Cocktail Hour

Trout Caviar Sweepstakes, 2009 Local Food Highlights now in progress.

After a hard day toiling in the orchard or the sugar bush, a man needs a drink. A woman, too. I mean, yes, a man might need a woman, it's true, and a woman might need a drink. And a man. Or a fish. And a bicycle....as that old saying used to go, as you might remember.

Anyway, sometimes a man or a woman might need a drink, and fortunately, the land provides. I haven't quite settled on a name for this drink, but I'm leaning toward "Highway 64 Revisited." Wisconsin state highway 64 runs east and west across the state, from Hudson to Green Bay. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources's reckoning, it divides the state into northern and southern sectors (according to my sense of things, too). It takes me to some of my favorite hunting grounds, and a number of fine trout waters.

More significantly, for our purposes here, it runs just south of Bide-A-Wee, which produces the maple syrup and apple cider that flavor the drink, and through New Richmond, where is made the 45th Parallel vodka that gives it its guts. This is good stuff, this Badger State vodka. I used to be of the opinion that "vodka is vodka," but I've had to admit that that was a benighted view. Now, I don't think vodkas are ever going to have the character or variety of single malt scotch, but I've come to recognize that there are significant differences in vodkas, and to my taste 45th Parallel is among the best. It's clean, crisp, and slightly sweet, slightly viscous on the tongue even when not iced. Just as important as what qualities it has is the one it lacks--that sinus-scorching cleaning fluid aroma often found in lesser vodkas. I don't mean to seem to damn with faint praise, not at all--when I want to sip iced vodka neat with my trout caviar on Tata's rye rounds, this will be the one.

Enough exposition, here's the drink:

Highway 64 Revisited
for each drink

2 ounces 45th Parallel vodka
2 Tbsp unfiltered fresh apple cider
1 tsp pure maple syrup
1 capful dry vermouth (I like Martini & Rossi)
1 sprig fresh thyme (optional but very nice)

Put some cracked ice in a martini shaker. Add all above. Shake or stir? Well, I kind of swirl, let sit a few seconds, swirl again. That's more like stirred, I reckon. I should try it shaken. Maybe tonight. Strain into a martini glass. I like to let a few shards of ice drift into the drink. Garnish superfluously with a slice of pickled crab apple, if you have it, or a wedge of fresh apple, or a maple leaf, whatever makes you happy. Sip and savor.

For added enjoyment and sophistication put on our friend Will Agar's wonderful classical guitar CD, Suenos Ibericos, definitely one of our musical highlights of 2009. Contact Will at willagar4@msn.com if you'd like to purchase a copy. Highly recommended.

Cheers.


Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Amour de Pommes (2009 Food Highlights)

Time for another Trout Caviar Sweepstakes: I've got an extra copy of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma to give away. Also up for grabs, The Angry Trout Café Notebook, the story of that popular Grand Marais restaurant with profiles of the fishermen and -women, farmers, and foragers who provide their raw materials; with recipes for many of their best-known dishes. And finally, a copy of Jacques Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice (this one's a paperback and a little dinged up). Share a notable local food experience from last year in the comments section, and we'll make a random drawing of the entrants at the end of this month.

You may note, just off to right side of the page here, a new section that shows Trout Caviar's "followers." Click on the "Follow" button to become one. You probably know better than I do what that actually means. In my mind, it means you've joined the Trout Caviar Righteous Eaters' Army*--a prestigious distinction, indeed!

Happy New Year, everyone. May your gardens grow abundantly, your farmers' markets thrive, your foragers' baskets overflow with bounty, this year and throughout the new decade.

I've been slow getting on to the 2009 Food Highlights. The new decade sort of took me by surprise, I guess. But it was a remarkable year in food for us, and I want to note a few of the more memorable experiences from last year over the next couple of weeks.

Last year was our first full year with Bide-A-Wee, and we spent a lot more time in that cheesy state just east of the Saint Croix and Mississippi Rivers. We added the term "tree crops" to our vocabulary, and then we added our own tree crops to our pantry and table.

We tapped maple trees for syrup for the first time last spring. That was tree crop number one. That was really good fun, and it was amazing to see how much sap a tree could produce on a good day, and to taste it straight from the tree--cold, clear, slightly sweet, a touch woody. Absolutely delicious, a spring tonic. And it was a challenge to figure out how to reduce that sap by a factor of 40 to turn it into syrup. Lot of boiling. More boiling. Boil it some more. We'll get us some better equipment for the task this year. We got a decent amount of syrup, but it wasn't a great year for sugaring--it turned too warm too soon, breaking the freeze and thaw cycle that really gets the sap flowing. We also tapped some of our birches, for you can make birch syrup too (it takes even more boiling!), but we never got enough sap to even begin.


