Just popped an apple pie in the oven, using up those Braeburn apples from Thanksgiving (and using a cheater crust, because I'm lazy). Been quite a while since I made an apple pie, or spiced apples; I hope I got the spices right. Real Men Don't Follow Recipes; I was working partly from a recipe that was handy, and partly from memory (the recipe at hand included sugar, which is unnecessary with most modern apples, but had neither cloves nor ginger, which I think belong, so I tossed some in).
Now to wrap a few packages, so there'll be something under the tree for Christmas Eve (since actual festivities are later in the week, getting everything wrapped is not urgent).
Then some rice-based stuffing for a chicken to be roasted later this afternoon, using an actual roasting pan for the first time in forever. (It's a fairly large chicken; I suspect tomorrow's dinner will be Leftovers Casserole.) My usual brown-rice blend plus extra wild rice; onions; mushrooms; garlic-herb butter; maybe a couple of bay leaves, just because the tree is out there. Bacon? Some salt, too. Maybe some other seasonings, depending what catches my fancy; tarragon might be good.
I'd vaguely planned on getting some work done today, too, but that seems to have gotten squeezed out of the schedule.
Oh, and Southmoon seems to like my choice of pie seasonings; she's been gnawing on my hand again. There's not much overlap with goulash; I wonder what she's reacting to this time?
Update: I looked up a couple of rice-based-stuffing recipes on the 'net for starting points. Those stuffing recipes that start with 1½ cups of rice? That's for a turkey. The large chicken (just barely fit in a standard-size non-turkey roasting pan) didn't take anything like the full batch.
Which was just as well, because the rice that was on the surface during roasting got very crunchy indeed. Best results were obtained by taking the large amount of excess stuffing and dumping it into the pan, after removing the roasted chicken, then applying heat atop the stove and stirring for a while.
And the pie? I was remembering the right spices, but got a bit carried away as to quantity. It came out smelling wonderful, but tasting mainly of the spices, with not much apple flavor coming through. There's nothing like homemade apple pie, in the same way that there's nothing like eating hay when you're faint.
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