E is for Eats

The rutabaga before the soup A few weeks ago , I picked up a rutabaga at the farmer's market for the first time. I was kind of at a loss as to what to do with it. So, as usual when faced with a new vegetable, I turned to soup. I poked around on line and through my cookbooks for ideas and inspiration. This recipe from The Inn at Little Washington was actually mentioned in two of my books and on many of the sites I visited. It looked delicious, but all that butter! 2 cups of heavy cream! It was a bit too heavy for a weeknight dinner. And I didn't have the sweet potatoes and squash on hand. I used the recipe as a guide, but made a few tweaks out of necessity. Rutabaga and Apple Soup adapted from Patrick O'Connell's Apple Rutabaga Soup serves 4 to 6 2 Tbl Butter 1 rutabaga, peeled and chopped 1 onion, diced 4-5 carrots, peeled and chopped 1 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and chopped 4-5 cups of stock, chicken or veggie 1/2 cup of Milk (I used 2%) 1/4 cu...

A few weeks ago, we went apple picking and came home with 50 pounds of apples. I had a few dishes in mind that I wanted to make, and this was one of them. I made pickled apples last year, and loved them. Of course, I didn't note the recipe or the source of the recipe. I searched high and low, but every single recipe I found used red hots (yup, the candy) as a flavoring. Well, that kind of goes against everything we are trying to do (not to mention, it sounds kind of gross), so I kept on looking. Still, no luck. Using the red hot recipes as a guide for safety, I paved my own road. Ok, more like repaved a road that many had previously traveled, but still.... The final product turned out great, taste wise. I had a very difficult time canning these suckers though. The apples just did not want to stay put. I'm talking serious float. I haven't been canning that long and I'm still super clumsy when it comes to canning fruit. It seems like no matter what I do, it all floats. U...

For the first 7 years of our marriage, I was constantly pestering Craig to go apple picking. He always said he wanted to go, but somehow we never made it. Finally, he gave in last year and we went to Dressel farms . It was a little late in the season, but we still came home with a half-bushel of delicious apples. This year we wanted to go earlier in the season and we wanted to go to one of the farms from our greenmarket.  We decided to go to Wilklow Orchards , in Highland, NY.  Wilklow is at our market year round – they are a sixth generation family farm that brings us city-dwellers delicious produce, meats, baked goods and jams. We were excited to see the farm and we weren’t disappointed. We spent a few hours in the orchard and picked a full bushel of apples. We picked Macoun, Cortland, Red Delicious, Macintosh and Jonamac. I’ve been eating about two apples a day, usually slathered with almond butter. This weekend, Craig has his work cut out for him peeling apples. L...