The pits

I scored a clementine hat trick today by consuming three clementines in a row without encountering a single seed. Don't laugh at me. This is a big deal. I remember a golden age, not so long ago, where all the little crates of clementines Mom bought came from "Maroc" and seeds were a rare annoyance. Then I moved here to Maryland and had to adjust to new purveyors of produce. Clementines here are "Cuties" or "Darlings" - still sold in crates made of splinters - and look exactly the same as the old ones did. But they're not the same. They are evil inside. You would think that a small citrus treat marketed as the perfect snack for children's school lunches wouldn't have hard nuggets of doom lodged within them, ready to chip teeth and block lungs, but there you have it. I had to develop a new clementine-eating strategy that involved eating them in a room with a good light source, so I could hold individual peeled segments up and X-ray them with visible light.

I can't handle putting the whole clementine segment in my mouth when there is a real and present danger of seed content. Somehow, I'm supposed to magically get the sweet juicy fruit away from the hard seeds, and then spit the seeds back out. I am to do this without choking on them or cracking a tooth. I can't figure out how everyone else is managing to perform this trick, so I have to put my clementines through the full-body-sunlight-scanner to detect seeds and pick them out.

That's why, when I got three sweet seedless Darlings in a row today, I pulled one of these:

Apple Pie

I'm sure there are more complicated ways to make an apple pie. I've seen recipes involving nuts and cranberries, vanilla and allspice, and delicate lattice crusts. I'm sure those are very nice, but I like to keep it much more simple.

The apples: there have been physical altercations over the types of apples that are "supposed" to be used in an apple pie. There are very aggressive Granny Smith and Golden Delicious contingents. Northern Spy is often praised as a pie apple, but I've never seen one in the flesh, so I've never tasted one. One of these days I will have to spend a day making a dozen apple pies with different apple varieties so I can see what all the fuss is about. As for my pies, I've always used McIntosh apples when I can find them, and Spartan or Empire as a backup plan. The internet will tell you that McIntosh apples get too mushy when cooked, but it's not like you get an applesauce pie at the end. I don't like my apple pie to have a crunch - the filling should be pretty soft.

The crust: I have tried making my own pie crust, and I find that the effort put into the process isn't worth it when the quality of pre-made refrigerated crusts has gotten so much better. Homemade is better, but not better enough for my pie needs. I used the store-brand stuff, because it's really close to the right texture.

The spices: Cinnamon and sugar. The end. I use about 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 tsp  ground cinnamon for a pie, but the measurements are flexible. I scoop out some sugar into a bowl, sprinkle cinnamon over it, and mix it up. It's ready for the pie.

The pie: I lay out my bottom crust in the pie plate, then I peel my apples and put them, whole, in a pot of water with a dash of lemon juice to keep them from browning as I go. Once they're all peeled, I dry them off one at a time and cut them into big wedges, tossing them into the waiting pie plate. Once I get a full layer, I sprinkle a mix of sugar and cinnamon over it using a big spoon. I aim for near-full coverage, and it's okay if some of the sugar falls through the gaps and gets to the bottom. I keep adding apples and sugar until I have a nice big mountain of apples.

Notice how big I keep the apple pieces? If I cut them much smaller than that, then they may get too soft once they're cooked. That is probably because I insist upon using the wrong apples for pie.

The top crust goes on to cover the apple sugar mountain, and holes are poked to let steam out. I covered the edges of the crust with foil to keep them from getting too dark, and only realized at the end that I should have tried that with the top part, too. I got a brown pie. 

I also may have left it in a tiny bit too long, so the filling got a little closer to applesauce than I like, but it was tasty anyway. 

Yes, that is a dirty plate. That's because it was my second helping and I was so eager to eat my first piece that I didn't bother finding my camera.

HOORAY FOR PIE!!

Cranberry and Apricot Pork Chops

This is a variation on a recipe I've posted in the past: Cranberry Pork Chops.

The reason for the variation is that halfway through making dinner, I discovered I did not have any marmalade left. Oops. I did have apricot jam, however, and I've had success using that with pork before, so I decided to smash two recipes together and hope for an edible result.

It worked!

