Ginger Apple 3.14159

Since I need the motivation to get off my computer and actually start baking, I'm going to work on this post while working on the pie.

Yes, pie.

You know what's worse than finding a worm in your apple? Discovering that all the apples you've been buying at the farmers market with dreams of baking delicious apple baked things... are going bad. Any of y'all who have been following this blog know how much I love my apple baked goods. You may also know how much I hate waste. This situation is seriously heartbreaking.

But the thought of peeling all those apples, and cutting off all the rotten bits and what not isn't really motivating me. Instead I'm chatting with a friend about how I want to go to the farmer's market on Saturday to buy more apples. I have a problem, and its time to fix it. So here goes.

Step 1: Turn on music. Then post a screenshot of the music to my blog, because obviously y'all need to see what I'm listening to.

I'm going to take a moment to wonder whether I started saying y'all before or after I started listening to too much country music.

Step 2: Sort all the apples. Discover that most of my eating apples, and the newest apples are fine enough to save for later. Sigh with relief, since this means I have the right number of (slightly too old) apples for a pie - 9. Throw out one apple that's too far gone and cry a little bit. Wash all the fine apples so they don't have anything nasty on them.

See? These apples all look good and aren't mushy! They've since been joined by a lot more apples from the banged and bruised rack at the grocery store.

Step 3: Realize this might be a good time to find a pie pan. Unsure if I've ever seen a pie pan in my kitchen, I go digging in the drawer under my oven. I find 3. None are labeled with a size, so I pick one at random.

The pie crusts need to warm up so, after checking the size, I leave them on the counter. It'll probably take me 3 hours to peel the darn apples anyways. I guess I'll go do that now. Hopefully my knife is sharp.

Testing the knife on the pie crust box reveals that it's still very sharp. It's seriously a joy to work with. For the first time ever, I peeled an apple in once piece.

Unfortunately, one spot was a little thin and broke while I was trying to take a picture.

My hands are sore from spending almost 11 hours typing today, so I'm not quite as successful at peeling the others in one piece. I decide to throw out another apple because it smells like mold. More sadness ensues.

Step 4: Finish peeling the apples. It only took 20 minutes. So far so good.

Step 5: Begin slicing the apples. The one thing my mom taught me about pie is that the apple slices need to all be around the same size, so they cook evenly. Given the varying sizes of apples, however, this proves to be impossible.


(Apparently I didn't take enough pictures for all the writing I did.)

My dad would probably have some things to say about my knife form, but for now I figure, as long as the apples are being cut and I'm not, it's fine.

I take that back. Slightly ashamed, I fix my knife form per my dad's voice in my head - leave the tip of the knife on the cutting board and rock it instead of picking it up and pushing it back down. (If I had a second pair of hands I'd take a picture to demonstrate, but you'll have to trust my description for now.) Unsurprisingly, this is much easier. It also leads to even less uniform slices. I still need practice. Even so, the last three apples take about half the time to slice that the first two thirds do.

In the process of mixing up the other ingredients for the filling, I remember that I needed to feed my sourdough starter 2 weeks ago. I'm really failing at this kitchen thing. I also find a hole in my bag of flour, after flour gets dumped all over me from the side of the bag. Never a recipe without a mess...

Step 6: The recipe I'm following suggests adding cloves. I have an unopened container of cloves in my spice pile, somehow. They're whole cloves, which doesn't sound very nice to bite into, so I go about slicing them. This is harder in some ways than slicing apples. The cloves don't take favorably to remaining on the cutting board.

I also find some dried ginger in my spice pile. Screw that, I have fresh ginger. I decide to add some fresh ginger to the pie. Chopping the ginger (see right) is much easier than chopping cloves.

Step 7: Realize that I should turn on the oven. Discover that my recipe doesn't have baking directions. I guess they're on the box of pie crusts. Using premade pie crusts reminds me of the time I  bought premade Korean bbq marinade, and some Korean grandmother tsk tsk'd me for not doing it myself.

Korean bbq marinade is easier than pie crust. It just needs a blender, it isn't picky.