Through the spring and summer we harvested many kinds of wild fruit, some of which we’d never tasted before—nannyberries, highbush cranberries, haws. We picked all the blackberries we wanted for a good five weeks, a remarkable run. Wild plums, black cherries, elderberries, wild grapes—it was indeed a very fruitful year.


But really, 2009 was the year of the apple at Bide-A-Wee. We didn’t know it at the time, but last spring provided perfect pollinating conditions for fruit trees of all kinds. We were kind of disappointed when the blossoms didn’t last as long as the previous year, but now I think that they blew away early because, once the flower had been pollinated, the blossoms weren’t needed anymore. And then we watched as the trees started to fruit, and were amazed at the difference from the previous year.

Many apple trees have a biennial habit; 2008 had provided a fairly meager crop, but in 2009 almost all of our trees were “on”, and how. We started picking apples in August, and I foraged the last basket at the end of November. I was surprised at how much frost the apples were able to withstand. Several times temperatures dropped into the ‘teens overnight, and in the morning the frost-covered fruit appeared frozen solid. But as long as the temperature rose above freezing in the course of the day, the apples recovered with no lasting damage.


Nor was a coating of snow a problem. An October surprise turned the valley white. Annabel strikes a call-of-the-wildish pose:


There was no way we could pick even a small fraction of the apples that bowed the branches of the trees by early autumn. We’ve been doing “triage pruning” for two winters, just getting a start on rehabilitating some of these several dozen long-neglected trees, but many of them are still untouched. Picking apples is difficult on the steep, brambly hills where most of our trees grow. Some trees were completely inaccessible within thickets of blackberry canes. Some trees made repulsively scabby apples. A few trees, heavily laden with beautiful fruit during one of our weekend visits, had suddenly dropped almost all their apples by the next weekend.


In spite of that we had a bountiful harvest, and we’ve been exploring all the many aspects of the apple, a remarkably versatile food crop. We’ve made apple jam and jelly, apple sauce and butter, apple cider and syrup, apple relish, ketchup, and pickles. We’ve eaten apples at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all times in between. We braise meats in apple cider, and sauté apples to serve with meat and fowl, fish and game. We grate apples into pancakes and breads. We have apple cider fermenting in carboys and bottles, and I’m experimenting with apple cider vinegar, too. We use dried apples to pep up granola, to sprinkle over salads, or just for snacks. Since we discovered that Annabel and Lily gobble dried apple slices enthusiastically, I haven’t bothered to bake dog biscuits. Apple salad, apple salsa, apple "kimchi", what the hell?

We invested in a cider press, the Happy Valley Ranch "Homesteader." Thoroughly old-fashioned technology, still quite effective. The press produces apple juice, or sweet cider. That juice we ferment to "hard," alcoholic cider, reduce by boiling to make versatile apple syrup (more tart than sweet; better in salad dressings than over pancakes), or freeze for drinking fresh through the winter. We haven’t bought orange juice in more than a year, start the day with a glass of apple cider, just like Thomas Jefferson did.


Of all the various uses to which we have put the versatile pome, I can recommend a few with particular enthusiasm.

--Braising in cider: There are classic preparations using cider in cooking, a lot of them from the French regions of Normandy and Brittany, where apple trees grow more readily than grapevines. In these dishes the cider, sweet or hard, serves the same purpose as the wine in a coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, etc., a flavorful, tenderizing (because acidic) liquid that mellows in the cooking and the mixing with the meat juices and melting fat to create…man, really, really tasty food. Game birds, chicken, and pork are particularly suited to this kind of cooking. When it’s cooked for a long time, the fruitiness and tartness of the cider recede into the background. The end flavor is distinctive, but not necessarily apple-y. That's country-style pork ribs braised in cider, with apples and chestnuts, above. Here’s a chicken dish with cider and cabbage, and here’s grouse in cider cream. But you can adapt a lot of recipes that call for wine, stock, or even beer as a braising liquid, subbing cider in their place. Give it a try.

