Deconstructed Caramel Apples

We made caramel sauce.

Do not be afraid of trying this. It was wicked easy and delicious.

Ambrosia
We altered this recipe to fit our needs.  The original has excellent pictures to reference when deciding if the syrup is caramelized enough to add the cream.

2 cups sugar
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup heavy cream, lukewarm, split into 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup portions
2 Tbs butter, cut into pats
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt

Combine sugar and water in medium saucepan.  Heat over medium-high.  To reduce crystallization, cover cooking syrup for one minute so the steam will wash any unmelted sugar off the sides of the pan. Continue to cook until the syrup has changed to an amber-brown color around the edge (will be lighter in center of pan).  The mixture may not be deep enough for a candy thermometer to be effective, but if it is, the temperature should be 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Remove from heat and immediately stir with wooden spoon or whisk.  Add 1/2 cup heavy cream and butter while stirring.  The mixture will foam up and steam, so don't stick your head or hand right over it.  Stir until combined.  Add remaining heavy cream, vanilla and salt and stir until caramel is smooth.  Transfer to a heat proof jar and cool on countertop for an hour before sealing or storing in the refridgerator. 

Thouroungly lick, then soak the pot, spoons, etc. in hot water before you attempt to wash them. Seriously, they are sticky. Let them soak for at least as long as it takes you to eat half the jar of caramel.

So far we know that this stuff is excellent on apples (especially sprinkled with smoked sea salt), on ice cream, and by the spoonful.  I imagine that it would be amazing on just about anything desserty or breakfasty.

Relativity Pie

I started my second year of pre-med classes last month: Physics and Organic Chemistry. So, I spend a lot of time doing homework now, but I am also reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It has taken me all summer to get through the series, partly because they are huge, complicated books and partly because I was waiting to read them until I could afford to buy them. I know myself well enough to know that I would want to own these.

Whilst reading, I encountered a passage which simultaneously made me think about reference frames (physics) and pie (yumm). Daniel (fictional) and Isaac Newton are riding in a carriage, recently swept out of a club where they were about to consume dinner. Daniel is understandably distracted by the presence of pies in the carriage, but Isaac seems to have forgotten them entirely.

"Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie--as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were the relationships between his, Daniel's, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together in both position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity--e.g., being hurled at his face--then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastical hypotheticals Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it."

As a result of reading this, I was obviously overcome with desire for pie. Daniel and Isaac are eating savory pies, which I could not make due to the fact that we had neither meat nor vegetable in the house. We were generally short on food, but I was able to rustle up some (year-old) frozen cranberries and apples (one partially eaten).

I don't have a recipe for the pie, because it was largely improvised. For crust, I used one of the pat-a-cake pie crusts from the Joy of Cooking. The rest was based on what I had for ingredients and a love of warm fall spices. This post has been languishing in limbo waiting for me to write one (I have confusing notes on what I did somewhere). I decided to just post it and hope that it inspires further pie-making. I recommend lots of brown sugar and cinnamon.

S'Mores

Sanna Sanna Ho

Easter Eve (Holy Saturday?) dinner:
Breakfast (consumed noonish): Lemon Rolls with Cream Cheese Glaze from the kitchn


Dinner: Eggs Benedict and asparagus


I made the hollandaise sauce using Alton Brown's method. It was super easy, but attention-needing so I was glad that Pirogi was taking care of the other egg-related preparations. I don't have a double-boiler or a metal bowl, so I had to balance a corel bowl in my saucepan.

Concerning Hobbits and Apfelkuchen

I am completely in love with the Lord of the Rings (books, movies, mythology, geeky merchandise--I love it all), but my dear boyfriend, codename: Pierogi, had never seen the movies. So, over the summer we watched the Fellowship and Two Towers. In an ideal world, we would have watched all three movies over one weekend, while eating exclusively food mentioned or eaten in the movies. However, not everyone has my stamina or enthusiasm. So, for my birthday (which is on Thursday), we decided to celebrate by (finally) watching the Return of the King and spending an entire day eating like Hobbits.

There is something completely wholesome about Hobbits. They are content with the details of their little lives, and unconcerned with the big world, which has always managed to keep existing without their help so far. As long as one is comfortable, well-fed, and has a few nice things to look at or play with, they see no reason to look for adventure or confrontation. In the introduction to The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes that Hobbits are now rarely, but that their favorite places are in the "well-ordered and well-farmed countryside," where life moves slower and they are less likely to encounter loud and unpleasant machinery. In many ways, they could easily be the poster-species for the modern slow food and back-to-the-land movements. Though not pretty, hobbits have good-natured appearances, their faces being designed for laughing, eating and drinking: "And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them)."

