A Complete Waste of Apples

One of the reasons I was excited to move to my current place of residence was the apple tree in the front yard. I can't pin down the variety, but it seems to fall somewhere in the red delicious family. They aren't the best eating apples, but they bake like nobody's business.

So you'd think I would have used them for baking. Nope! I decided on cider, despite the fact that I didn't have any of the necessary equipment or know-how. This was also right before I learned that good cider contains a carefully blended mix of different apples selected for complimentary flavors. Instead, I just took all the scraggly ones left at the end of the season, ran them through my neighbor's juicer, then used a piece of an old pair of pajama pants for a filter.

The flavor was all wrong, the texture somewhat chalky, and I lost a high percentage of the liquid due to the inadequacy of my filtering setup. What would have made loads of fantastic crisps, tarts and pies made less than one wine bottle's worth of cider.

"At least I'll have alcohol made entirely from my front yard," I thought. Wrong again. It went moldy. It was, as the title of this post suggests, a complete waste of apples.

That said, I did dump the cider/vinegar/mold onto the ground by the tree, figuring that it might at least be appetizing to the bacteria which colonize the dirt. In doing so, I performed a rather tradition wassail.

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RECIPE: Ruined Cider

Take lots of apples that would be great in something besides cider, and make cider from them.

Incorrectly ferment the cider, rendering it useless.

Failed Apple Pancake

Cocaine isn't the only fine, white powder you can get addicted to for a quick fix. There's also baking powder.

Ever since reading the Bitten post on pancakes made with yeast, I've been thinking as baking powder as nothing but a cheap shortcut. I mean what is that stuff anyway?

The trouble with making yeast pancakes, which would be a terribly unappetizing name for them, is that they require an ounce of forethought, which is not something that comes into play when making pancakes. In fact it's hard to think of something I think less about than prepping pancakes.

I decided to amp up the already awesome "specialty flour" pancakes we've been making, and the somewhat mealy apples we have on hand seemed like just the ticket. A bad apple may spoil the bunch, but a bad eating apple can be a great one for cooking.

Unfortunately, apple power was not enough to save these awful pancakes. Believe it or not, throwing a bunch of kinds of flour together with yeast and not waiting for long enough actually doesn't result in something you want to eat. I made the batter too thin, didn't give it time to rise and didn't count on the yeast tasting so... yeasty. It was almost impossible to get the things to cook through and they tasted neither sweet nor savory, just bad.

The worst part was after I had made the first one, choked it down, and then realized that there was plenty of batter left over. I went ahead and made and ate the rest of the batch, as penance.

Still, the apples look nice, don't they?

Poblano's Revenge, In Perspective

Remember those handsome poblanos I bought over the weekend? You'll see them, roasted and stuffed, on the left in the photo above. Everything else I made for dinner was great, but they almost ruined my night.

First the kitchen filled with smoke as I charred them under the broiler. Our fire alarm, which has actually gone off while I've been making toast, had a field day. Several times. Because I couldn't stand the beeping and couldn't tend the flames and fan the smoke at the same time, I cut the roasting time a little short. Of course the peels then stuck like squirrel fur to squirrel meat.

I had to scrape them off piecemeal with a knife, but since these were local, organic, heirloom poblanos, of course they were runty. The combo of the sticking skin, scraping, and their small size meant that I tore them to shreds in the process. Still, I managed to cram a bread and parmesan stuffing into their small, tattered cavities, and when they came out of the oven they had hung together, the cheese had browned, and they actually looked decent.

I thought I could finally enjoy my hard work until I took a bite. There was no flavor, only bitter, vengeful heat. I've always known poblanos to be delightfully mild with only a hint of capsicum, and I have a decent heat tolerance if I do say so, but these sent me open mouthed to the milk jug. Even in today's Bitten they're referred to as having "gentle warmth," but I guess there's just something special in the feisty soil of New England.

Still, what China's dealing with really puts things in perspective. Suddenly deciding between organic or local seems much less important than spending a month's salary just to find out if your child will live.

It Ain't All Chez Panisse

To fill you in a little on my relationship with food, I thought I'd switch things up and post about some of the things I actually don't like to eat. Sadly, this is a category into which most of my meals fall.

The reason I'm so enchanted with good food is that, given the amount I travel, I rarely get it. I come to nice meals not from a place of comfort and stability, but from depravity and misery. I come crawling.

For every slowly simmered crockpot stew I write about, there's a whole lot of cold, plain oatmeal eaten on my lap at an airport, with chopsticks. And that's a good day.

I see a world on fire, and I see food as a way to still see the good in it. Additionally, I see responsible, ethical, sustainable food as a way to, in part, save ourselves from ourselves, as the Lakota holy man Lame Deer once said. Every morning, when my NYTimes homepage comes up, I look with horror at the news of the day. Afghanistan, Iraq, Tibet, Darfur, New Orleans - you name it.

Then I see a ray of light: the food section.