As it turns out, both the pie crusts and the pie filling recipe say "bake as directed". I have been given no directions. Thankfully there's a recipe on the box, I'm not sure how I didn't notice that before when I was looking for an apple pie recipe to follow. I've found my baking directions.

Step 8: Mix apples with seasoning.

Step 9: Dump apples into pie pan.

I'm a touch concerned by the volume of apples, but almost all of them get nicely piled into/onto the pie pan. One slice ends up on the floor. I'm distracted, because someone is asking me for help with things and I'm bad at saying no to friends.

I somehow manage to cover the entire pile of apples with the top pie crust. I know from experience that the apples will shrink when baking so the sheer size of my pie doesn't concern me just yet. Unfortunately, I forget to add butter or lemon juice, so hopefully the apples are nice and juicy and tasty on their own. I slice a pretty pattern of slits on the top and open the oven only to discover that I forgot to remove my cast iron pan from the oven. As usual.

Once the pie has been in the oven 15 minutes, I try to put foil around the edges, per directions, but the pan is hot and the foil isn't sticking, so we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll have some slightly burnt edges.

I check the directions one more time to make sure I have the cooking time correct. It appears the pie has to sit for 2 hours before being eaten. I decide to stay up past my bedtime to eat pie, rather than deprive myself of pie until morning (which inevitably meant until I got home from work the next day, because there's no way I was spending that first delicious bite of pie on my half-asleep morning brain.

The pie was, in fact delicious. I ate it all week. The variety of apple breeds and the failure to homogenize the ginger/apple mixture meant that every bite tasted slightly different.

The roommate and the one friend I shared with also approved.

Roar. I'm a pie.

Ginger Apple Pie

Ingredients
8ish apples (sliced evenly)
2/3 cups sugar
1/3 cup flour
1 pinch salt
4ish cloves (chopped)
1 tablespoon fresh ginger (chopped)
Pie crust (store bought or homemade)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2. Arrange bottom pie crust in pie pan
3. Mix apple slices, sugar, flour, salt, cloves and ginger
4. Arrange apples in pie pan on top of crust
5. Cover apples with upper pie crust
6. Seal the edges between the two crusts and cut slits in the upper pie crust
7. Bake for 15-20 minutes
8. Cover edges of pie with foil to prevent browning
9. Bake for another 20-30 minutes
10. Cool for a few hours before serving

I've gan coco-nutty for you

A couple of weeks ago, I became obsessed with the idea of vegan chocolate chip cookies. I'm not really sure what got me the idea. I wasn't even sure if vegan chocolate existed or how much I would have to pay for it. But I wasn't going to let the idea go without at least a little Googling.

In the Googling, I encountered a recipe titled "The BEST Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies" and I thought that might be a good place to start. As it turns out, Trader Joes chocolate chips are vegan, and vegan chocolate chip cookies are really not all that difficult.

With that knowledge in hand, and also the knowledge that I could get coconut oil and possibly almond milk at Trader Joe's, I went on a shopping trip.

The Baker Josef's flour was already in my cupboard. I have a serious Trader Joe's thing going, apparently.

I am not ashamed.

It starts like most cookies, by creaming together the sugar and the fat. In this case, however, the fat is coconut oil instead of butter.

Usually, when baking, this is a dangerous stage for me. Butter and sugar is delicious. So I naturally wanted to try the coconut oil and butter and see how it was and... well... delicious. A bit coconutty, and still pure fat and sugar. This recipe was off to a very good start.

The coconut oil was a lot harder to cream into the sugar than butter usually is, partly because I'd been keeping it in the fridge so it wasn't very soft.

However, it got there eventually. And I munched on a bit more. And it continued to be delicious.

About this point I realized that no raw eggs = edible cookie dough. This made me very excited.

Duly excited, I went on to add the rest of the ingredients. I dumped both full bags of chocolate chips into the cookies, even though that was something like 3 times what the recipe called for, because seriously... chocolate.