--Pickled crab apples. I’ve been absolutely tickled with these pickles, which are pictured at the top of the post. Whole crab apples cooked in a wonderfully fragrant-spiced sweet and sour syrup. Serve these with roast pork or game, chop them to add to dressing for a winter cabbage salad, garnish a cheese plate with them. I tinkered a bit with a recipe from Linda Ziedrich’s excellent The Joy of Pickling, adding some star anise, black peppercorns, and a good deal of fresh ginger slices, to the original recipe’s cinnamon, cloves and allspice:

Pickled Crab Apples
Makes two pints

1 ½ pounds crab apples, stems on
One 2-inch stick cinnamon
1 tsp allspice berries
½ tsp whole cloves
1 whole star anise
6 slices fresh ginger, 1/8-inch thick
½ tsp black peppercorns
1 cup sugar
¾ cup water
1 cup cider vinegar

In a large, non-reactive (stainless or enameled) sauce pan, combine the water, sugar, vinegar, and spices. Bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat and let cool.

Pierce each apple in a couple of spots with a metal or bamboo skewer (this is supposed to keep the apples from exploding, though a lot of mine cracked anyway; no matter).

Add the apples to the syrup and bring the syrup to a simmer over medium-low heat. Simmer the apples until they start to look translucent, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let stand overnight.

Next day, use a slotted spoon to transfer the apples to sterilized canning jars--one quart or two pint jars. Strain the syrup to remove the spices, then return the syrup to the sauce pan. Bring it to a boil, then pour the hot syrup over the apples in the jars to cover. Seal with sterilized two-part lids. Process in a hot water bath for ten minutes (or just whack the lids on and refrigerate; they will keep indefinitely in the fridge).

Save any leftover syrup in a jar in the fridge. It’s great used in dressing for beet or cabbage salads. Likewise, use the liquid from the canned apples this same way.


--India relish: I acquired three new cookbooks this past fall—used, but new to me: Hollyhocks & Radishes, Joy of Cooking**, and…a compilation of recipes from The Country Journal magazine, can’t recall the exact title. Weirdly, each one practically fell open to a recipe for “India relish” the first time I picked it up. I had never heard of India relish; India relish calls for a lot of apples; I was intrigued, nay, compelled to try it. It’s great—delightful on a hot dog, a cheese sandwich. Last weekend at Bide-A-Wee we had a lunch of grilled ham (Grass Run Farm, purchased at Seward Co-op) and cheese (Roth Kase "gruyère”) on homemade natural leaven brioche with India relish. Yay, lunch!

I’m not going to give the recipe because, well, it’s in pretty much every old-timey cookbook out there, apparently. In Joy (the old one, mine was printed in 1964)it’s called Indian relish, and it’s on page 785. This is one for next fall, as it also calls for green tomatoes. So if you have a garden, and access to an apple tree, it’s basically free. I always cut back the sugar in traditional recipes like this by 20 or 25 percent. (Also in Joy I’ve just come across a recipe for sweet and sour baked beets and apples, page 264. I have beets and apples! I’m gonna try it.)

So there you go, that’s my exultation of the apple. I think we tend to take the apple for granted, consign it to the obligatory role of the piece of fruit in the lunch bag, or the plop of apple sauce beside the pork chop. But in fact it is an extremely important food crop, and a cook’s delight in the range of its uses. And then, of course, there’s all that cider bubbling in the basement. Will report when we open the first bottle.

Duck confit with crabs and cabbage.

Cider sipper Mary.

_______________________________________________

*--I was originally calling this the TC Toxic Zombie Cult, because I've noticed that zombies and cults seem to be really hot these days, and the "toxic" part just made it super extra edgy, which people also go for. But it was suggested to me that the whole concept didn't really fit the Trout Caviar zeitgeist, and upon further reflection, I had to agree. But if you'd like to be part of the TC Toxic Zombie Cult, I could probably still manage to make up some membership cards.

**--That is the correct title, Joy of Cooking, no "the" to be seen. Never noticed that before....

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Cider-Braised Chicken with Cabbage and Bacon (Not Half Bad)

I've been having a hard time keeping up with all the great foods of this autumn which arrived about three weeks ago with a definitive gale. In one blustery weekend thoughts went from what to throw on the grill to what shall we put in the braising pot tonight? I made a chicken braised in cider and cream a few days ago, and I wanted to write about that, but I would have to make it again to have a real recipe to share. I'm doing this all the time, making up a dish at dinnertime, taking a few photos of it, thinking I'll remember what I did when I sit down to write about it a few days later, and inevitably, of course, I've forgotten important points because I didn't make detailed enough notes.

