The Apple Week 2

With fall in full swing I met the morning with my best shawl collared deep red sweater and a killer sore throat. That meant lots of tea, which meant getting out the local honey, which lead to a plate of golden delicious apple slices to dip is said honey. Work was agony but early to work equals early home so I had some extra time to tackle the pile of dishes, start the belated laundry cycle, move the old ill fitting clothing out of the closet and onto the to-be-donated mountain that is taking over one corner of my room. Except for one instance where she bolted behind the fish counter at Whole Foods, K has been mostly cooperative and a good sport with only minimal bribery. She whined a little about dinner but then settled for coloring at the table while I managed to not only cook whole wheat pasta (always takes longer) and reheat the chicken but also put together an impromptu apple crisp loosely based on a recipe in the Whole Foods coupon flyer I was browsing at stoplights on the drive home.

Starting with 3 of my CSA Red Rome apples sliced and lightly sugared covering the bottom of my favorite blue 9" square Pyrex I tossed in a couple of handfuls of frozen whole cranberries. Next I mixed 2 cups of some long forgotten Trader Joes blueberry muesli (which is nicely preseasoned with cinnamon) with 2/3 cup flour, drizzled with oil and honey (can be adjusted to taste but I used 6 and 4 tablespoons respectively) and tossed with 1/2 walnuts before pressing on top of the fruit. Baked covered w/ foil at 375 for 45 minutes and then another 20 uncovered produced a very nice impromptu crisp.


For both lunch and dinner I enjoyed a portion of the 4 boneless whole chicken breasts(not half breasts like you positioned in nice little lines on a tray at your grocery store) I picked up from Fields of Athenry at their booth at Great Country Farm on Saturday. I breaded and finished them with tomato sauce, but no cheese using the chicken Parmesan directions from the Cooks Illustrated 08 Cooking Light issue and I will never do breaded chicken any other way. The breading stayed on, cooked to a golden brown w/o burning and stayed crisp, not soggy even 2 days later. I cut a few bite size bits off to give to K as "chicken nuggets" and served them over the bed of whole wheat penne and more sauce. A delicious dinner that would have gone great with wine but alas it was water for me and apple juice for K.

An Apple A Day

It seems that October is the wrong time for me to start challanges. For the past several years I have been aware of, inteded to be involved in, but unable to keep up with the various October Eat Local Challanges. Not for lack of trying but October is a bad month to scale back on anything. Yes, local produce is in abundance, the change of weather makes me yearn for homemade soups and my intentions are always the best. Then life gets in the way. Job changes, impending holiday expenses, unexpected medical bills, metal fatigue and a sudden onset of cooking apathy. What happens next is that I suddenly find myself at the end of October eating convenience food manufactured in hong kong and yearing for the fancy produce shipped in from a land far, far away even as the freshly picked local produce sits languishing in my refrigerator crisper or the bottom of my pantry.

This year was shaping up to be much the same. I was already in a no clean dishes when I need them equals no time to cook mood and had let several bunches of late summer spring onions dry out and get tossed when I ran across something that reinvigorated my will to source local and organic. It may not live up to the average Eat Local Challange participants standards but its a start and even something I know I could do. Eat an apple a day every day in October. Simple, right? Im too lazy to try to track down who started it but I crossed it on a Farm to Philly post late last night when I was too tired to be reading anything but to awake to be sleeping, the best time to aimlessly browse the internet. My take on this challenge will be to eat a local apple each day in some way shape or form without prejudice to the nutriousness of the dish; raw apple, last years canned applesauce and apple pie all being equal.

The frist thing I did with our first CSA provided crop of local Gala and Golden Delicious apples from Marker Miller Orchards and the Braburns from Bigg Riggs was to make the apple pandowdy from Cooks Illustrated. I used a mix of all the apples and I dont remember which I used or which worked best but they all were delicious. I had that for desert every night until Wednesday. Didn't eat any local (only the ones in the Starbucks pack) on Wednesday but Thursday, Friday, Saturday and today I finished off the Braburns in raw slices and whole. DD has been demanding the canned apple sauce from last years crop almost every day too.

I pack my own share from the CSA and with the new delivery of Red Rome apples I choose apples over my portion of potatoes (since I already have many), pears (not a big hit with DD) and green beans (had them continuously for a month) [note to self: next year blog about share w/ weight and totals]. Now I have of 20 green, red and golden apples packed into the crisper, some as small as 1/2 my fist others the size of almost 2 fists. I'm sure I'll be able to find many ways to use them and in a pinch a raw apple makes a healthy dessert.