Dried Apples

We had an abundance of apples this autumn and decided to give an old food dehydrator that my Dad had a whirl. It's quite simple, easy and relatively quick work to dry a bushel of apples in one of these gizmos. You can also, of course, get the same results by using your oven. Just slice the apples to around a 1/4" thickness, spread them out on a wire rack and let dry over the course of 12 or so hours in a warm oven heated to 145º or so. Give the rack a turn once or twice during the drying process.

The apples have a concentrated sweetness & tartness, are chewy (kind of like gummy bears) and store for a good long time. We bagged them up and popped them in the freezer. Great for a road trip or a little snack.

Making Apple Wine

I've been posting a lot of images and status updates about our apple foraging adventures of the past several weeks on my personal facebook page (the title of the page is my name, David Smith, but the URL is http://www.facebook.com/JavaTikiKing). We've been apple picking maniacs this autumn, keeping a sharp eye out for apple trees every time we go anywhere. We've harvested from single and multiple trees along country roads, amongst old farmhouse ruins, public parks, private properties and friends' backyards. Many dozens of bushels (well over a couple thousand pounds) and over two dozen varieties have filled our buckets, baskets and bags. It's been a lot of fun, not unlike a treasure hunt full of surprises and excitement.

We've consumed a lot of apples in the form of jellies and jams, apple pies and crisps, fruit pizzas and apple sauce, apple cider and fresh apples straight from the basket. Apples, apples, apples. I've also got the food dehydrator running with trays full of sliced apples as I write this. But the most fun has been in the making of apple wine. At the moment we've got glass jugs and carboys full of apple cider (juice that will become wine is called the "must") in various stages of fermentation.

I'm not going to provide a detailed a description of the process and recipes in this post, but rather just wanted to share a few images from a batch we made earlier this week (click on the images to enlarge):

1 & 2) Gather & wash your apples; Core & rough chop.

   3 & 4) Chopped apples ready for the processor; Kim turning them into pulp.

5) Buckets of apple pulp.

   6 & 7) Cloth bag o' pulp.

  8 & 9) Putting the bag o' pulp into the press.

    10 & 11) Pressing and getting the cider.

  12) 5 gallons of fresh cider!

13) Apple must the day after adding the pectic enzyme. Racked it to eliminate all the silt (lees) at the bottom; then added sugar, yeast nutrient and yeast; capped with an airlock; let 'er sit and ferment for two or three months.

I've got a good deal more to write about the apple press. It went through several modifications as we had to address design flaws. Look for that, as well as a more detailed look at the wine making process, in a forthcoming post.

Make your own "saltines" crackers

Kim and I made some creamy potato soup today. She is the one who actually made it; I was just the knife man in charge of chopping onions, celery and garlic. It was mighty tasty. But for me, soup without crackers is like a fried egg without toast, and we had no crackers. Solution: make your own saltines or oyster crackers. It's pretty quick and simple.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups flour
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1 tbs salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 stick butter
• a little more than 1 cup cream or whole milk (no cream in the house so I opted for whole milk)

Toss the dry ingredients in the food processor and give it a pulse or two. Cut the butter into 1/2" chunks and add to the flour mixture. Pulse until it's well blended. You might have to take the lid off a few times and work the butter around and into the flour by hand if it doesn't seem to be integrating well; I think it depends on the processor you have.

After everything's well-blended run the machine while pouring the milk (or cream) in, until you get a nice stiff dough. Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and set in the fridge for a half-hour (or an hour, if you're going to go pick some apples like I did after making the dough).

Set your oven to 400º and line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper. Flour the counter and roll the dough out to 1/4" thickness. Cut it into cracker-shaped squares (or into little rounds like oyster crackers...I made mine square even though the final product is more like an oyster cracker in flavor and texture than a saltine). Brush some cream or milk on the crackers and sprinkle with cracked pepper and sea salt (I used red sea salt just because I like how the color shows up on the cracker). Bake until they start to brown (took about 18 minutes in my oven). Let 'em cool and there you go!

Take that, Nabisco!

Goosefoot Pesto

Goosefoot or Lamb's Quarters is one of the first wild plants that I tell people about who are new to foraging, just because it's so very abundant, tasty and easy to identify. We'll discuss more detailed goosefoot taxonomy and identification in a follow-up journal entry; for now I just wanted to share some images and the recipe for a pesto I made this morning using the plants that were growing in a small patch next to our house. They're forecasting frost and freezing temperatures for midweek, and I thought I ought to harvest what I can while there's still time.

