Apple Jam, with the assistance of Dolliver Dreads and her little friend

Having a farmshare, only two more weeks to go, twenty six weeks of great produce, definitely pushes you to new levels of vegetable and fruit prep and eating.  The apple crop this year is amazing, at least three different varieties, all huge and perfect fruit, literally handpicked.  The farm family are proud of their new bit of equipment allowing their picker to get the fruit a bit faster, but it's still one individual working up in the trees.

So, all the squash being roasted, stirfried, made into soup, made into bread, baked, made into french fries, that was the squash scene.  And a ton of green vegetables, which will make great stir fries and soup and bread eventually. And the apples have been: applesauce, apple salad tossed with a bit of mayonnaise, no need to get all carried away,  various forms of crumble, and now I made apple jam. Not jelly, jam.

Caramel apple jam,to be exact, with the assistance of Dreads Dolliver and her little friend, who wouldn't tell me her name.  The pix are still firmly stuck in my camera, and you should have heard their screams of rage, after all their work, slaving over a hot jam pot, before they flounced off back to their shelf, but I hope to reveal the pix and their hard work when a new camera comes into my life soon...

Meanwhile, this week's apple share made exactly six cups of cubed apple, just what the recipe ordered, and we'll see how it goes. Very sweet, I'm guessing, judging from all the brown sugar. And it used up the last of this year's pectin supply.  So I hope it works.

Other experiments: I made yogurt cheese from my homemade yogurt and it's really good.  I got about a cup of whey off it, so that's in the freezer for next time I make a squash/sweet potato/pumpkin soup, whichever happens first.

I tried out the cheese, just a bit spread on, on top of a helping of crumble from the freezer.  I must say that time and freezing improved that anonymous crumble considerably.  The y. cheese was good on top, cut the sweetness.

So that's your low tech blogger sighing and sadly waving goodbye to my loyal old Coolpix cameras, faithful to the end, not their fault their software got old and unsupported.  Don't we all....

Tiny Pies Redux, and Oblivious Squirrels

Ages ago I got on a wonton wrapper kick, and made all sorts of interesting things, from tiny pies to ravioli and dumplings and various other ideas.  Then I went on to make my own pasta, so the ravioli idea went away.

But I figured that since it's apple season, and I don't like eating raw apples, but don't mind them cooked, perhaps, since the farmshare is putting in massive apples each week, I'd better see what wonton wrappers will do.  

I'm not fond of making pastry. I make good pastry largely because I have naturally cool hands, always a help from Mother Nature.  But there are many things I'd rather be doing.

Sooooo, all round by China to say I did get a supply of wonton wrappers from my Asian store, and today made a little batch of Tiny Apple Turnovers.  Spells tat.  Oh.  Well, they actually taste pretty good. Seen here on an antique dish, figured it was time to try and make my food look nice, since I don't have a food stylist on staff.  I didn't count, but it's about a dozen and a half, if you need to know how many you'll end up with.

 
Filling: grated and chopped apple, one medium sized, oat flour mixed in to take up some of the juice, note the flour motif recurring throughout recipes these days, splash of lemon juice, drop of almond essence.  Wonton wrappers, edges brushed with water, you can use eggwash if you feel fancy, pressed firmly down, both sides, and  then stabbed with a big antique Russian fork.  Take that, and that!  You can stab them with anything else if you don't happen to have your big Russian antique fork handy right now.

And here they are, with a dusting of confectioner's sugar.  I expect in some kitchens there's a nice little gadget you use to dust stuff with sugar, but in mine you open the bag and shake.  These tiny turnovers are crisp, since the wonton wrappers are unleavened and thin.  I baked them so as to have a little something with my afternoon tea today, and several days going forward.

Meanwhile, out on the patio, demonstrating a great disregard for the work going on indoors, and an independence of needing tiny pies, an athletic squirrel is doing his calisthenics at the same time as getting a nice feast of wild cherries. 

He's welcome to them -- they're bitter and tiny and all pit.  But birds and squirrels and rabbits are crazy for them. I have to keep sweeping the windfalls, cherries, that is,  off the patio so they don't get trodden into the house.