Easy Hard Cider

This is a low-alcohol (theoretically around 3%) hard cider that’s quick and easy to make. Yummy, and sweet. 

Ingredients: 

1 gallon apple juice or cider (without preservatives)

1 to 1½ tsp yeast *

* Don’t use bread yeast. Use beer or ale yeast. Champaign yeast will make a dryer cider. I intend to try Belgian yeast one time. You can use wild apple yeast (from organic apple peels) in a manner similar to sourdough bread starter, but that’s more complex.

 

Special Equipment: 

Fermentation lock (or substitute)

Rubber stopper for bottle, with hole for Fermentation lock

Gallon jar (glass or plastic)

Instructions: 

Leave apple juice at room temperature. Remove a cup or so of the juice to a bowl, and heat to body temperature. Add the yeast to the warm juice to activate. When it starts bubbling, return it to the gallon jug and mix thoroughly.

Install the fermentation lock into the stopper, and seal the bottle. (It needs water in it to work right.)

Set the jar in a warm place to ferment for a week: a little longer for drier cider, a little shorter for sweeter cider. During this week, bubbles are good!

The next weekend, bottle your cider. Use containers that can handle pressure:

• Re-use (pint size?) soda-pop labels.
• Swing-type self-locking (“Lightning type closure”) bottles
• Crown caps (traditional bottle tops: requires a bottle opener to open, and requires a capping tool to seal).

Let the bottles set in a warm place for a day or a little more to carbonate. The pop bottles have an advantage: it’s easy to tell when they’ve carbonated enough: when the bottles are hard (as they would be when they’re full of fresh soda pop at the store), it’s enough.

Store the sealed bottles in the refrigerator.

Consume some time between “as soon as it’s cold” and three weeks or so.

Comment: If you let it ferment too long, you’ll need to age it (a year or more)

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Update: I've made 3 batches by now.

I added a step to the process: our home isn't incredibly warm, so I filled a pot with warm water, and put the fermenting gallon into it to keep it warm.

In the second batch, I heated it too much, late in the process, and killed the yeast, so the cider tasted good enough, but there was no carbonation to it.

In the third batch, I heated it often, but much more gently. Carbonation is fine, but it's over-fermented, and as a result, it's drier than is best.

I'm learning the process.

Green Curry Veggie Bread

Into the mixer, in this order:

 

1½ tsp active dry yeast

2 cups white flour

1 cups wheat flour

¾ cups dried mixed vegetables

1 TBSP white sugar

1 TBSP dry buttermilk powder

2 TBSP gluten

2 TBSP butter

⅓ cup green curry paste

1 fresh egg

1⅓ cups milk, preferably lukewarm.

This raises slower than usual. Let it rise in a bowl until doubled in size. Then form into loaves and bake in the oven. 

Comment: I cooked these in the toaster oven. The large loaf raised enough to come into contact with the top element, and burned the top of the bread, but it was still excellent! 

It’s quite spicy. Very good toasted with butter, or with cheese, and a fried egg on top. 

Candied Bacon Ice Cream

Ingredients:

For the candied bacon: 

½ pound bacon, in slices.
2 or three Tablespoons brown sugar (light or dark, though light tastes slightly better).

For the ice cream custard:

3 tablespoons salted butter
¾ cup (packed) brown sugar, light or dark (you can use either)
2¾ cup half-and-half
5 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons dark rum or whiskey
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
optional: & ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Instructions:

To candy the bacon

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Lay the strips of bacon on a baking sheet lined with a silicone mat or aluminum foil, shiny side down.

Sprinkle 1½-2 teaspoons of brown sugar evenly over each strip of bacon, depending on length.

Bake for 12-16 minutes. Midway during baking, flip the bacon strips over and drag them through the dark, syrupy liquid that's collected on the baking sheet. Continue to bake until as dark as mahogany. Remove from oven and cool the strips on a wire rack.

Once crisp (As in "done." Doesn't need to be crunchy)  and cool, chop into little pieces, about the size of grains of rice. Resist the urge to eat it all.

(Bacon bits can be stored in an airtight container and chilled for a day or so, or stored in the freezer a few weeks ahead.)

To make the ice cream custard

Melt the butter in a heavy, medium-size saucepan. Stir in the brown sugar and half of the half-and-half. Pour the remaining half-and-half into a bowl set in an ice bath and set a mesh strainer over the top.

In a separate bowl, stir together the egg yolks, then gradually add some of the warm brown sugar mixture to them, whisking the yolks constantly as you pour. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan.

Cook over low to moderate heat, constantly stirring and scraping the bottom with a heatproof spatula, until the custard thickens enough to coat the spatula.

 

Strain the custard into the half-and-half, stirring over the ice bath, until cool. Add liquor, vanilla and cinnamon, if using.

Refrigerate the mixture.

Once thoroughly chilled, freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. Add the bacon bits during the last moment of churning, or stir them in when you remove the ice cream from the machine.

Dad's Fish Stew

Ingredients

• 6 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 cup of chopped onions
• 4 - 6 large garlic cloves, chopped
• ⅔ cup fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 cup of fresh chopped tomato (about 1 medium sized tomato)
• 2 - 3 teaspoons tomato paste
• 8 oz of clam juice (or shellfish stock)
• ½ cup dry white wine (like Sauvignon blanc)
• 1½ lb fish fillets (use halibut, cod, sole, red snapper, sea bass), cut into 2-inch pieces
• Touch of dry oregano, Tabasco, thyme, pepper
• Salt

Instructions

1 Heat olive oil in heavy large pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add chopped onion and garlic and sauté 4 minutes. Add parsley and stir 2 minutes. Add tomato and tomato paste, and gently cook for 10 minutes or so.

2 Add clam juice, dry white wine, and fish and simmer until fish is cooked through, less than 10 minutes. Add seasoning. Salt to taste. Ladle into bowls and serve.

Serve with sourdough bread with butter and a red ale or a good hefeweizen beer. 

Serves 2 well, or serves 3 with other dishes. 

This is very good.

French Cake

I haven’t tried this with layer cake (with frosting). I wonder if that would be a mess.

I made some white cake in a small bread pan the other day, to go with some epic chocolate ice cream. It turned out that the ice cream didn’t need something alongside it (except a spoon), so the cake has just sat there for a day or two.

I cut  the cake into half inch wide slices, dredged them in a mixture of eggs (I have too many of these!), yogurt, and a little milk. I seasoned the eggs with salt and a bit of cinnamon, though next time, I may add some powdered sugar.

Then I tossed the slices into a hot, greased frypan, and cooked it for a couple of minutes each side.

Pull ‘em out, add peanut butter (and maybe this is the better place to add the powdered sugar, or cinnamon sugar) and enjoy with a good cup of hot coffee.

And bacon. Serve with bacon.