This dish, chicken in cider with cabbage and bacon, I threw together in the midst of making doughs and mixing up sourdough sponges for our market baking last night. And while making it I came up with a trick to help me remember what I was doing: I added most of the ingredients in "half" measures--half a leek, half an onion, half a cup cider, of stock, etc. I should be able to relate this in no more time than it took to make it, so here goes.

Preheat your oven to 275.

2 ounce chunk good slab bacon, cut into 1/2"-inch cubes
4 chicken thighs (skin on or off, according to taste)
salt and pepper

1/2 a small onion, sliced
1/2 a small carrot, cut in half the long way, then across into thin half-moons
1/2 a small leek, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
1/2 a small cabbage, cut into four wedges

In a dutch oven or deep-sided sauté pan that can go in the oven, slowly cook the bacon over low heat until most of the fat has rendered and the bacon is brown. Remove the bacon from the pan, pour the fat into a small dish and reserve. Salt and pepper the chicken on both sides, then add it to the pan, bring the heat to medium high and brown the chicken well on both sides, about five minutes each side.

Remove the chicken from the pan, and drain off any fat. Return a teaspoon of bacon fat to the pan, add the onion, carrot, and leek, and cook for about five minutes, until the vegetables have softened and just begun to brown.

1/2 cup apple cider
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup water
1 sprig sage

Deglaze the pan with the apple cider, then add the stock and water, the sage, and return the chicken to the pan. Add a good pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper. Bring it up to a boil, then cover the pan and place it in the oven. Cook for 40 minutes (check it after about 10 minutes to see that it's bubbling gently; if it's not, increase the heat to 300 and check again in another 10 minutes.)

After 40 minutes add the reserved bacon cubes to the pot and nestle the cabbage wedges in between the chicken pieces. Cook, covered, for 20 minutes.

Increase the oven heat to 375. Remove the cover from the pan, turn the cabbage wedges over, and cook for another 10 minutes, or until the cabbage is tender.

Serve the chicken and cabbage out into wide soup dishes. If the sauce seems thin, reduce it over high heat on your stovetop for a couple of minutes to desired thickness. Serve it forth. Taste for salt.

I was going to serve this with boiled potatoes, but Mary discovered some leftover spaetzle in the fridge, so we used that instead, briefly fried in a little butter. We drank an Austrian gruner veltliner, a crisp white with good body; an Alsatian riesling or pinot blanc would have been another good choice. Or a lighter red, a cabernet franc like a saumur, or a modest pinot noir. Or, indeed, a glass of honest hard cider.

Nothing hard about this dish, and by the time it has braised all that long while, the cider is completely integrated into the sauce--you'd be hard-pressed to tell there was cider in it, at all (I really didn't intend the pun, but I'll take it...).

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

"Where are the songs of Spring?"

"...Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too.
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue..."

Then, don't you just really want a hearty, satisfying dinner like slow-braised pork in an intense, savory pan sauce, served over soft polenta or mashed potatoes? I know I do.

I was talking on the phone to my brother, William Bruce (we call him Bill), the evening after the last market of the season, and as is typical in these cocktail-hour conversations, talk came around to what we were preparing for dinner.

"I'm braising some pork belly in cider with vegetables from the market," I said.

"Pork belly? Isn't that...bacon?" Bill responded.

"Well, yeah, but, no," I said. "It's what they make bacon out of. Fresh bacon. It's delicious."

"Hmm," said Bill

It's not that my brother is an unadventurous eater, quite the opposite. He's an avid slurper of icy raw bivalves, and a fan of foie gras. But the idea of "bacon" for dinner can make even the most fearless diners pause.

It shouldn't. I'm not going to claim that pork belly--sometimes called side pork, or, as mentioned, fresh bacon--is a lean dish. However, if you look at the "Still Life with Pork Belly" above, you can see that it's quite possible to find pork belly that is more lean meat than fat. Furthermore, as you brown the meat thoroughly prior to braising, a lot of the fat renders off and is poured from the pan before you continue. And then, a little goes a long way. I call for a pound of meat for two servings, which is very generous. We had leftovers (which I ate atop Chinese noodles in broth for lunch--yum) when we made it, even after the grueling final baking and market of the season, when we generally consume vast quantities. If you cut the meat portion back to twelve ounces total, I don't think anyone would go away hungry.

