Randomness
Good Friday morning to you, dear readers!
I just have some randomness to throw at you today.
I've been making tons of applesauce.
Well, not tons, but enough for me to fill up pretty much all of my containers.
(note the motley collection there, waiting to be filled.)
When you run out of containers, you should probably stop making applesauce.
I believe this means that the rest of our apples are going to have to become apple crisp or something.
(I'd make apple pie, but I don't really like pie, the crust part at least, and so I hardly ever make pies which means I am completely dreadful at dealing with pastry dough.)
Apple crisp, though, is totally happening. It's all the good parts of apple pie with none of the bad.
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I butterflied, salted, and roasted a chicken the other day.
When I butterflied it, I saved the raw backbone along with all the bones from the chicken and put them in my freezer.
BUT.
I did not let them sit there for eons, because I am KEEPING MY FREEZER CLEAN. 😉
So I browned the backbone in a pan to render the chicken fat, added chopped onions and sauteed them in the fat, added the rest of the chicken bones, and made a pretty darn impressive pot of golden chicken broth, if I do say so myself.
Then I sauteed some veggies in the chicken fat that I skimmed off the top of the broth, and added chicken and noodles to make a pot of soup.
It was delicious.
And super inexpensive.
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I made a not-from-a-box chocolate cake yesterday, for my children's education (more on that in a minute).
It came out of the (buttered and floured) pan so beautifully, I had to take a picture.
Behold:
I've been using the Story of the World curriculum for Sonia and Zoe, and our chapter was about the Taiping rebellion in China.
Why make a cake?
Well, after we cut out a stencil, we turned our cake in a large replica of a coin they minted during the rebellion.
Apparently the Qing dynasty destroyed most of the coins after the rebellion failed, but a few were still found.
Of course, if you follow me on instagram (I'm thefrugalgirl, naturally.), you already knew about all of this. 😉
Even without the chocolate parts, Story of the World is a ridiculously good history curriculum, and gosh, I wish it had been around when I was a kid.
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I made three loaves of bread, plus the cake yesterday. But when it came to dinner, I had no inspiration. I'd planned a meal, but hadn't gotten to the store to buy what I needed.
So we got pizza.
However, I had a Groupon for a local chain, so it was a very inexpensive night of not cooking.
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I think that's all the random stuff I have for you today. Have a delightful weekend, and I will see you back here on Monday!
This is my new favourite apple crisp recipe and it is sooooo simple. It makes a softer crisp so I suppose it isn't really a "crisp" but it is delicious and probably a little healthier than a butter recipe. This makes a small dish so I always double it to use lots of apples. Walnuts are VERY expensive here so I haven't tried it with them yet but I am sure it would be crispier with nuts.
1/3 cup brown sugar, oats, flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon and nutmeg
3 tbsp canola oil
1/2 cup walnuts (optional)
Mix all ingredients until well combined.
Thank you for sharing how you made your soup this week. I've only ever made broth by boiling carcasses for hours and it's never turned out very great for me. This seems like a much quicker and easier way!
I think having the raw backbone really helped. Cooking it over medium heat rendered the fat and produced some fond on the bottom of the pot, and then when I added the onions, their juices released the fond, and so by the time I added the rest of the bones and the water, the liquid was already a nice golden, delicious color.
I did simmer the bones for a while, but I think the browning and the onions are what really upped the flavor.
How would you feel about giving a step by step for that broth/soup? It sounds so good and I have 2 carcasses in my freezer that I'd love to use. I lack the imagination, though, to go about making it without instruction. Ditto to Emily. I've been making my chicken broth in the crockpot and my family is begging me to stop because they think Better than Bouillon tastes better! So, I know I must be doing something wrong.
Yes! I'll put that on my to-do list...it'll take me a little bit to get around to it bc I'll need to do the whole process over again so I can take photos.
I should probably wait at least a week before I serve roasted chicken and chicken noodle soup again. Hee.
One thing to keep in mind that a commercial product such as Better Than Boullion uses a ~ton~ more salt than any rational home cook would. In cooking school* I never got a perfect score because I never used as much salt as my restaurant-trained chef/instructor wanted me to.
Things you can do to make stock tastier:
- Brown the chicken
- Use skin, especially if it's browned, as well as bones
- Concentrate it: 1 lb of bones makes 1 quart of weak stock, or 1 pint of strong stock. Go for strong. For really strong, simmer chicken in weak chicken stock.
- Chop the bones into 1" pieces, the sweat/brown them before simmering.
- Don't boil the stock, just keep it at a bare simmer. This is what your crock-pot does, btw.
* One year I was a bit bored so I took Cooking 101, the intro class at the nationally-ranked cooking school in my city.
Thank you! I'll try those tips. It sounds like more work than just chucking it all in the crock pot, but it'll be worth it if it tastes better!
You can brown the bones & quartered onions by baking them at 350F till they're brown.
Ditto on making lots of applesauce. The last three years I've made it in my crockpot. Before that I would inevitably have a batch that burned on because I forgot to stir it often enough. Burnt applesauce is yuck. To use the crockpot you just peel, quarter, and core the apples, throw them in the crockpot with a bit of water, some sugar, and spices, and walk away for a few hours. The family likes chunky style sauce, so once the apples have cooked enough to be soft, I just mash them lightly with a potato masher, then jar and process in the pressure cooker. No more stirring...and! no more burnt apple sauce.
