Apple Cinnamon Bread Pudding

Feed the birds, tuppen’s a bag? No! Make bread pudding instead!

It seems that my posts usually end up being baked goods, but to be sure, when I have the opportunity to make something new it usually tends to be a sweet treat. This time of the year, too, I'm all about comfort foods.

This is a fairly standard recipe for bread pudding, which is good for not wasting old hardened bread that you would normally pitch out to the pigeons. Bread pudding is also wonderfully versatile. You can add other fruits instead of apples (pears are good alternative), or try a coconut/banana version using coconut milk instead of moo juice and sliced bananas. Or everyone’s favorite – chocolate – by adding 2 oz. chopped bittersweet chocolate into the 1st step and omitting the apples and raisins.

Ingredients
3 c. milk
4 tbsp. (half stick) unsalted butter
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. ground cloves
½ c. plus 1 tbsp. sugar
Pinch salt
Leftover hardened bread, slices or torn into chunks (old baguette or challah is the best)
2 eggs
1 c. peeled, grated and drained apples
¼ c. raisins

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350*. Over low heat in a small saucepan warm the milk, butter, half the cinnamon/nutmeg/cloves, ½ cup sugar, and salt until the butter melts.
2. Grease an 8” glass baking dish, and place the bread chunks inside.
3. Pour the hot milk mixture over the bread in the dish, let sit for a few mins for the bread to soak up the liquid. Beat the eggs briefly and stir them into the bread mixture, adding the apples and raisins too at this stage.

4. Mix the remaining 1 tbsp. of sugar with the rest of the spices and sprinkle over the top of the dish.
5. Set the baking dish within a larger baking pan and pour hot water in within an inch of the top of the dish.
6. Bake 45 mins to 1 hour, until a thin knife into the center comes out clean (or nearly so; the center should be somewhat wobbly).
7. Serve warm or cold, best with a few fresh berries and whipped cream.

Celeriac-Apple-Potato Puree

Ever since cookbooks became bedside reading material for me, I've been reading about how hand blenders and electric beaters and food processors are anathema to mashed potatoes. Evidently, by whizzing them up with such a device, the glucose or something is released, and it results in heavy, sticky, "gluey" potatoes. At my first restaurant job, which was when I first came across this law of potatoes (because I swear, every cookbook published after 1999 makes reference to it; if you don't own a food mill, there is something wrong with you), I asked the sous chef what a potato ricer [which is basically the same thing as a food mill but handheld] was; the next day he brought me one. I've never been one to break rules, so the potato ricer has since been the device of choice when I mash any vegetable at my own home, but I've always wondered what said sticky potatoes taste like.

Well, I have tried this recipe two ways now, one with the food processor and one with the food mill, and finally, I know what these cookbook authors are talking about. The food processor potatoes were sticky and viscous, and the food mill ones had a lighter mouthfeel and were more delicate and precious in a way that Alice Waters might approve of. Though I will serve the food mill ones to people I want to impress, I secretly liked the gluey stuff. That version was more like dessert--apple-potato-celeriac dulce de leche or something.

(Apologies for the quarter-chicken sitting next to the mash.)

Celeriac-Apple-Potato puree

4 T butter, separated
1 head of celeriac (celery root), 1/2-inch dice (peeled!)
1 granny smith apple, 1/2 inch dice (peeled!)
2 medium Yukon gold potatoes, 1/2-inch dice (peeled!)
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/2 cup water
1/4 c heavy cream
1/4 c milk
squeeze of lemon

In medium skillet melt 2 tablespoons of the butter, and then add the celeriac, apples, potatoes, salt and pepper. Cook for 5 minutes or so, until it just begins to soften. Add the water (you could also use wine, or cider), cover, and cook for 25-40 minutes, stirring often, until everything is very soft. Add more liquid if it begins to burn. Transfer the mixture to a food processor or put it through a food mill and puree. Heat the cream, milk, and rest of the butter in a small saucepan. Return the potato-apple mixture to the original pan. When the cream/milk mixture is hot, stir it into the puree. Add lemon, taste for seasoning, serve hot.

kitchen katastrophe: homemade applesauce

when staying with my friend in paris last fall, she had a bowl full of VERY ripe apples. they had been sitting around for at least 2 weeks while i was there - a few being eaten here and there. after she went to southern france for a weekend and came home with more apples from her mother-in-law, we decided we had to use them. and thus is my story of attempting to make homemade apple compote (apple sauce).

our journey begins with the most basic step. peeling and cutting of the apples.
the picture above looks very nice, mostly because we took out the apples that i turned red after bleeding on them. my friend, living in france, does not have an apple peeler, so she peels all of her apples with a little rounded knife. i am not so adept at this method. in any case, for every one quarter of an apple i peeled, she peeled 2 whole apples. we got through the bowl pretty quickly.

next, we put brown sugar, a fresh vanilla pod, cinammon, lemon juice, and a bit of water into a pot placed on low heat. we stirred the mixture until it was kind of carmelized. i would guess less than half a cup of brown sugar, but it's really dependant upon your own tastes - if you like it sweeter, use more. stir over the heat until the sugar is kind of dissolved.
then the fun part - add the apples! at first, it doesn't look like much. just apples in a pot. continue stirring every few minutes and eventually the apples will soak up the sugar.
you may need to add water as you go. you want to make sure there is always enough liquid over the apples. it should take about 1/2 hour on slow heat for the apples to naturally break down into apple sauce. you could eat it when it looks like this, or continue with the heat and use the wooden spoon to mush (mash?) the apples more. it eventually becomes tbe yummiest applesauce ever! my friend made it look really easy to make; i have yet to recreate it, but once i do, i will let you know how it goes.
i asked my friend, what are the best kind of apples to use? apples good for "eating" work best for her. if using granny smith or "cooking" apples, you might need to add sugar at the end before eating to sweeten it a bit. this is served deliciously warm or after putting in the fridge you can eat it cold. it should keep for a few weeks in the fride. mmmmm.... that's mad tasty.

apple & parsnip dessert bakes

This dessert was merely an effort to finally use these great mini-casserole dishes that I got from JaBootay's folks last year. I knew it would only be two people for dinner, so it seemed like it'd be fun to pull these out for dessert. Now I love parsnips, but usually either in a mash or deep fried parsnip chips, and I wanted to see if I could love them in another form.

ingredients

• 3 apples
• 1 large parsip
• a handful of walnuts
• cinnamon, allspice & ginger
• french vanilla

So I started by peeling and then grating the parsnip. Parsnips do not particularly enjoy being grated and may resist you, but I encourage persistence. Then I sliced the apples from their cores and then into smallish thin pieces. I threw them in a mixing bowl with the walnuts and spices and stirred them up. That's it.

These are the casserole dishes. They're kind of adorable. Anyway, in they went to the oven, which was at 425 fahrenheit because of the dinner I was cooking. I had them in there for about 40 minutes, but I'm sure they kept cooking in their little cast iron dishes for after that.

Unfortunately, the parsnips ended up being overpowered. I think that it would have been better for me to cut them into pieces more like the size of the apple slices and maybe adjusted the ratio a little bit, because they ended up tasting like lazy apple crumbles. My dinner companion also thought I'd used too many walnuts. But either way, there's definitely something worth exploring here.