I didn't invent the idea of cooking pork belly like this. This rich, unctuous, economical cut of meat holds a place of great respect in Chinese, French, and other world cuisines. In the U.S., it became quite popular a few years ago among chefs interested in the "nose to tail" eating most often associated with Fergus Henderson of the St John restaurant in London. There's a bit of macho posturing to this sort of thing, to be sure. (You've probably seen or heard of those TV shows where guys go around the world eating gross stuff--previously unheard of organs, bugs, rotting things; cook's tour as freak show.) But it's also a recognition that those of us who eat meat ought to honor the animals we consume by using and appreciating the whole beast. It's the right thing to do; and, there's some very good eating to be had, low on the hog.

I most often buy my pork belly at an Asian market, because it's always in stock there. Any good local butcher should be able to get it for you. (Here in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Shuang Hur--University just west of Dale; Nicollet and 27th--and United Noodles are reliable sources.)

Cider-Braised Pork Belly
serves two

If, after all my effort to convince you of the glories of fatty pork, you still find yourself bacon-phobic, this dish would be nearly as good with country-style ribs, pork shoulder, or a piece of fresh ham in place of the pork belly. You could use other vegetables--parsnip, perhaps, or small sweet turnips. I had picked up some beautiful local fennel at our last farmers' market.

1 pound fresh pork belly, skin removed, in two chunks

1 tsp oil

1 small carrot

1/2 medium onion

1 small leek

1 small fennel bulb

1 serrano chili, seeds removed, optional

6 small cloves garlic, peeled and left whole

3 cloves garlic, chopped

1 cup fresh apple cider
1 cup unsalted chicken stock
1 Tbsp soy sauce, preferably dark
a few sprigs fresh thyme

Preheat your oven to 375 F.

Heat a dutch oven or high-sided saute pan--a three-quart pan is a good size (I really love that All-Clad saucier you see in many pictures here--that's a three-quart pan). Season the pork belly well on all sides with salt and pepper. Add the teaspoon of oil (canola, grapeseed, etc.) to the pan. Add the pork and brown well on all sides over medium heat. It will take four or five minutes per side. Don't rush this stage, as a lot of the flavor in the finished dish is developed at this time.

While the pork browns, wash and chop all the vegetables. If your carrot is fresh and sweet you needn't peel it. Use all of the leek that seems tender, both white and green parts (and save the trimmings for stock). Just chop everything quite coarsely; it's going to cook for a long time and most of the vegetables will melt into the sauce.

Remove the pork from the pan and pour off most of the fat, leaving a couple of teaspoons behind. Add all the vegetables except the chopped garlic, and saute until they are lightly browned, five or six minutes. Add the chopped garlic and continue cooking for one minute.

Add some of the cider and scrape the pan bottom with a wooden spatula to deglaze (dissolve the brown stuff into the cider). Add the rest of the cider, the stock, the soy sauce, and then the pork. Here's what you're looking at:


Bring the liquid to a boil, then turn off the heat. Move the pan into the preheated oven, put on the lid, a bit ajar, and cook for 30 minutes. Turn the pork over and cook for 30 minutes more, partially covered. Turn the pork again and cook, uncovered now, for another 30 to 45 minutes, till the pork is very brown and tender--oh, and check to be sure there's still some liquid in the pan; we want the sauce quite reduced, but not all boiled away. Add a bit of water if it's getting too dry.

Here's what mine looked like after an hour-and-half:


That looks almost good enough to eat. If you want to try a little sort of "cheffy" trick, you can remove the pork from the pan and really crisp up the exterior by placing it under the broiler for a couple of minutes, or in a hot oven--I put my oven up to 425 convection and put the pork in on a baking sheet for about five minutes. (You might reasonably say that this is a clear example of gilding the lily; to which I would respond, "And...?")

We were going to serve this with polenta, but the polenta jar was empty. White corn grits (polenta by another name) stood in just fine. Noodles, rice, mashed potatoes--all would be great.

This is the sort of dish that cries out for a glass of really nice wine, and while the deep, dark richness of it might lead you immediately to a full-bodied red, don't rule out a crisp, aromatic white like an Alsatian riesling or pinot gris.

To Autumn (stanza the last)

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, though hast thy music, too--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Of sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats, 1819

Text (except the Keats) and photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw

"Or By a Cyder-Press..."

"...with a patient look
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours."