How to make delicious happen:

4 pork chops

1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh cranberries, halved

Apricot jam, 3-4 tablespoons

Preheat your oven to 350.

Season the pork chops with salt and pepper, then brown them, for about 2 minutes a side, in a pan that can be transferred straight to the oven. I like to use my favorite Le Creuset Braiser for this sort of thing. Sometimes you can find those at Home Goods at a steep discount, and I'm sure other brands are good too, but this one is was a gift from my Mom and it's gorgeous and I try to use it often.

While they're browning up, a small bowlful of halved fresh cranberries with enough apricot jam to hold them all together, which in my experiment, came to about 3 tablespoons.

Once the chops have some color, put a dollop of the cranberry goo on top of each one. Add a few tablespoons of water to the pan (enjoy the sizzle!) and then transfer it to the oven, covered, for about 20 minutes. Check the temperature with a meat thermometer - pork chops come in varied thicknesses and yours may take longer to cook through.

If you've got some liquid left in the pan, move the pork chops to a plate and put the pan back on the stove to boil off and thicken the liquid into a sort of gravy. Add another dollop of the apricot jam if you want it sweet and syrupy. I did, and I loved it!

Apple Cinnamon Muffins

I'm guilty of piling up dozens of "to try" recipes on Pinterest, and never getting around to actually trying them. Recently, re-pinning a chicken recipe led me to a great Canadian cooking blog called Rock Recipes, which I have since bookmarked, because I want to try so many of their ideas. 

I was in the mood for muffins, so I searched their recipe archive to see what I could work with, and their Caramel Apple Muffins seemed like a good bet, even without the caramel part. I added more apples than called for, since I was skipping the caramels, and I think these turned out so great.

Get your dry ingredients mixed together:

2 1/2 cups flour

1/4 cup white sugar

4 tsp baking powder

2tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

Then do the same with your wet ingredients:

1/3 cup sour cream

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 cup milk

2 eggs

1tsp vanilla

Then add the wet to the dry and mix it all up until you've got a nice lumpy batter.

Peel and chop three apples - this recipe is a good way to use up older, softer-than-usual apples. Then, and this is where I tweaked the recipe, toss the apple bits with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a dash of cinnamon so they're well coated. There's not much sugar in this recipe, so adding more here doesn't hurt. Fold the sweet apples into the batter.

Bake them in greased muffin tins at 350F for about 20-25 minutes. Depending how big you make your muffins, you'll end up with 12-15 muffins.

They were fluffy and not too sweet, just cinnamony enough, and very good with a cup of coffee for a quick breakfast.

Baking - Cranberry Orange Bread

This is my Mom's recipe and it's so good I recommend you double it right away because you're not going to have enough! This makes one loaf, 8 mini-loaves, or 12 small muffins.

Cranberry-Orange Bread


1 cup fresh cranberries, cut in half
1/4 cup sugar

1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp shortening
1 tsp fresh orange zest (one large orange should do it)
3/4 cup orange juice
1 egg

Grease a bread pan or muffin/mini-loaf pan, and preheat the oven to 350F.

Mix the cranberries with 1/4 cup sugar until they're well coated. This mitigates their tartness and helps them not to sink to the bottom of the bread.

Mix the dry ingredients (including the non-cranberried sugar) in a large bowl, then cut in the shortening until it's all in tiny crumbles. Make a well in the middle and pour in the juice, egg, and zest, then mix until everything is wet - don't overdo it. Add the sugared cranberries and blend them in well, then pour into your baking receptacle of choice.

A loaf will need 40 to 45 minutes, my mini-loaves only took 20. Not sure how long muffins would take, but I'd start with 15 minutes and check from there.

Notes: I didn't get much more than 1/4 cup of juice out of my orange, since I don't have a juicer thingy - I was stabbing at the orange halves with a fork and squeezing them to death to get some juice out and it didn't go very well. Sadly, the OJ in the fridge was very expired, so I just made up the difference in liquid with plain water and hoped for the best. It turned out really well - still tasted plenty orangey.

