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

Sweet Potato Fries with Spicy Garlic Aoli

I made this recipe to bring to Thanksgiving at my Dad's last year. My nieces and nephews (all under the age of 12 and averse to veggies) loved these, and the aoli elevated the dish so that all the adults were impressed with my "culinary expertise." My family asked me to make these again this year, so I figured I'd share the recipe. At home, I'll usually pair these with a black bean burger or my quinoa burgers (and put the aoli on top of the burgers too)!

SWEET POTATO FRIES WITH SPICY GARLIC AOLI

Ingredients:

Fries:
- 1 large sweet potato, peeled (don't have to peel them, but it makes them more crispy if you do. Also, a good rule of thumb is to ration about 1 sweet potato per person if you're cooking for more than just yourself or a friend).
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- Salt, pepper, paprika, and cinnamon to taste

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
While you wait for it to heat up, peel and cut your sweet potato into 1/2" thick sticks. Try to keep really pointy ends from being there, as they burn easily.
In a ziploc bag, put in your olive oil and spices.
Throw your sweet potatoes in and give the bag a good shake so that everything covers the sweet potato (this step is especially fun if you're making this with a kid as your helper. Put on some music and shake around!).
Put your potatoes spread evenly on a baking sheet with tin foil over it.
Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes, turning your fries over in the middle (at 10 or 15 minute mark - different ovens will take different times to make the fries crispy). When your fries begin to brown, it's time to take them out.
Dry your fries on a paper towel, add some extra salt and pepper, and serve!

You can make oven fries with regular potatoes too. Just bring down the cooking time to like 10-20 minutes because regular potatoes will burn more easily.

Aoli (don't use this if you're vegan unless you have vegan mayonnaise):
- 1/3 cup Mayonnaise (bonus points if it's homemade)
- 1-2 tbsp sriracha sauce
- 2-3 cloves garlic
- 1 tsp Lemon or lime juice (I used lemon)
- pepper & salt to taste (I used about 1 tsp pepper and 1-2 tsp salt)
- 1-3 tbsp cayenne pepper (depending on how spicy you like it)
- 1/2 tsp cumin

So, the funny thing about aoli is: it's just a fancy word for mayonnaise. You put stuff in it to make it taste better, but it's usually just mayonnaise (yeah - all those fancy restaurants that have "aoli" somewhere on the menu? It's because they're too chicken to just call it what it is so you're actually willing to pay more money and think it's healthy or high-class or something).

To make it, you just mix all the ingredients together until it tastes good. Up the quantities of everything if you want more aoli to dip into or if you're putting it on top of a burger.

Items not donated or dumpstered: olive oil, garlic, spices, sriracha sauce

Soup Month - Curried Pumpkin Potato Soup

Apparently, I mostly made large batches of soup in December with my dumpstered food. It's warm and comforting in the cold, and lasts awhile. So, forgive the copious number of soup posts coming up in the future. I promise this blog will not exclusively cover soup. December just turned out to be soup month. Also, I think I got a little overexcited about my new food processor/blender combo that my landlord gave me.

The cool thing about soup is that you can freeze it, elongating the meal's life while you use other ingredients from your fridge that may spoil sooner.

Right after Halloween and into November, there were a lot of un-carved pumpkins hanging around. My mom had two on her counter at Thanksgiving which she was going to throw out anyway, so I took them home. They stayed on my counter as decoration for about a week, but they screamed to be eaten. Then there was the challenge of using up my insane supply of potatoes. Something had to be done.

CURRIED PUMPKIN POTATO SOUP
(Vegan, Gluten-free)

Ingredients:
2 small-medium pumpkins
1.5 bags Yukon gold potatoes (approx. 8 potatoes)
2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock
1 tbsp butter or olive oil
3-4 cups of vanilla soy milk (you can also use milk or cream with a little vanilla extract)
3 tsp brown sugar
1/2 medium onion
1 stalk celery
1 carrot (optional)
3-4 cloves garlic (I used 6 in my original recipe, but it was SUPER garlicy)
Sprinkle of sage
1 tsp ground cumin
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp salt (or more to taste)
1/2 tbsp ground pepper (or more to taste)
3 tbsp pondicherry curry powder (can substitute w/ curry paste too)
1 additional cup of water or stock
1 sprig parsley (from my window garden)

Step one: Roasting the pumpkins.
Remove the stems and leaves from the pumpkins.
Puncture with a knife a couple times.
Roast pumpkins at 375 degrees for 2 hours until the skin is brown and the pumpkins begin to cave in, like this:


Skin and seed your pumpkins. Put the seeds aside to make toasted pumpkin seeds to garnish the soup.

While you're roasting your pumpkin, when you have about 10 minutes left, quarter and boil your potatoes until tender (don't worry about skinning them).
Blend potatoes, butter, stock, and 1 cup soymilk in a food processor until smooth. Put in a pot and cook on ultra-low heat on the stove.
Blend pumpkin separately, then add to your potato mixture.
Blend raw onion, garlic, carrot, and celery together. Add to mixture.
Add spices, remaining soymilk, and water (or stock) to taste.
Warm everything up again.

TOASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS

So, the hardest part of toasting pumpkin seeds is cleaning them. This is especially hard if you've already roasted your pumpkin like I did. Pumpkin snot is the least attractive texture in the world to me. However, I did a batch of pumpkin seeds that were really well cleaned, and a batch that wasn't well cleaned. The difference is real. Clean your seeds. It's worth it.

Put about 1 tbsp of olive oil in the bottom of a pan with tinfoil on it.
Sprinkle your seeds on the pan.
Sprinkle water and salt on top of the seeds.
Put your seeds in the oven or toaster oven at 350 degrees for 10-15 min. until golden brown.
Shake the pan a few times while the seeds are toasting to make sure they aren't sticking together.

Once you've toasted your pumpkin seeds, use a homemade potato chip (recipe forthcoming), toasted pumpkin seeds, and parsley as your garnish so that your food is as nice to look at as it is to eat.


You can probably blend cooked lentils into the soup for protein if you want to bulk it up too.
Makes a HUGE pot of soup. I froze half my batch and broke it out around Christmas for a meal I cooked for my Dad and Stepmom. They loved it!

Items not dumpstered or donated: veggie stock, olive oil, brown sugar, soy milk, garlic, spices