On the apple uptake

I’m a bit late on the apple uptake, I know.

While I’m giving you recipes for tarte tatin, the recognizable orchard bags full of the season’s best Macouns and Empires are slowly being replaced by mounds of their less fresh, less crisp cousins.


You know the ones – they kind of disappointingly dissolve instead of that emblematic crisp on first bite, the fruit equivalent of a wet dishrag. Think the few apples you always got in your Halloween pillowcase (no one ever gave out the good ones, as if too precious to pass out to the ghost and the pirate on the front stoop), the ones that you dreaded getting and that your parents wouldn’t let you eat. Think red delicious, dining hall style.


But you can still find the good ones, you can. So let’s get on with it then, here is your tarte tatin – not fresh from the oven, but not far off – as promised.

To be perfectly honest, you could probably make this with the less-than-fresh apples that will soon take over; you’re cooking them quite a bit in this dessert, carmelizing them until they are at their very slouchiest. But try for the good apples, at least try; there’s nothing wrong with a little apple snobbery, especially this time of year.



Apple Tarte Tatin
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Note: This recipe makes you chill the butter, the flour, and the food processor blade in the freezer before you make the crust. Sounds ridiculous, I know. But I advise you to do it: I followed the directions and this was probably the best pastry I have ever made. Also, after you’ve arranged the raw apples in your pan, make sure you’re not too shy to crank the heat after you return it to the heat. If the heat isn’t high enough, your apples won’t carmelize; otherwise, they will start to disintegrate on you.

Crust
1 stick plus two tablespoons cold salted butter, cut into cubes and chilled in freezer
1 tablespoon sugar
1 ½ cup flour
3 to 6 tablespoons ice water

Filling
7 medium apples
1 stick salted butter
1 cup sugar

For the crust: Pre-mix the flour and sugar in the food processor container, and cube the butter on a plate. Then put the dry ingredients and the butter in the freezer for a while. Prepare about 1/3 cup ice water and refrigerate. Chill everything for at least 20 minutes, then add the cubes of butter to the dry ingredients and pulse until the largest pieces of butter are no bigger than tiny peas. Add the ice water a little at a time, processing just until the dough starts to come together into a mass. Be careful not to over-process it.

Turn out onto well-floured surface and pat together into a ball. Don’t handle the dough too much, or the warmth of your hands will start to melt the butter. Flour the top of the dough and use rolling pin to quickly press and roll the dough out into a 10 to 11-inch circle. You want the circle to be about the size of the pan you’re cooking the apples in. It will seem a little thick, thicker than your average pie crust. Move the crust onto a piece of parchment paper or onto a floured rimless baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.

For the filling: Preheat oven to 375° F. Peel, core and quarter the apples. Don’t cut them into smaller pieces than quarters–the quarters shrink considerably during cooking.

Over low heat in a heavy, ovenproof skillet measuring 7 to 8 inches across the bottom and 10 to 11 inches across the top, melt the stick of butter. Remove from heat, add the sugar and stir until blended.

Shake the pan a bit so the butter-sugar mixture distributes evenly across the bottom. Arrange apple quarters in pan, first making a circle inside the edge of the pan. Place them on their sides and overlap them so you can fit as many as possible. Then fill the center of the pan; you may have some apple left over. Keep at least one extra apple quarter on hand–when you turn the apples over, they may have shrunk to the extent that you’ll need to cheat and fill in the space with an extra piece. This one piece won’t get quite as caramelized as the other pieces, but it will still cook through.

Return your pan to the stovetop on high heat. Let boil for 10 to 12 minutes or until the juices in the pan turn from golden in color to dark amber. Remove from heat. With the tip of a sharp knife, turn apple slices over, keeping them in their original places. If necessary, add an extra slice of apple to keep your arrangement intact. Return to the stovetop on high heat once more. Let cook another 5 minutes and then remove from heat.

Place the crust on top of the apples and brush off excess flour. Tuck edges under slightly, along the inside of the pan, being careful not to burn your fingers. Bake in oven until the top of the crust is golden-brown in color, about 25-35 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool on a rack about 30 minutes.

Run a sharp knife along the inside edge of the pan. Place a plate or other serving dish on top of the pan and quickly flip over the whole pan so the Tarte Tatin drops down onto the plate. The pan will still be hot, so be careful while doing this. It’s not as hard as you think, but you may have a few stragglers left in the pan after the tarte flips over. No worries, just put them back in their rightful tarte tatin place. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Get this thing going

Let’s get this thing going, yeah?