This patch of goosefoot sprang up in two big washtubs I had filled with dirt and intended to plant something else in, but never did. Once I saw the washtubs being taken over by this "weed" I was more than happy to let that be my chosen crop.

Goosefoot is most often compared to spinach as a leafy green. I don't find that to be accurate as it concerns flavor (to my palate it doesn't have near the intensity or bitter qualities of spinach), but it's certainly true in how it may be used as an edible green. Use it fresh in salads, steamed with butter as a side vegetable or as an ingredient in ravioli or canoli. But one of my favorite ways to use it is as the green in pesto, in place of the traditional basil.

Detail of Goosefoot/Lamb's Quarters leaf attached to plant. (clcik to enlarge)

Goosefoot leaf. (click to enlarge)

Harvested Goosefoot.

Ingredients:

• Goosefoot leaves
• Oil (olive or canola, enough to create the consistency you want)
• Pecans (you can use any kind of nut; I just happened to have a 1/4 cup of pecans left)
• Sea salt (just a pinch)
• Fresh crushed black pepper
• Garlic (1/2 clove chopped)

Rinse the leaves well. You'll find that running water easily beads and runs off of goosefoot, a function of the white, almost powdery bloom on the leaves. It's nothing to worry about. Goosefoot is one of the cleaner plants you'll find, but rinsing under running water or immersing in a sink full of cold water should be standard practice for all plants anyway.

Assembled ingredients.

Add everything to a food processor (the really fun part) and pulse until you get a nice smooth paste. I always start with less oil that I think I'll need and drizzle more in as seems necessary (you can always add more, but you can't take any out once it's in there).

Adding the oil; canola oil in this case.

The fun part. Pulse, pulse, pulse...

What a beautiful color! (click to enlarge)

Tada! I like this image. That green is just gorgeous. (click to enlarge)

Ooh, that's good!

Label and refrigerate. It will last, if you let it, two or three months in the fridge.

Addendum: There is a cultivated variety of Goosefoot that I am considering trying next year, called Magenta Spreen. It's a beautiful plant, vibrant green with patches of brilliant purple/pink on the stem and base of the leaves. Seeds can be had from several sources, including Johnny's Selected Seeds (image of the plant at this link).

Making Marigold Wine

This is a little video I slapped together with the Flip program, which doesn't have any creative features other than allowing you to edit the length of the videos and choose from a half-dozen pre-selected background music files.

This was just me playing around with the Flip. I don't videotape music every weekend anymore like I used to do at Stumpjack and just had the urge to fiddle around a bit. We're actually in the idea stage of creating a series of high quality video episodes of this sort of thing (foraging, local artisan food production, cooking, interesting personalities or projects, etc), and those will be "professional" in format and visual quality. But this was fun anyway.

Stumpjack Hot Sauce

Here's the recipe Stumpjack Hot Sauce I promised I'd share. It's a riff on the Blue Ribbon Restaurant, New York, hot sauce recipe. The garlic and onion give it an extra layer or two of flavor and the carrots give it a nice mellow sweetness and great color. I especially like it on eggs and in certain creamed soups.

Ingredients

• 3 cups distilled white vinegar
• As many habanero and cayenne peppers as you want (I used 10-12 total, 5-6 of each), with seeds removed. The seeds add more heat but may not puree completely. If you want more heat just add more peppers.
• 2 heaping tbsp coarse Kosher salt
• 1 1/2 lbs carrots (trimmed & peeled, cut into chunks)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 small clove garlic, diced
• 1/4 cup diced white onion

Directions

1. Add a tablespoon of olive oil to a wide saucepan. Sauté the onion, garlic and peppers for just a minute or two, just enough to soften everything up a tad and release some flavor and aroma.
2. Add the vinegar and salt, and bring everything to a boil. (Make sure you open the door or a window to get some good ventilation; boiling vinegar can get pretty intense.) Let it cool.
3. Add the chunked carrots to a pot with just enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 8-10 minutes. You want the carrots tender but firm. Drain and give them a few minutes to cool.
4. Add the peppers, onion, garlic and vinegar mixture to a blender or food processor along with two cups of the cooked carrots. Puree until smooth.
5. Taste it. If it's got too much heat add another cup of carrots and puree again, until you get it to where you want it.
6. Once you have the flavor and level of heat you're happy with you can either bottle it up right there, or strain it to get a greater liquid texture.
7. Bottle it in a cool-looking bottle. It will last in your refrigerator for at least a year.