I mean, look at this. Does that look like too many chocolate chips? It is pretty darn crumbly. But its not the chocolate chips that make it crumbly...

However, lots of squishing and warming it up with my hands made it into reasonable balls of dough. Most of them, anyways...

And, then when I'd filled 3 pans with cookies, I ate the rest of the dough.

It was delicious, and it didn't carry a risk of salmonella!

I probably could have stood to flatten the balls out a bit, but who really cares what shape their cookies are as long as they taste good, right?

These cookies tasted great. I took a bunch to a party and didn't tell anyone they were vegan until about half had been eaten, and then when I spilled the beans, nobody believed me. Someone gave me a specific line that I was supposed to quote in here about how good they are, but it was almost 2 weeks ago and I don't remember anymore.

Not only were they just as good as non-vegan cookies, they also kept really well. I had one sit out on the counter for a week before I ate it, and it was maybe slightly stale, but not terribly so. Another bunch got mailed across a couple of states and... well, it sounds like they were well received. And as for me, well, I'm glad I made a double batch.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe found on Daily Rebecca, ingredients doubled, instructions rewritten to be my own.

Ingredients
1 cup coconut oil
2 cups brown sugar
½ cup almond milk
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 bags vegan chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Cream coconut oil and sugar together
3. Add almond milk and vanilla, mix thoroughly.
4. Add flour, then salt, then baking soda and baking powder. Mix periodically while adding.
5. Stir in the chocolate chips.
6. Form balls of dough, arrange on baking sheet.
7. Bake until done, around 10 minutes.

I bean wanting to dip into hummus

It's been surprisingly hot in Seattle lately. Hot enough that, for a couple days, turning on the stove or the oven to cook anything just seems irresponsible. Of course, I still need to eat, so the best plan I could think of was to make a bunch of something I could keep eating for a while, without needing to reheat. Hummus seemed like a good choice.

Somehow, I managed to get my heart set on roasted garlic hummus. Because, I don't know, taking a recipe that usually just involves blending things and adding an element of baking just seemed like the best idea in the heat.

And roasting garlic correctly, meh. I grabbed a couple cloves, doused them in olive oil, and stuck them in the toaster oven for a while. That thing still produced a surprising amount of heat.

One hummus recipe I found said that the best way to make the best hummus was to add the ingredients one at a time and then blend for about a minute in between. Since this one website said that was the best way, I figured I'd try it.

First, tahini. Tahini is surprisingly liquid, and surprisingly easy to spill all over the place. I was expecting it to be the consistency of peanut butter, but no.

After tahini was the lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and some basil.

I found basil in the freezer that was bought and forgotten last time hummus was made at my house. Basil freezes surprisingly well... just saying.

The problem was, well, the volume of all these ingredients just wasn't enough for my blender.

Everything got sprayed up on the side of the blender and had to be scraped back down every 10 seconds or so in order to keep them blending. So I figured I'd just add the chickpeas.

The recipe also suggested skinning the chickpeas was helpful, though a bit of a waste of time. I just shook them and removed obvious skins from the strainer before adding them to the blender.

Unfortunately, adding the chickpeas didn't really help. The solid to liquid proportions were off, and the blender continued to choke. I added some more olive oil to help it along, but it kept making weird blooping noises (see video).

I eventually got enough olive oil in to make it blend smoothly, but that was a bit too much olive oil for the hummus. I had some issues with separation in the following days.

At first I wasn't a huge fan of the hummus, it was a bit too tart and grainy.

However, the next day, when I pulled the hummus out for lunch, it was amazing. The flavors all settled overnight and suddenly I had hummus better than any hummus I've ever bought.

Totally worth the effort. Would be worth even more if I doubled the recipe so I didn't have to scrape the darn blender walls constantly.

Hummus

Ingredients

1 can of chickpeas / garbanzo beans

1/4 cup of lemon juice, or one lemon's worth

1/4 cup of tahini

Some cloves of garlic - roasting optional

2+ tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1. Dump all ingredients in blender
2. Blend until smooth
3. Eat, or refrigerate overnight for best flavory goodness