This is the longest I’ve left you before, I think, and it feels a bit strange. Words are a bit difficult to locate; how do I describe more than a month in Europe, living out of a backpack. How do I quantify the baguettes, the rounds of chevre, the bottles of Bordeaux. Or the days spent on trains and nights spent in hostels, the greves, courtesy of Sarkozy’s new retirement bill.


Exhausting, down to my bones. Lovely, gratifying. Absurdly picturesque. I’m between places right now, in all senses of the phrase, but those are some words that I can muster to answer the question everyone’s asking me these days: How was it?


I’ll miss France, but I’m glad to be home.


I will never take a shower for granted again. Or, as it happens, a stove. Or an orchard apple, or fall in New England. I’ve lived here all my life, but when October hit in Spain, I remember getting anxious about missing the trees, the leaves, the apples.


So, first order of business, barely unpacked and still with mounds of unfinished laundry, I made a tarte tatin.


Stay tuned for that, that’s up next. For now, these are some photos from Across the Pond.


Let’s get this thing going.

Across the pond

Hi, there.

I guess I've been so busy lately, with making granola bars and dreaming about road trips, that I've forgotten to tell you all that I have a trip of my own planned. I'm off and running, destined for good food and good wine and better company, to Europe.

...Tomorrow.


...For six whole weeks.


I'll be back in November to tell you, (fingers crossed), about the culture across the pond, and about how to successfully navigate the bay of Biscay coast depending solely on vineyards as landmarks. Like I said, fingers crossed.

Until then, stay well, and stay hungry. Talk to you soon.

Until you get to wherever you're going

Every family has their vacation traditions.

There are those two weeks in late August where the old Bronco is packed up to it’s sturdy if not slightly rusted brim, trunk nearly bursting with towels and folding chairs and the stuffed animals that just can’t be left behind. Bikes are strapped precariously to the back, the cause for checking the traveled highway every hour or so, making certain there are no two-wheeled casualties.


The drive is always unthinkably long. The distances covered seem to grow exponentially to the rate at which your sibling’s hair pulling and screechy sing-alongs increase. You know the ones.

For my family, the drive was always to Maine. Interstate 495 North was, to me as a child, vaguely akin to Sunday mass: it dragged on for much too long, exhausting all potential excitement within the first few minutes. It was cramped. I always needed to stretch my legs.


My family vacations always held the promise of good snacks, though, something to make the ride a little less, well, long. We had this trail mix, called Gorp if you’re my Dad, which seemed to appear only on road trips. It almost became a Pavlovian response of a kind. Gorp: Maine. Gorp: road trip. Gorp: endless expanses of highway.

Not surprisingly, I am and always have been a firm believer in good snacks when traveling. Which is why, last week, I made a bunch of them for Katherin as she left for a two week cross-country road trip. And here I thought 495 was endless.


Once you’ve made these, it’s advisable to drive somewhere. (It is what they’re meant for, after all.) A spontaneous road trip, if you’re into that. Hopefully they’ll make the drive until you get to wherever you’re going a bit more bearable.

Road Trip Granola Bars

Note: I know I’ve given you a recipe on here for granola before, but these are different. Think of them as granola’s more convenient, travel-friendly cousin. The recipe below is also highly adaptable – feel free to substitute any nuts and dried fruit, really, maybe even crystallized ginger if you’re feeling wild.

Oh, and also, keeping these cold works best to keep them together. I stashed them in the fridge until I was ready to give them away.

2 cups old-fashioned oatmeal
1 cup sliced almonds
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup flaxseed
1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
2/3 cup honey
¼ cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 ½ cup dried fruit, or a mix of dried fruit (I used chopped apricots, and two kinds of raisins)

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Butter an 8×12-inch baking dish and line it with parchment paper.

Toss the oatmeal, almonds, and sunflower seeds together on a sheet pan and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned. Transfer the mixture to a large mixing bowl and stir in the wheat germ and the flax. Reduce the oven temperature to 300°F.

While the mixture is still warm, stir in the honey, vanilla and salt until the mixture is well coated, then the dried fruit. Pour the mixture into your prepared baking dish and press it in until the mixture is packed as tightly as possible. Note: this will be annoying. And messy. And it will take a little while – just go until you feel like you can’t press anymore. The payoff will make it worth it.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until light golden brown. Cool for 2 to 3 hours before cutting into squares with a serrated knife.

