Fall Bounty

There's a co-op of farms near my university that J and I went to with her mom.
They're selling gobs of apples and also italian prunes.

Prunes as compared to a granny smith apple belonging to a housemate.

Also, huge "Flemish Princess" pears.

I'm going to bake with these because there's no way I could eat one in one day.

I have some big plans for my prunes and pears - slow cookers and ovens.

The same granny smith apple was used in all photos.

 I made applesauce from my housemate's slowly-going-off gravenstein apples and some other apples I scrounged from around my kitchen, which I'm not posting here for three reasons.


1. Applesauce recipes, aside from being ridiculously simple, are a dime a dozen on the internet and in cookbooks. I used a different housemate's crock pot, cut a bunch of apples into it, poured a little apple cider because it kept seeming too dry, sprinkled in a little cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg (to taste, but start very small), and sweetened with honey as I went along.

2. I did not use a recipe, and I didn't write down what I was doing.

3. I didn't take any pictures of the process.

 If you want a recipe, just type "crock pot applesauce" into your search engine of choice and pick one that has ingredients you have.




I suppose I have big plans for my apples, but I just got itty bitty ones so I can eat them raw the way I like. It's not as difficult as it sounds, but suffice to say that I have a complicated-to-explain-but-easy-to-do method for eating fresh apples that doesn't work well on normal American-sized apples. I have to buy the bags of tiny apples at the store for it to work. And I eat all my apples that way if I don't bake them, so it doesn't really as a big plan.

The red apple is one that I picked; the green one is the same one from earlier. I like tiny apples, okay?

Right now, I'm thinking about a carrot soup, prune butter (in the crock pot, no peeling required), pear bread, and olive oil bread (I just need a recipe for these last two).

Also, I'd like to elaborate on the prune/plum thing. I always thought prunes were just dried plums, which maybe they sometimes are. However, the prune fruit is similar but ultimately distinct from the plum fruit. Plums are big fat round juicy affairs, while prunes are skinny and comparatively dry. While I've never baked with plums, I can say that prunes are amazing in the oven. They're okay raw, but MAN are they good baked. I made a tart and it was pretty much a religious experience. They don't spread out via juices hardly at all, but that basically means that they keep all their goodness concentrated. I didn't even need to put in sugar or spices. In fact, had I done so, I'm sure they wouldn't have been as delicious.

We're Making Sourdough! Day 3, morning

So about not doing twice-a-day posting anymore...
I was kidding, it appears.
In other news, IT'S ALIVE!
I didn't kill my sourdough, there was no hoochy stuff on top, and there were definite bubbles and signs of it having risen a lot during the night. My housemate turned off the oven light this morning, but I'll put up a note or something. It definitely needs the warmth. Especially since it's raining still. I promise, I'll get to the store today. I'm also thinking about baking something interesting, or cooking something other than stir fry and crepes, so be prepared.
Day 3 (10:00): Starter showed signs of having risen after sitting in a slightly warmed oven all night, if not all morning. Bubbles were evident, and the smell had lost much of the sickly sweetness, although it wasn't quite yeasty. It might not be supposed to be yeasty. I'm not too worried. It's brand spanking new, and Mike says that the initial dominant bacteria and fungi might not be the final dominant cultures. So I forgot to discard half, and added a little more than 50 g each of tap water and unbleached white flour. I'll get rid of half if it's growing like crazy today, and I should be able to watch it like a hawk, given that I have nothing better to do except go to the gas station for batteries. I also scraped down the sides really well with the trusty spatula and tried to put lots of air into it by mixing vigorously, as per Mike, although I didn't stir between adding water and flour.

In other other news, I've been reading all of Well Fed, Flat Broke lately, starting whenever I wake up and ending when I get a headache from reading in bed for too long. It makes me want to cook all the food. I really, really miss the presence of a fresh vegetable venue nearby. In England (where I lived for a semester and which has accidentally turned into the "well, it was better there, and also I'm one-upping you" card), we had fruit and veg stands every other street, with three on one particular street. It was great. You could pick up just enough produce for dinner on the way home each day. Here, I have to walk for at least fifteen minutes to get to expensive produce and easily half an hour to forty minutes to get cheap, fairly decent produce. And then it goes bad because I buy too much and don't actually have a use for it, or I do have a use for it and it just never happens because life happens instead and we're just out of luck on that tomato, which was out of season and kind of skeezy looking to begin with.
Hell of a sentence, Raeann. I promise (been making a lot of those lately) that I can write real good, it's just that school's out and I haven't had my tea. Also, writing with excellent grammar has few applications outside of academic and professional writing (like copyrights, instruction manuals, and newspapers). It's stuffy and stifles conversation, and I blog like I talk, which is with extra commas here and not enough there and lots of "ands" that would be quickly squashed and turned into comma series if I wasn't just having a conversation with you all.