end of day

It's the end of a very busy day and I'm feeling it but felt like posting before I go to bed.

Today was a cooking day. I have started a sourdough starter and made my first batch of fresh ground wheat/spelt bread from it. It turned out fairly well but I'm having problems with my ferschtunkene oven. I think it's off, maybe by as much as 50 degrees. It's a high end appliance and we had three service calls in the first two years, but I digress.

The bread came out well but I think it didn't loft as much as I would have wanted in the oven so although the crust was perfect the crumb was a little too dense. It was tasty but not too sour as it's still a new starter. I'll be interested to see what happens with the next batch of bread I make from this starter.

The recipe? I'm glad you asked...

2 C. starter
~5 C. flour (I used hard red and spelt)
1 T. salt
1 C. warm water

Knead, let sit overnight, punch down, form, let rise four hours. Bake 400 degrees for 25 minutes.

Still in the kitchen I decided that today was the day that I was finally going to process the apples that I got when I went apple picking with the cousins. They've been hanging out on my porch and I needed to finally get them done.

I made 7 quarts of apple pie filling. I've been wanting to make this for years but every year I go ahead and make apple sauce instead. This year it was the pie filling. It looks delicious and I hope it turned out well. The great thing is that when we want a pie, all the peeling, slicing, dicing will be done. And thanks to my lovely friend Kay I own an apple peeler/slicer/corer so I was able to whip through a half bushel of apples in nothing flat.

Apple Pie Filling Recipe:

Fill your sterilized jars with slices of peeled cored apples and then pour the syrup over them, seal and process in a boiling water bath. The syrup is:

10 C. water
5 C. sugar
1/2 C. cornstarch
1/2 C. granulated tapioca
5 t. cinnamon (I used some very fragrant apple pie spice that my lovely friend Freydis brought over from England on her last visit)

Cook the above stirring often over medium heat until it comes to a boil.

When we were picking apples there was a bin of pears that we could help ourselves to so I did. I've been eating my way through them but still had quite a few left so I decided to make something. Rummaging through recipes I modified a couple and came up with the following:

Pear Cranberry Pecan Conserve Recipe:

4 C. peeled, cored, diced pears
1 C. dried cranberries
1 C. sugar
2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. fresh ground pepper
1/2 t. salt

cook over low heat until ingredients have thickened together, approximately 30 minutes. Add 3/4 C. chopped pecans. Can and process 15 minutes.

This should be good with roast meats as a side condiment, I hope it comes out well.

After all of that my day was not done because I still had to go to the Leader Training for Girl Scouts. Our troop has bridged into the next level so they get you and make you go to training. Actually it was fun, we had a good time and laughed a lot but they could have accomplished the objective in 1 1/2 hours instead of 2 1/2 hours and it was 40 minutes away. Bleah! But it's done, I'm good for three years now unless we decide that we want to do mountaineering or something, unh huh.

And now it's off to bed.