The six meals a day part was the biggest challenge of our day of Hobbit food. By checking out this list of foods in the books and movies, remembering a few things of my own, and using my imagination, it was easy to think of several days worth of Hobbit food, but we had to keep it down to 5 (we couldn't handle 6) meals, and somehow find time to eat those 5 without exploding. So, here's what we did...

An Unintentional Collection

Peanut butter is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest foodstuffs known to mankind. Without peanut butter, I’m not sure I would have survived high school. Although our cafeteria was not the worst, it got pretty awful after eating there exclusively for three or four weeks, so the diet was supplemented with a myriad of healthy and unhealthy foods. Plenty of kids ate ramen and Mountain Dew or Vault every day. One girl seemed to survive almost exclusively on avocado and tea (she was a vegan in public boarding school, poor thing). For me, it was macaroni and cheese (usually eaten after 10 PM and split between a few roommates and friends) and large spoonfuls of store brand creamy peanut butter.

Since I left high school, I have stopped eating peanut butter by the spoonful, except in extreme situations. Usually that means late-night writing sessions when I need easy energy or quick breakfasts when I forgot to set my alarm clock. But I do eat a lot of peanut butter. I eat peanut butter with tea and crackers, on English muffins, with cold noodles, on ice cream, with celery, and, of course, in peanut butter cookies. This requires a pretty steady supply of peanut butter, particularly my favorite kind: Hannaford’s store-brand creamy. I know, it’s not glamorous, but it tastes just right.Unfortunately I now have a surplus of peanut butter. In and of itself, that is not a problem. The problem is that it is mostly peanut butter I don’t like.

Figure 1. From left to right: Hannaford’s Creamy, Hannaford’s Crunchy, Peanut Butter & Co. Mighty Maple (“blended with yummy maple syrup”), Nature’s Place (Hannaford’s) All Natural Creamy, Organic Sunbutter, Teddie Old Fashioned All Natural Smooth, and Teddie All Natural Chunky with Flaxseed.

Only two of these belong to me: the Hannaford’s Creamy and the Sunbutter (which is, I feel, a healthy alternative that does not force me to compromise my peanut butter standards). I live in what you might call a two peanut butter household. My boyfriend was raised (brainwashed, I assume) to prefer the natural, sticks-in-your-mouth kind of peanut butter whose flavor I find pretty underwhelming. Ideally, this conflict is solved by simply stocking two kinds of peanut butter and in itself does not explain my current situation. Easiest to explain is the crunchy peanut butter, which belongs to a friend’s dog that I used to look after. The three natural peanut butters (for the record, we just finished a fourth jar of Teddie’s Creamy) are the result of my boyfriend’s work as an archaeologist, which leads him to spend 4-10 days at a time living out of hotel rooms. He hates bringing food into the field, so he usually comes home with a few bagels, a few bottles of beer, and a half-empty jar of peanut butter. Thus, three (four, until today) jars of natural peanut butter.
So, I need to use up some peanut butter.

My first project in this endeavor is the classic: peanut butter cookies. My family has long held that we make the best peanut butter cookies. Every peanut butter cookie I have had at a pot luck, Christmas party, or wedding not made by a member of my family inevitably disappoints. They are pale, weak imitations of the real thing...

Figure 2. Peanut butter cookies and milk.

Ingredients
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup butter, softened1 cup peanut butter (I used ½ Hannaford’s Creamy and ½ Nature’s Place Creamy)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 ¼ cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Figure 3. My lovely assistant demonstrates the appropriate fork pressing technique for ideal peanut butter cookies.

Procedure
-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
-Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a small-medium bowl
-In a large bowl, cream together butter, brown and white sugar. Add peanut butter and beat well. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well.
-Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix until completely combined.
-Roll tablespoons of dough into balls and set on an ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten each ball with a lightly floured fork.
-Bake for 7-10 minutes, until desired coloration and crunchiness are achieved (there is some debate as to the appropriate levels of each of these, but I stand firmly in the browned-and-crunchy camp. The sugars have a chance to get a tad caramelized and the texture is just right for dipping in milk while maintaining structural integrity)