What's for Dinner - Pork chops, apples, and onions

Because I still work evenings, I need to get dinner figured out pretty early to avoid having to come up with a plan at midnight. Depending on what I'm making, I'll prep everything in the morning or I'll thaw stuff overnight, leaving me with only the cooking part to do once I get home. I don't mind so much having to cook late at night, but thinking is always a problem after a long day, and I hate having to come home and decide what to feed us.

So I reached into the freezer before shuffling off to bed around 2am, and pulled out two ziplock bags with fleshy pink frozen meat inside so I could leave them in the fridge overnight to thaw. I always buy the boneless, skinless chicken breasts at Costco and freeze them individually for easy portioning later, and that is what I thought was in those bags. I had a plan for a lemon garlic sauteed chicken breast dinner, and I was quite pleased with it. Lesson learned: label freezer food. Seriously. Because examination of the thawed meat at midnight after the following long day at work revealed pork chops. Eight teeny tiny thin pork chops.

Now what? After a moment or two of grumpy pouting because I couldn't make the dinner I wanted to, I threw together a new plan.

I peeled and cut up two apples, put them in a covered bowl with about a quarter cup of apple cider, and put them into the microwave for two minutes so the apples would get soft. Meanwhile, I fried up the pork chops in a pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and put them aside when they were done. Next into the pan went half an onion, sliced really thin, with a bit more oil and a dash of thyme. When they were soft, I put in a small bit of flour and stirred that around for a minute before dumping the apple cider and soft apples in. The pork chops and their juice went back in too, and I stirred it all up and left a lid on it with the heat all the way down for a couple more minutes before I called it ready because I was hungry.


It turned out pretty good. It got the husband's thumbs-up and there were no leftovers, so either we were starving or it was decent. I thought it was a little on the sweet side and I think I'll add some apple cider vinegar if I do this again. I probably should have gotten the pan hotter and done a better job browning the chops so they'd look nicer - this meal wasn't very photogenic!

What's for Dessert - Apple Crisp

Full credit for this recipe goes to the Five Roses Flour cookbook, "A Guide To Good Cooking". Mom gave me this book when I moved out, and I am delighted to have it, because she used it a lot and it's familiar and comforting, down to the rusty spiral binding, the missing back cover, and the dog-eared and sauce-spattered pages. She has a newer edition for herself now, but I love this old one.

It's McIntosh season again, so for the past week I've been eating two apples a day. They are, hands-down, the best apples in the world and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. They're tart and crunchy and juicy and perfect. They are apples. The absolute essence of apple. When you buy something apple-scented, it doesn't smell like a damn Golden Delicious or Pink Lady. It smells like McIntosh, King of Apples.

Since I haven't quite mastered pie crust yet, I threw together an apple crisp last night so I could enjoy my apples in a warm cinnamony medium.

Apple Crisp

Topping:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup flour (the book specifies Five Roses All-purpose Flour, of course)
1/4 tsp cinnamon
*The book also says to add 1/4 tsp cloves, but Mom never did and so I don't, either.

Cream butter and brown sugar, then add spices and stir in flour until you get a crumbly consistency.

This amount of topping is just enough to cover an 8x8 apple crisp.

The recipe then says to cover your casserole dish with an inch-tall layer of any fruit "prepared in the usual way", which I think is hilarious. Obviously a good homemaker knows exactly what to do with various fruit so make them crisp-ready. By this definition, I am not a good homemaker, but at least I can figure out what to do with apples. I always just peel them, cut them into large chunks, toss them in the dish with a few tbsp of sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon, and then layer the topping over them. To simplify:

Filling (This part is NOT in the book)
5-8 apples (depending on size)
2-3 tbsp sugar
cinnamon

For an 8x8 pan, I needed 7 apples, but they were on the small side. Use your judgement. Don't fill it too full, because the apples will give off liquid while they cook, and it will start to bubble over. Give yourself some space. Also, leave your apple chunks pretty big, because they break down in the heat and if you start out with small pieces you'll be left with applesauce under that crumbly topping.

Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes.



My picture isn't very good because the light in my kitchen is lousy for photography, but here's the finished crisp in all its yumminess. I would have taken a picture of it in a bowl, covered in ice cream that's slowly melting and dripping down, snaking between delicious golden mounds of soft apples and crunchy topping, but it seemed a little pornographic.