Earlier this year, when we purchased our Wisconsin land with its sixty-plus apple trees, many of which we had seen laden with fruit last fall, we had visions of heaping bushels of glorious fruit, rivers of cider (or "cyder," in Keats's world), an abundance of pommes beyond imagining. What would we do with all those apples?, we wondered. What a pleasant condundrum to face!

What a lot to learn we had! What a lot we have learned.

Lesson 1: Many apple trees, particularly older varieties, have a biennial habit--they bear a full crop of apples every other year, and bear sparsely or not at all in the other year. Several of the most heavily fruited trees that we saw last fall turned out to have this tendency. There went half the harvest.

Lesson 2: Apple picking is flippin' hard work. Modern apples orchards use dwarfing rootstock to keep the trees from growing very tall, and then those trees are severely pruned to keep them healthy, vigorous, and easy to harvest. Many of our trees, on the other hand, are anything but dwarfish, growing to twenty feet and more, and in their long-neglected state their crowns are a crowded tangle of branches and dead wood, impenetrable without a pruning saw in hand. Even with a good ladder, and one of those apple-picking gadgets with the basket at the end of a long pole, filling a couple of sacks of apples was hard, hot work. For several weeks this summer I brought apples to sell at our farmers' market , but when I look back and consider the time and gas it took to drive out and back, the time spent picking and hauling, and the paltry sum they brought at market, where they had to go up against apples from real orchards...well, financially at least, I'd have been better off staying home and baking a couple of batches of dog biscuits. (But honestly, I can't say I regret having spent those mornings here--

--rather than in a hot kitchen breathing in dog biscuit fumes!)


Lesson 3: There's a very good reason why organic apples cost so much in the grocery store. I stopped at our co-op mid-summer, before any of our own apples were ripe, to buy an apple, one single apple for a recipe I wanted to make. The cashier rang it up at a buck-fifty. That's because organic apples were priced at $3.89 a pound. I began to imagine that we were sitting on a gold mine, with our dozens of pesticide-free trees.

Then came the hail. Then the scab. Then the bugs, I'm not sure which ones, but I'm guessing, all of them. A couple of trees, well laden and ripening with gorgeous fruit, suddenly and inexplicably dropped all their apples in late August. It was heart-rending to see all that beautiful fruit moldering on the ground, useless for anything but feeding the wildlife.

In brief, if we had tried to fill just one bushel basket with perfect, unblemished, unbruised, bug-free fruit, well, I don't think we could have done it. Really. With trees this long neglected that's just the way it goes. There's a lot that we can do, in terms of pruning, of orchard hygiene, etc., to bring the trees back and have better harvests in the future. In the meantime, we've started planting more trees. Three weeks ago we put six heirloom cider apple trees in the ground just up the hill from "Bide-A-Wee." It felt pretty momentous, I have to say.

We did harvest a decent amount of apples this year, and while most of them were the furthest thing from perfect, they all looked good coming out of the cider press that our friends Emily and Dan Hoisington were nice enough to let us use.



We found that it takes nearly fifteen pounds of apples and rather a lot of work--washing the apples and picking them over, grinding them in the food processor and running them through the press--to produce just a gallon of cider. But what satisfaction in drinking your own home-grown, fresh-pressed sweet cider, and setting a carboy or two aside to ferment into hard cider. I'll report back on that topic in a few weeks.

Meantime, I mentioned a while back how easy it is to make small amounts of fresh apple cider at home, as here comes the proof. We will need:

Apples
A food processor (or even just a good grater)
Cheesecloth

The set-up:

For this demonstration I used just about a pound of apples--looks like six smallish apples there. Chop them up into chunks. Do not peel, do not core. A few bruises are no problem. Put the apple pieces in the FP and start pulsing to chop them up, then let it run. Most likely the apple bits will pile up on the sides. Now's the time to add a little bit of water or cider, to help get the puree going. Scrape down the sides and add a tablespoon of water or cider and let the FP run. Add a tad more liquid if needed. To process this pound of apples I had to add about 1/4 cup of water. Process until you have an applesauce-like consistency:

Put it into the cheesecloth:
And sque-e-e-e-e-e-z-z-z-z-z-e:

That pound of apples produced 1 1/2 cups of juice:


It's a delicious, local beverage--fresh cider has replaced our morning orange juice for some time now--and it's a great ingredient in the kitchen. Next time: Cider-Braised Pork, a wonderful autumn dish.

"To Autumn," stanza two

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes, whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner though dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with a patient look
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

John Keats, 1819

Text (except the Keats) and photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw