just come across a quince recipe a few days earlier, so I sniffed the quince, fell in love, and scooped up 4.

Blueberry Oat Muffins

I'm a big fan of muffins.  Besides being basically a slightly healthier version of a cupcake that somehow has gotten mass approval as an acceptable breakfast option, they are also fairly quick to throw together.  If I am on my game, I can have them ready to go in the oven by the time the oven preheats.

These blueberry oat muffins are a family favorite.  The juicy pops of sweet-tart blueberries and the chew of the oats is a great combination, and a tried and true breakfast combination, also delicious in breakfast cake.  These muffins are so moist and flavorful that you don't need to worry about buttering them up, which is good, because they have a tendency to crumble easily.

So here we go.  Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  Melt 1/4 cup (one half stick) of butter.

While the butter's melting, grab a 2 cup measure and make 1 cup of sour milk by putting a tablespoon of white vinegar in the measure and then adding milk until you get to 1 cup.  This is a quick substitute for buttermilk, if you need it in a recipe and don't have it on hand.  Otherwise, sub in the same amount of yogurt or sour cream...they all are pretty interchangeable in baking recipes.  Creamy with a tiny bite of sour.

Add 1 cup rolled oats to the sour milk and mix it.  Let it sit while you move on.

In a large bowl, mix 1 cup flour, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Go back to the milk/oat mixture.  Add one egg and the melted butter.  Make sure that either the butter is cooled or that you mix in the egg first and then slowly add in the butter...you don't want to scramble your egg.  Mix.

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and combine until everything is just moistened.  Don't overmix muffins!  They'll turn into hockey pucks, which are NOT delicious.  

Take 1 cup of frozen blueberries and fold it in. 

Scoop into greased muffin cups (or paper lined tins).  I like to use a cookie dough scooper, like a small ice cream scoop, for quick muffin cup filling.

Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, your muffins will turn out resembling Grumpy Cat.

Blueberry Breakfast Cake

So, all of you had a little notebook of clipped and scribbled recipes when they were in high school, right?  I mean, I'm sure I can't be the only one.  There's got to be at least a couple other people out there...

Okay, I can face it.  I'm a cooking junkie, and have been for a while.  I would steam artichokes in my dorm room in college.  I would bake muffins to bring to high school for my friends and/or teachers.  And I would buy cooking magazines since before I could drive.  And some of the recipes that I have clipped or written out from back then are still in constant rotation at my house.  Which is a good thing.

Just fair warning, this week may be a little oatmeal-centric.  I have bananas getting too ripe, and that's perfect for a banana oatmeal snack cake.  Plus, there's a great blueberry oatmeal muffin recipe that we love here, and I might pull that one together to share.  But today, it's blueberry breakfast cake.  I'm not sure where the original recipe is from, but right now, it's in my old little recipe book with a note about it being from a Blueberry Festival in Indiana.

How Does Your Garden Grow? Part Two: What to Plant

Okay, so if you read part one of my gardening posts, you should have an idea of how to set up your garden, in terms of structure and soil.  Next comes the fun part: picking out what to plant.

Picking plants for your garden is going to be different for each one of you, depending on your garden's location, light exposure, size, and what foods you will use.  It's best to start simple and then add in as you have more experience.  I have some standards that I know will do well in my garden, and then I try a few new things each year to find new favorites.

There are great books out there, like Square Foot Gardening, The Family Garden, and others, that can give you a structured plan to help you design and set up your garden.  Like I said in part one, I'm more of a trail-and-error, learn-through-experience kind of gal.  But either way, the easiest way to find out when and how to plant the plants you like is by reading the packages.  They will give you planting dates for your zone, seed depths, and any other special requirements that the plant might require.  It will also tell you about how long it will take for the plant to be ready for harvesting.

The Best Things You Probably Aren't Eating Yet: Rhubarb

I think I need a springtervention.  I am so excited about spring, and all of the goodies it brings.  As my freezer starts to get more and more emptied of last year's harvest, I start to look ahead to the good things on the way.  In the spring and early summer, that means rhubarb.

Rhubarb is a puzzle to a lot of people.  It's hard to pass by its' beautiful ruby stalks without noticing it, but not many people stop and pick some up.  It's tart, it's big, it kind of looks like red celery, grocery stores put it in the vegetable section, but it's used more like a fruit, the leaves are actually poisonous...let's face it...it's kind of weird.  Even the word "rhubarb" means "a heated debate or controversy".  But there's no need to debate in my mind.  Used in the right ways, rhubarb is a real spring treat.

Rhubarb has potassium, vitamin C, fiber and calcium.  It's been used for centuries as a medicinal herb, reducing inflammation and assisting digestion.  And it makes some amazing baked goods, like this beautiful rhubarb cake from Not Without Salt, which I could eat everyday for the rest of my life.