Mike Nolan
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This is kind of pre-baking, I made apple pie filling today, enough for 4 pies plus enough left over to snack on for a couple of days. My wife discovered that the apple pie filling goes very well with Pepperidge Farms Bordeaux cookies.
I still have enough Winesap apples left to make another batch of pie filling plus a couple of apple strudels. I've got them in the garage where it is cool and they keep fairly well. I picked them 3 weeks ago and when I was processing them today I only found two that had to be thrown out.
USDA recommends that you use clearjel rather than starch (cornstarch or wheat flour) when canning pie filling.
I don't think I've seen them in stores, at least not lately, but I do see 3 cup (24 ounce) Ball canning jars on Amazon, but not at a price I'd be willing to pay. There are some 20 and 22 ounce jars, probably from China, on Amazon, but the reviews on them aren't very positive and the jars may not be compatible with Ball/Kerr lids and bands.
We're having beef stroganoff on toast for supper.
Good looking pizza. I haven't made pizza dough in a while, we've been doing lavash pizzas. I should get back into my quest for the perfect thin crispy pizza, not quite lavash thin, though.
I sort of want to try making carta di musica, but I think the next experiment will be trying to make hand-pulled noodles.
They came from one of my wife's co-workers, I've never had much luck growing beans, peppers or cucumbers. These are a particular heirloom variety of pole beans, with some purple areas and with spots on them. The 'rattlesnake' part apparently comes from their tendency to curl around whatever they're growing on.
At the height of tomato season, I made a big batch of tomato relish (recipe here), somewhere around 8 quarts of it.
The last time I made a big batch I overcooked it trying to reduce it and we didn't care for the taste, so this time I cooked it until I thought it tasted right. It was still fairly watery at that point, so we've been dishing it out with a slotted spoon to drain it a bit, because it turns a hot dog bun soggy quickly.
To save some time, I drained a bunch of it and put it in a 1 quart container. I saved the liquid that I drained off, which is a combination of vinegar, sugar, salt, tomato juice and the juices from the onions and sweet peppers. I thought it might make a good salad dressing.
Tonight we had salads for supper, with some tuna fish, tomatoes (close to the last from the garden) and cheese. My wife used the relish liquid as her salad dressing, I added it to some Dorothy Lynch (French-style) dressing. I also put some on some steamed rattlesnake beans. It was very good on both.
It would be ironic if we wound up using the excess liquid from this year's relish before we ate all the relish, but it is certainly possible.
We had a beef stir fry with broccoli and mushrooms.
A heat diffuser, sometimes called a flame tamer, might help. They make them for gas, electric and induction ranges.
I find when I'm making something like a large batch of soup or stock, I can't get my gas range down low enough to produce a light simmer unless I use a diffuser. If I put it on simmer, that's too low, and while there's some ability to adjust it in between simmer and low, it has a tendency to down to simmer, so I use a diffuser and then low works. I have two different types, sometimes I need both.
I have a similar problem with the induction burner, but I don't have a diffuser for it yet. Newer standalone induction burners have more temperature settings, but I don't think they make ones that have continuous adjustments, at least not for the home market.
I've seen some softball sized onions that weighed over a pound.
I can do spaghetti from scratch in about 35 minutes start to finish, but that's using sauce from a can (Hunts pasta sauce, there are two garlic-free ones!, and a can of diced tomatoes and usually a small can of tomato paste, plus a can of mushrooms.) If I want to make a meat sauce or meatballs that adds another 20 minutes to just brown the meat or 40 minutes to make meatballs and cook them in the sauce.
And that time includes making cheese toast in the oven.
The thickness of cream caramels is mostly controlled by the temperature it is cooked to. Any water in the cream and in the butter is boiled out before it gets to 230. For caramel apples I like it on the soft side, cooked to 242 degrees on a properly calibrated thermometer, for caramels I'm going to cut and wrap I like them a little harder, but not to the point where you can't chew them without risking your fillings, more like 246. At 248 they're pretty solid. But it can go from 242 to 248 quickly, sometimes under a minute, so you have to watch it carefully. I use a digital probe and the first time I see the temperature I'm after, I take it off the flames.
If I'm making caramel apples I put the pan in a bain marie to keep it from getting too cool while I'm dipping the apples, otherwise I pour it out quickly into a prepared form. I have 4 stainless steel candymaker's bars, 3/4 inch square, that I use for poured candies, so I can pour it directly on the marble and let the bars do the shaping while the marble does the cooling. For toffee I will sometimes put aluminum foil down to make it easier to move around. The last time I made honeycomb sponge candy I poured it into an 11x13 pan as the recipe specified, next time I'm going either going to pour it onto the marble or use a 13x17 pan so it is thinner.
I use the caramel recipe in the Antoinette Pope School New Candy Cookbook, I've been using it since the 1960's. The book is long out of print, but occasionally you see copies for sale online, I think I paid under $20 for mine and I see at least 3 online, at prices ranging from under $9 to $25.
Although Accuweather says we hit a low of 24 last night, it doesn't look like we got a killer frost here. We're a bit south of the official reporting station at the airport and the garden is somewhat protected
At least with baking a large amount of the total time is just waiting: during bulk rise, final rise, baking and cooling. That's why the 'bread in 5 minutes a day' method works. But you still need to pay attention to it, because of things like overproofing.
But even a fairly simple savory dish can involve 45 minutes to an hour or more of active prep time, and sauteeing or frying are not 'hands-off' activities.
One of my pet peeves with recipes is when they call for a cup of something like a diced vegetable without giving you an idea of how much that weighs. How you dice it makes a big difference in how much the cup of diced vegetable weighs. The autumn chicken dish I made last week called for four different diced or cut ingredients: sweet potatoes, apples, Brussels sprouts and onions. It also called for 6 ounce chicken thighs, but the only ones I could find were 8 ounce (4 to a two-pound package.) We both took pretty large servings of vegetables with each thigh, but there was still a lot of vegetable left over at the end.
I can find 24 ounce (pint and a half) and 28 ounce canning jars, but nothing between 32 and 64 ounce. (And the USDA recommends against using 64 ounce canning jars for much of anything.)
It's supposed to hit the mid 20's here tonight, we may finally get our killer frost.
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