Firsts

My cousin Jan is a generous woman. Thanks to her, I have had several "firsts" in my life. A first trip to Belgium, staying in her house and driving her car while she was away for Christmas. A first visit to Dillon Beach to let our dogs run wild in the surf and sand. And my first try at apple butter, made from the apples from her tree.

When I first try a new cooking adventure, I consult the internet and any appropriate cookbooks in my collection to see how the pros do it. Then, typically, I simplify what others do. I'm not one for foods that take multiple steps to make and I'm pretty happy when I find an easier way that works nearly as well as a complicated one. It was thus with apple butter.

Oh, you can make it as complicated as you like, adding steps and ingredients like crazy. Or you can make it as simple and pure as I'm sure it was in the very first kitchen when the very first woman let her applesauce cook too long. She probably just forgot it when she fell into bed after a long, hard day's work. The fire died down in her hearth overnight, slowly cooking the apples until they were dark and smooth as a blackguard's tongue. When she awoke in the morning, she was horrified - until she hesitatingly tasted the result, smiled to herself, and told everyone it was intentional. "Haven't you ever heard of apple butter?" she would have asked disingenuously, while spreading it onto the toast.

When I went looking, I found complicated recipes with a simple cooking methods, and simple recipes with complicated cooking methods. I chose the ingredients from one and the method from another and made, if I do say so myself, really, really good apple butter.

It cooks 'way down so you only get a few jars out of a half bushel of apples. I didn't have small jars on hand and my store was out of them, so I used larger ones and only got 2-1/2 jars. I will eat the half jar now and save the others for later or for gifts of my very first apple butter. Here's the recipe:

Crocked Apple Butter

About 1/2 bushel of apples, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks

A big splash of apple cider (preferably fresh and not filtered)

A scant 1/2 cup sugar (more if you use tart apples, less if you use sweet ones)

1/4 tsp ground allspice

1/4 tsp salt

2 tsp ground cinnamon

Using a crockpot (slow cooker), fill the pot with apple chunks. Mix the rest of the ingredients together in a small bowl and pour over the apples. Cover and cook on the high setting for an hour, then lower the heat to the low setting and leave it to cook for many hours - 8 or 10 - stirring occasionally until the apples turn a dark, rich brown and lose all their structure. If it seems too loose, set the cover at an angle on the pot to allow steam to escape.

If you don't have a crockpot, cook the mixture in a very heavy-bottomed pot on the lowest setting of your stove, stirring occasionally to make sure there aren't hot spots that stick and burn. If you should get a burned spot, one the recipes I read suggested pouring out the rest of the apple butter into a separate pot - the burned part will stick and you can discard that without ruining the whole batch. Clever, huh?.

If you want to get fancy, you can pass it through a sieve, but I liked the texture that remained after simply mashing any remaining chunks with a wooden spoon.

Ladle into sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath. You can find good instructions for bottling on the internet. Once bottled, it will keep indefinitely.

Another successful first!

Handmade Gifts

When I was a child, I always wanted to have enough money to buy expensive gifts for my mother. As Christmas or birthdays approached, I would take my meager allowance down to the Navy Exchange and gaze through the jewelry case, hoping for something wonderful, glittery and affordable for a woman who I knew loved jewelry.

There was never anything affordable and, truth be told, she didn't need anything from the Exchange, as she already had heirloom jewelry from her grandmother and my Dad added on a regular basis to her collection of sparkly things. But, I always wished for enough money to buy her a really impressive gift, as if that would somehow prove my love for her. When I would wish for that aloud, she would always say, "Give me something you have made yourself; handmade gifts are the best." I'd nod and pretend to agree, still secretly and stubbornly convinced that store-bought was better.

Sometime over the years I absorbed her philosophy and, as I grew wiser as well as taller, I learned to value homemade gifts the most. Fast forward to yesterday, when I opened my pantry door looking for something to go with my cottage cheese and found a jar of homemade apple butter that Molly had given me more than a year ago. I have posted about this strange combination before, but had to mention it again, both because of Molly's generosity and because of the excellence of her apple butter.

Molly's is a lighter, spicier apple butter than I have had before, a little runny so just a spoonful decorates a satisfyingly large scoop of cottage cheese. She uses either different spices or nicer combinations that most - this stuff is highly addictive! Sitting down to a bowlful, I could hear my mother's voice extolling the virtues of handmade gifts, and was grateful.

Bachelorette Dinner

Whenever My Beloved is away on a business trip, I take a vacation from cooking and scrounge whatever I can find in the fridge. Here's what I found today, a favorite combo, fat-free cottage cheese and unsweetened apple butter.

When I was a kid, my mother invented this as a healthy snack to wean me off my then-favorite, cottage cheese and Concord grape jelly. I know, I know! Revolting! Looking back, I can hardly believe I loved that! More recently, with the addition of Four K Farms apple butter to my life, this concoction has gotten even more nutritious than it was when I was buying a national brand.

I've posted about this before but it was a long time ago. Hope you won't mind the reminder. Easy dinner for the grass widow.