* variation: divide the vinegar mixture in half, pureeing one half just as directed, but to the other half add some fruit like papaya, peach or pineapple before pureeing. You can cut down on the carrots a bit if you add fruit. The best advice for making this stuff is to let your imagination be your guide, have fun and write your ingredient list and process down as you do it. You might come up with something that knocks your socks off and having it written down will ensure that you'll be able to replicate it again.

Curing Salmon Roe for the Kitchen

We went salmon fishing a few times this autumn and did fairly well, catching several. We released some of them because they were too far into their spawning run and were therefore too dark for good eating, but a few had enough good color and firmness to keep. Two or three big females we caught and kept also had excellent stores of roe.

In the past, while I've reserved some of the eggs for eating I've usually just collected most of the skeins and had simply frozen them for later use as fishing bait. But with salmon roe going for anywhere between $6 and $9 or higher per ounce there is plenty of incentive to make use of this delicacy in the kitchen.

Step 1: rinse/clean the salmon eggs

We'll try to add a few recipes that make use of roe when we make something we think you might enjoy as well. You'll probably have good results with salmon roe in dishes that combine it with other ingredients such as goat cheese, chives, farm eggs, mayonnaise, peppers, and certain fairly intense cheeses. Basically, wherever you might use anchovies, like on pizza, in spring rolls or as part of some tapas plates, you can use salmon roe.

Step 2: dissolve Kosher salt in warm water

Here's a simple recipe to cure or temporarily preserve fresh salmon roe. I'd also suggest letting yourself play with this in anyway that strikes your fancy. Try any number of curing or pickling ingredients (gin or vodka, hot peppers, garlic, cucumber, herbs, etc). It's quite all right if some attempts don't turn out so great; you might hit upon something that is totally awesome.

Step 3: add eggs to salted water and let cure for 2-3 hours

Ingredients:

• Salmon Roe
• Kosher Salt
• Water
• Dark beer
• Sugar

Here's the recipe I used to beer brine cure around 3 lbs of fresh roe (steps correspond with images):

1. Rinse the eggs if they're loose and free of the skein (the membrane that holds the whole bunch together) to get rid of any bits of blood bits. If they're still in the skein rinse it thoroughly.
2. Add and dissolve between 1/3 to 1/2 cup Kosher salt into around a quart of 100° water.
3. Add the eggs to the salted water and let them sit for a couple hours. If they're cloudy going in they should be clear after the brine bath.
4. After two or three hours rinse the eggs using a sieve and running water. If the eggs were still held together in a skein now's the time to peel the membrane from them so that they're free. Be attentive when doing this because the little things seem eager to escape and bounce around.
5. Prepare a second brine of dark beer and sugar. I used a bottle of Dragon's Milk from Michigan's new Holland Brewing that my friend Brian gave me. It's a rich, creamy oak barrel aged ale, 10% abv, and goes down like a liqueur. Added (and dissolved) to the beer 7 heaping tablespoons of sugar and a tablespoon or two of Kosher salt..
6. Add the loose eggs and let them sit for two or three hours.
7. After two or three hours drain the eggs in a sieve (don't rinse) and jar them. They'll last for two or three weeks in the fridge.

Step 5: prepare beer/salt/sugar brine

Depending on the character of the eggs when you brine them they may be a little "hard" and "poppy" when you bite down on them. They soften up a bit when heated during cooking and are easier to eat.

Step 6: cure eggs in beer/sugar/salt solution for 2-3 hours

Step 7: drain eggs

Step 7: jar the eggs and refrigerate (good for 2 or 3 weeks)

Below is a simple recipe to add a little color and interest to your breakfast, with beer cured salmon roe.

Scrambled Eggs with Roe & Chives:

• Cut a few chives from your herb pot and scissor them up into tiny pieces.
• Whip three eggs in a bowl with a bit of cream or milk and salt & pepper.
• Melt butter in skillet over medium heat and sweat a little diced garlic and onion (around a teaspoon each).
• Add a tablespoon of the salmon eggs to the skillet and cook them for a minute or so, stirring them around a few times. This will soften them up and let them soak up some of that good butter/garlic/onion flavor.
• Pour in the egg/cream mixture, sprinkle the chopped chives over the top, and move it around like you do for scrambled eggs, until it's nice and fluffy and done. Drop a teaspoon of butter on top as it's about to finish cooking.
• As soon as the eggs are plated turn the heat up a little and lay a slice or two of country bread, buttered on both sides, in the skillet to quickly toast it, flipping it once. About a minute and a half. Pour yourself a cup of coffee in your Stumpjack mug while the bread is browning.
• Bonus points: take a picture of it all and share it with us and post it on facebook.

Final Step: eat 'em up!