Applesauce & Apple Butter

This is going to be a lazy post (I apologize now). I dumpster a lot of apples in the late fall, and this year I also went apple picking at a local farm, so I've had a lot of use for apple preserving tactics. My favorites? Applesauce and apple butter. Applesauce is perfect for Thanksgiving or to pair with Hanukkah potato latkes. Or, y'know, applesauce is a pretty great snack by itself too.

The excellent part is this: when you get tired of your canned applesauce, you can make apple butter out of it! I love giving jars of apple butter to family during the holidays. It's thoughtful, homemade, and lasts about 1 year if you use proper canning technique. After you open the jar, it'll keep in the fridge for at least another 2-8 months, depending on how much sugar you put in it (since sugar is a preservative).

Here's my favorite recipe for making applesauce at home. You can tweak their recipe by adding lemon juice (also works as a preservative), keeping the rinds in there as you cook the apples down and removing them before you mash everything up:

http://www.pickyourown.org/applesaucewomill.htm



Now, apple butter is way easier than you'd think. It's literally just cooking applesauce down at a very low temperature for a very long time until there's very little moisture left in it. You can add extra spices and more sugar during this process too, depending on how tart or sweet your applesauce was to begin with. There's two methods to achieve apple butter: 1) cook it on the stove at a low heat or 2) use a crock pot at very low heat.

The crock pot is a little safer, since you have to leave it on while you're presumably at work or otherwise living your life. Here's good instructions on how to make apple butter. You can futz with the proportions to make more or less, depending on how much applesauce you start out with:

http://www.pickyourown.org/applebutter.htm


Something I like to do when I'm giving tiny jars of apple butter to people is spice them up a little. For pretty much all home canning, you're using jars with 2 pieces to the lid - a ring and a flat part. If you have some fabric scraps (a cool old t-shirt works fine), you can put the piece of fabric in between the flat part of the lid and the ring, like this:


Now you don't need wrapping paper!

Other apple ideas are apple juice (which comes out of making a lot of applesauce) or apple cider.

Ingredients not donated or dumpstered: spices

Peach-Mango Salsa & Ginger Mojitos

Recently I had the pleasure to go through Hurricane Irene. It didn't hit us very hard in Maryland, but everyone was told not to go out of the house. So, while I waited for the power to go out with a friend (it never did), we made some peach-mango salsa, guacamole, and ginger mojitos, then sat down and watched Royal Tenenbaums as the wind and rain raged outside.

PEACH-MANGO SALSA


Ingredients:

- 3 small peaches, diced (from a large bushel given to us at work by a customer bought from a local farmer's market)
- 1 mango, diced
- 3-5 cups diced (fresh) tomatoes
- 2 cups diced white onion
- 1 clove garlic
- 1/2 - 1 jalapeno pepper - with seeds (depending on desired spiciness)
- 1/2 yellow bell pepper, diced
- Juice from 2 limes
- 1 bundle of fresh cilantro, chopped
- Salt (we needed quite a bit), black pepper, & cayenne to taste

Place tomatoes, onions, jalapeno, and bell peppers in a large pot over medium heat for 10 minutes, allowing the tomatoes to release their juices.
Add peaches & mango, then cook for an additional 5 minutes.
By this time, there should be a LOT of liquid accruing in your pot. Depending on how watery you like your salsa to be, drain as much off as you'd like. I ended up draining off about half the liquid (but kept enough to use as canning fluid for a few jars).
Add lime juice, cilantro, and extra spices.
Cool down the salsa before serving.
Can it if you'd like so you can bring it to a BBQ or pot-luck or give it as a gift to a friend. Plus, if you can it, you can enjoy the salsa in the winter when none of the ingredients are in season anymore! But BEWARE: There's not a whole bunch of acid in this recipe, so I wouldn't use the salsa after a few months - 6 at most (even if it's been properly sealed the whole time). If you want to keep the salsa longer, just add some apple cider vinegar to your mixture and it should make it last a little longer.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Garlic, cilantro (from garden), salt, black pepper, & cayenne

GINGER MOJITOS

This is my favorite drink in the world. I first encountered a ginger mojito when I was living in Prague going to film school (which is funny, since the drink is Cuban in origin). Plain mojitos were all the rage in Prague when I lived there, and the ginger spin on the drink was on the menu at this really awesome lounge/club named Radost FX (Rihanna notably shot one of her music videos there). If you're ever in Prague, I'd highly recommend hitting it up.