On religious pretzels and lovely western Africans

Sometimes, I feel wholly justified in sleeping for eleven hours.

At the moment I’m writing this, I just crawled out of my own bed for the first time in weeks, and I’m currently yawning, confused, and desperately trying to remember how the coffee routine in my house works.

At least I’m well-rested.


I just got back from a study tour of major American cities with an international program I’ve been working for. It was two other recent college grads and I, along with twenty lovely, if not easily distracted, western Africans. Add to that a crowded Times Square and luggage issues and vans with flat tires, and you’ll start to get an idea of my logistical day-to-day.

But there was also so so much fun. And lots of Senegalese dancing from a fantastic lady named Marguerite, who could move her hips in more directions than I think even exist. And patient French lessons from beautiful Ivorian boys, particularly on the pronunciation of vegetables, particularly concumbre. And some of the best soft pretzels I have ever tasted. (That’s where you come in.)


We were in what they cleverly call the Valley of No Wires – otherwise known as Amish country in Lancaster, PA. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel blasphemous for listening to an Ipod while driving through. And for owning a phone which is, safely hidden in the confines of a bag, deviously and sacrilegiously searching for 3G. Or at the very least, it makes you feel like some kind of technological tease, much like it would feel to eat a giant slab of chocolate cake in front of someone on a diet.

But, these pretzels. They almost make you forget about religion and blasphemy and all the man-upstairs rest for a moment. That is, until the woman at the pretzel stand tells you that the three open spaces in the dough actually represent the trinity, the twist in the center, arms crossed in prayer. But they also make unbelievable ice cream, which, in addition to being either vanilla or raspberry, happens to be completely secular.


The program is over now. I’m currently down twenty friends and trying to figure out the going rate for calls into Mali, but this is one of my favorite food memories from the trip: us sitting at picnic tables smack in the middle of Amish country, alternating bites of homemade pretzel with raspberry soft serve, racing the blaring sun as it melted cones and sundaes with reckless abandon. I don’t think I could go back without them, but you should.

Where I wish I could be

I have so many new things to tell you. So so many.

There are Amish pretzels, and twenty new lovely African friends, now come and gone, there are sixty five foot chartered schooners called Extrapolation. I think there's pesto somewhere in there, too, and a chana masala adaptation.


But while I'm sorting all of that out in a way that's at least slightly cogent, have a look at these. It's where I was yesterday, and where I think I wish I could be nearly every day. (Don't worry, I was at least thinking of food to tell you about, I promise.)

Foolproof formula

Have we talked about instant gratification on here yet? And how I, like most people, like it quite a bit?


Well, I do. I like it in all forms. My friend Katherin (the birthday-galette maker, remember?) and I hike this trail every so often that we have come to call Instant Gratification Hill. The name is self-explanatory, but essentially, you reach a lookout in about ten minutes. Five if you’re really trying, if ten minutes seems like too long to you.

I’ve found that sometimes, patience is just overrated. This holds true for most things (lines? USPS?), but where cooking is concerned, slow braising and rising times and starters certainly have their limits.


In the name of instant gratification, then, I bring you these cookies (bars?). They follow a pretty foolproof formula, which is to say: flour, sugar, summer fruit, copious amounts of butter. Done and done. They take about ten minutes to throw together (five if you’re really trying, if ten seems like too long to you). Here, patience is rendered completely irrelevant, which is the way I like it, preferably with one of these bars right alongside.



Blueberry Crumb Bar Cookies/Cookie Bars
(Adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

1 ½ cups white sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 cups AP flour
1 cup cold unsalted butter (2 sticks)
1 egg
¼ teaspoon salt
Zest and juice of one lemon
4 cups fresh blueberries
4 teaspoons cornstarch

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 9×13 inch pan.

In a medium bowl, stir together 1 cup sugar, 3 cups flour, and baking powder. Mix in salt and lemon zest. Use a fork or your fingertips to blend in the butter and egg. Dough will be crumbly, almost like scone dough before you add the buttermilk. Pat half of the dough into the prepared pan.

In another bowl, stir together the sugar, cornstarch and lemon juice. Gently mix in the blueberries. Sprinkle the blueberry mixture evenly over the crust. Crumble remaining dough over the berry layer.

Bake in preheated oven for 40 minutes, or until top is golden brown and berries and their juices are bubbling slightly on the edges. Cool completely before cutting into squares. (It also helps, but isn’t necessary, to store these in the fridge once they’re cool.)