That chicken broth looks lovely. I've never made my own before...
Is it hard to butterfly a chicken? I've never actually bought bone-in chicken, much less a whole one, but I've been feeling the urge to try it and see how many meals I can make from it!
Nope, it's not! I just use a pair of kitchen scissors and cut down both sides of the backbone. A butterflied chicken cooks WAY faster than an intact bird, and it's an especially lovely technique to use with turkey, which takes eons to roast otherwise.
Just to make it sound even more interesting, the formal word for the technique is "spatchcock." One of the cooler words in a cook's vocabulary.
Yes! I did think about using that delicious word, but then thought it might come off as unnecessarily pretentious. Ha.
Regarding The History of the World, do you purchase the complete.collection? My 3rd grade goes to school but he's interested in lots of things. Might look into this for further study & enrichment if the total cost wasn't too prohibitive. Haven't looked on any other book sites for it. Thanks.
We actually started with book three last year, are doing book four this year, and then we'll circle back around and do the ancient history in the next two years.
You can definitely buy the books a l carte at places like Amazon and CBD.com! And they all stand on their own, so it's not like you HAVE to start from the beginning of history. I definitely recommend the textbook and the activity guide. The textbook is full of the stories, but the activity guide is where you get all the extra lit suggestions and the map work and the project ideas and such.
We've bought one each year. Our children love it. I even splurged (big time) this year and bought the cds for the year we're one because when I read all that I need to read to the children, my voice starts to give out. I like to sing in choir and, more importantly, sing to my babies, so I am trying to avoid too much strain.
Whoops. Story of the World.
How do you keep your apples fresh while waiting for you to turn them into all this loveliness? I had so many plans for our haul from the apple orchard, but many of them went so bad before I got to them. I did manage to roast some apples for applesauce, but not nearly as much as I'd have liked.
Oh, that's so sad! Mine have been fine sitting on the counter. I wonder why yours went bad! Do you live in a really humid climate?
I wonder if it is the variety of apple. When we lived in Wisconsin, we would go to a local apple harvest festival and some types of apples have rather short shelf lives and are rather delicate. Other apples had a very long shelf life.
Ever tried making apple pancakes? We have an apple pancake that I rather like. I am considering maybe making some apple muffins though, as I have a couple of apples to use up. Not enough to make applesauce though.
Some apples are better keepers than others. Most early apples--McIntosh, for example--don't keep for a long time. As a rule, the later the variety of apple, the longer they will last in storage. Storage temperature plays a big role. I bought Cortlands in September. The apples that I have upstairs at room temperature have softened much faster than those I have in my cooler basement. You can keep them in the fridge, but that's hard to do if you have a lot of them and only one refrigerator.
Yes, I suppose I should have put them in the refrigerator. I'm in the south and perhaps the humidity did make them go bad. I had a variety of apples - arkansas black, rome, delicious... The granny smith held out best, while the others were spoiling at the core.
So once they are brown on the inside and have that vinegary smell, there's no use for them right? Mine are all gone, but I'm just curious if there is a way I could have saved them.
This post makes me want to make chocolate cake this afternoon.
The cake is fab!
If you don't already have an apple crisp recipe, may I suggest the Classic Apple Crisp recipe on the King Arthur Flour website? I have made it several times already this fall, and I may make it again this weekend. Leftovers make for a yummy breakfast too!
Yes! My husband made an offhand comment last night about the crust being the best part of any pie, and I looked at him in astonishment. He claimed, "It is a commonly known fact." Glad I'm not alone! (And I adore apple crisp)
See, he has it all wrong.
The crust is the part of the pie that you leave on your plate after you've eaten the delicious filling. 😉
Nice to know that there are others out there who do not love pie crust. At church, I remember one person raving about that pie there has homemade crust. I was so, uhhh, yeah, so? I am just not a pie person, as I love the filling, not the crust. Hence why I like apple crisp. But the hard part of apple crisp for me, is measuring out servings for counting calories.
Would it help to make mini crisps in a muffin tin or mini pie plates?
I do the same thing.
FG, were you planning to freeze sauteed apple slices for crisps and such? Also, CI's Family Cookbook has a recipe for Apple Dumplings that I riffed out to simplify even more. The CI version uses pre-made croissant dough, which tastes good and is easy to work with but I wanted a simplier version that I didn't need to buy anything for. I determined that pie crust is easier to roll out, but biscuit dough tasted better.
Basically, you line muffin tins with a large piece of rolled-out dough; add apple slices/brown sugar/cinnamon/pinch salt; close the dough around the slices; then bake till the apples are soft and the dough is cooked. The apple juices and sugar make a syrup that everyone will want you to spoon out of the tins.
I hadn't planned on it...but if it turns out we really love apple crisp, maybe I should!
We got through all our apples because I chopped up one to mix with my oatmeal every morning. It adds a bit of sweetness, and is healthier than brown sugar! The 5-year-old took one in his lunch most days too. Between us, we went through 8-9 a week that way. Coupled with normal snacking, this made two giant baskets disappear before anything rotted. Not too much baking required!
I know this comment is late, but I just wanted to say that I'm not a fan of traditional pie crust in apple pie either. So I did some experimenting a few years ago, mashed together the best-looking parts of multiple recipes, and came up with an apple pie recipe that uses a graham cracker crust instead. Pretty tasty, IMO!
Graham cracker crust is completely acceptable. Unlike regular pie crust.
Also acceptable: cookie crust.