They make a way better ginger mojito than I ever could, but this is my meager attempt at trying to recreate it. You can also do a virgin version (that actually tastes almost exactly the same as the alcoholic one and is delicious) by just omitting the rum.

I feel badly that this recipe uses a lot of ingredients not dumpstered, but when you have SO many limes and ginger (which we had), it's a good way to use them when you're tired of using them in other ways. Plus, when there's a natural disaster, everyone seems to want a drink...

Ingredients:

- 2 shots white rum (optional)
- 1 cup club soda (add slightly more club soda for the virgin version)
- 1+ tsps minced ginger (I put in way more since I love ginger - think like 4 tsps for that extra bite to contrast the sweetness)
- 10+ fresh mint leaves (Again, I like way more for freshness, but most other recipes call for 10-12 leaves)
- Juice from 1 lime
- Lime slice to garnish
- 2-4 tsps sugar or simple syrup if you're more patient/making a big batch
- A bunch of ice (crushed for more of a tropical feel)

Muddle (basically mash together) ginger, mint, and halved lime (with rind) with a mortar & pestle or a muddler (if you don't have either of these, just put the ingredients in a small bowl or cup and use a spoon or similarly blunt object like the top of your rum bottle to mash them up).
Add this mixture to your ice, rum, and club soda.
Add simple syrup (or sugar).
Mix and enjoy!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Mint (from garden), rum, club soda

Spicy Chipotle Cream Sauce + How to Roast a Pepper

If you dumpster often, you know that you find bell peppers (and various types of peppers) a lot.

Pickyourown.org has pretty exhaustive tips and instructions on canning, and roasted peppers are one of my favorite things to can (you can also can raw bell peppers on their own, you just need a crapton of vinegar and canning salt to make it work).

Even if you don't want to can your peppers, roasting them will still make them last about 2 weeks longer in your fridge.

You incidentally also need roasted bell or chipotle peppers for this dish I'm about to lay down:

HOW TO ROAST A BELL PEPPER

It's actually uber simple! When you roast bell peppers, they unlock the pepper's sweetness. Just take your pepper, de-stem/seed it, then stick it in your oven or toaster oven (to save power) at about 400-500 degrees until the skin turns black (rotating it from time to time so it cooks evenly). Let it cool down, and the skin should come off easily with your hands or a knife (but be careful - the pepper will be smokin' hot). Slice it up and you've got yourself some roasted bell peppers.

You can use these for canning, puree them for an amuse bouche, pasta sauce, pizza, whatever. Get creative.

And now:

SPICY CHIPOTLE CREAM SAUCE (w/ Pasta and Stuff)

Ingredients:

- 3 tbsp butter
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 cup of fresh or canned corn (about 1/2 a can)
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 1/2-1 portabella mushroom cap
- Pasta of some sort (I used rotini)
- 1/2-3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream
- Cumin, nutmeg, basil, rosemary, red chili powder (hot), and salt & pepper to taste
- 1-2 roasted peppers (I used 1 orange pepper and a small red pepper from my garden):
Melt the butter in a medium pan.
Throw in the onion and mushroom on medium heat. Allow for the onions to become translucent and the mushroom to become soft. When they're almost finished, throw in the garlic, roasted red pepper, and corn.
Set your water to boil for the pasta and boil pasta as you finish the next steps.
Turn heat on veggies to medium-low.
Add cream (make sure the pan isn't too hot, or it will scald the cream). Continue stirring often while the sauce thickens so it doesn't coagulate.
Add red chili powder, cumin, and nutmeg. The nutmeg is what rounds out the creamy flavor of the sauce (pretty much every cream sauce in French cuisine will have some nutmeg in it for this reason), so don't be shy with it.
Add rosemary (fresh), basil (fresh), salt, & pepper to taste.

Once you've found a nice balance for your sauce, throw everything over your pasta and enjoy.


Items not donated or dumpstered: 1 red pepper (garden), whipping cream, basil (garden), rosemary (garden), butter, spices