Two Things Before Bed

1. I keep thinking about a pie made with apple and brie. Crunch top. But does the brie go under the apple or over?
2. The longer I've been on Facebook, the more disturbed I get at parents, grandparents, and other peoples posting pictures of children. There's no real consent. Even if the child wants something posted or was asked, he/she can't really grasp what having that picture posted can mean now and in the future. Not only are kids going to dig up drunken pictures of their parents to try to use in hypocrisy debates, but they're also going to find their childhood, happy times and breakdowns, posted for the world to see. It doesn't seem right to me.

On Making Apple Pie

I saw giant piles of apples at the grocery store the other day and I decided that what I wanted more than almost anything was apple pie. Not just a regular pie, but a mile high apple pie.

When I make apple pie, I like to get the apples ready first so they can sit for at least 90 minutes gaining flavor.

Here's what I used:

Sugar
Flour
Lemon Juice (I forgot to buy a lemon. The bottle works well, though.)
Nutmeg
Ground Cloves
Cinnamon
 Apples

I used three Lady Alice, three Honeycrisp, and  nine Granny Smiths. The variety of apples was to help vary the texture and sweetness within the pie when it finished cookin.

The contraption is an apple peeler/slicer:

Nothing gets apples prepped for pies faster. Setup, peeling/slicing, and cleanup took about twenty minutes. (You can choose if you want the apple peeled, too. Oh, it's perfect if you're going to dehydrate apples because it takes out the core and all the slices are uniform.)

I like to use a bowl with a lid so I can shake the bejesus out of it.

I used a teaspoon of the nutmeg, a teaspoon of ground cloves, a tablespoon of cinnamon (I like cinnamon in my apples, most recipes don't call for this much.), two tablespoons of flour (this helps thicken the juices the apples are going to let go), two tablespoons of lemon juice (which was too much; one would have been better), and one cup of sugar.

After the shake-up, it's time for the dough for the pie crust:

Flour
Sugar
Salt
Shortening
Butter
Vodka
Water

I use the America's Test Kitchen Foolproof Pie Dough, because I need the foolproof part and it's delicious. I'm not going to write the recipe out because they don't give it away for free. It's worth the price, though,

Also, I forgot to take pictures of the mixing process (I'm new to trying to blog cooking), but here are pictures of the only dishes I dirtied and the dough in balls ready to be put in the fridge for at least an hour:

After at least an hour, I pulled out the larger of the two balls, rolled it out, then put it in a 9-inch pie pan, mine is Pyrex.

After filling the bottom, I rolled out the top, laid it over the pie, trimmed and pinched the edges, and cut some slits in the top to let the steam out.

The pie went into a preheated 425 degree (F) oven on a half-sheet on the bottom rack of the oven. The half-sheet went into the oven as it preheated so it was nice and hot. This is to help the bottom of the pie cook a little bit faster so it won't be soggy when the pie is finished.

It cooked for 45 minutes and came out like this:

Usually, I use some melted butter on the top then sprinkle cinnamon/sugar. This time I used an egg wash and then cinnamon/sugar. It's pretty obvious where the wash was too thick and the cinnamon/sugar was too thin.

Here's the first slice, after it rested for an hour:

The dough was amazing. In the past I've rolled this recipe out several times and it's always come out flaky and tender and delicious. The apple had a great texture, but was a little tart; too much lemon juice added to the apples. I like tart, Granny Smiths are my favorite apples, but others would have liked it to be a more sweet.

Still, it was devoured pretty quickly.

After I put the pie into the oven, I collected the scraps of dough, formed them into a new ball, and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes. Then I rolled the dough out, smeared melted butter all over it, and sprinkled cinnamon/sugar everywhere.

Then I rolled it up into a log and sliced that log into half inch pieces. After the pie came out, the mini-cinnamon rolls went into the oven for 13 minutes. Which was probably two minutes too long. Some got a little too browned, but they all tasted great.

YOGURT!

Along with that cake yesterday, I decided to make yogurt in the slow cooker. I did it over night.

 

This is what the cooker looked like this morning after a couple little taster scoops. I'm not a fan of plain yogurt. I wanted to add canned peaches, but this yogurt was too runny to add anything juicy to it.

I put a clean dishtowel in a colander and put that over a bowl and let it drain in the fridge all day.

 That's what it looked like when I pulled it out of the fridge tonight. You can see the rings where the yogurt started.

It's the consistency of sour cream and sort of tastes like it, too.

 There were at least four cups of water in that bowl.

On the left is starter for next time. On the right I will mix in my can of peaches.

Like the recipe says, I used a half gallon of milk and it gave a half gallon of yogurt. After draining I have a lot less yogurt, but it's at a consistency I really like. I think that on the weekends I could do two batches a day and get a lot made. Plenty for the whole week.

Of course, since this isn't my house I don't think I should go this crazy, but in the future...

Hooray for cooking!

Because I Wanted To

I made cake.

 

It's devil's food with a butter cream frosting and I made it without a package mix. The cake is chocolaty and moist and so dark it's nearly black and quite wonderful. The frosting okay, but next time I think I'll use a bitter-sweet chocolate chip so it's not quite so sweet. (I used Alton Brown's recipe. He's my cooking hero. I hope he makes some Good Eats specials soon, since he stopped making the show.)

I really like baking things and cooking things. I'd do it all the time if I had the time an the money. The problem is that I don't really want to eat much of what I make (especially full cakes), so that sort of stops me from going crazy. I guess.

Still, I'm bought most of the the ingredients for a red velvet cake. I'll save that one for Christmas. Maybe a little green coloring in the frosting for the holiday?

There'll be pictures.