My fridge is the bottomless pit of apples. We went apple picking over a month ago and I’m beginning to run out of things to do with the apples. My goal is to finish them before I go home for Thanksgiving. I have a week. Tonight, I made baked apples.

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Baked Apples

• 4 Apples, sliced in half and cored
• 4 Tbsp brown sugar
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 C dried cherries, chopped
• 1/4 C pecans and/or almonds, toasted and chopped
• Cinnamon, to taste
• Nutmeg, to taste
• 1 C apple cider

Preheat the oven to 400F. Put 1/4 Tbsp on each apple half, then sprinkle with brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cherries and nuts. Place in a shallow baking dish and pour in the apple cider. Bake for 15-20 min, spooning cider over apples every 5 minutes or so.

Serve with yogurt.

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Dan and Chrys ordered nacho pizza from last week. It was so amazing, I had to recreate it myself. My version doesn’t taste anything like theirs… much much healthier, but equally satisfying.

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Nacho Pizza

• Pizza Dough (I went with Trader Joes’s whole wheat pizza dough. It burns at very high temperatures, so this is not the best dough to use with a pizza stone)
• Tortilla chips (I used blue corn chips so it would look pretty)
• Pizza Sauce
• Chili or ground meat flavored with taco seasoning
• Mexican blend cheese
• Lots of jalepenos
• Black beans
• Salsa

Roll out the pizza dough, cover with sauce, then make nachos! We put so much chili and salsa on the pizza that the chips got soggy - but still tasted good. the blend of flavors was great.

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Tom had a scary foods dinner party for Halloween. I made Death by Chocolate Cupcakes following a modified version of a Mississippi Mud Cake recipe taken from the July 2000 issue of Bon Apetite:

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Death By Chocolate Cupcakes

For Cupcakes:

• 2 1/4 cups sugar
• 2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups whole milk
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 6 tablespoons whipping cream
• 6 tablespoons dark corn syrup

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin pan. Whisk sugar, flour, baking soda and salt in large bowl to blend. Whisk milk, butter and cocoa powder in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat just until butter melts and mixture is smooth. Remove saucepan from heat. Whisk cocoa mixture, then eggs and vanilla into dry ingredients. Pour batter into cup cake pan. sprinkle with 1 cup chocolate chips. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 20-22 minutes. Cool cup cakes in pan. Meanwhile, bring whipping cream and corn syrup to simmer in heavy medium saucepan. Add remaining 1 1/3 cups chocolate chips. Whisk until chocolate chips have melted and glaze is smooth. Cool glaze 15 minutes. Pour glaze evenly over cake. Chill for about half an hour.

For the Monster Cupcake:

This is easy. You need two pieces of candy to resemble eyes (or one for a cyclops), one piece of “mouth” gummy (see picture below), a gummy bear and red sprinkles. Place eyes and mouth on the cup cake, then place the gummy bear inside the mouth. You might want to behead the gummy bear first. Use red sprinkles around/inside the mouth - this is ‘blood’.

For the Mummy Cupcake:

Warm a piece of liquorice allsorts (use the round kind) in the microwave for 5 seconds. You just want to warm it so that when you slice it in half it won’t crack. Once you take it out of the microwave, carefully slice it in half and place the two pieces in the middle of the cupcake. These are the mummy’s eyes. Melt a couple marshmellows in the microwave (use defrost option) until it is of spreadable consistency. It cools quickly, so you might have to work quickly (or remelt). Alternatively, you could use marshmellow fluff. Starting from the bottom of the cupcake, use a spoon to spread the marshmellows from left to right. Start the next ‘bandage’ above the first, slightly overlapping, making sure that there is minimal cup cake visible. Be careful not to spread the two layers together, otherwise your cup cake won’t look like it’s being wrapped in bandages. Continue all the way to the top, making sure not to cover up the eyes.

For Graveyard Cup cake:

I used choclate milano cookies as tombstones. Slice of the bottom of the cookie, then use a thin icing pen to write on it. There isn’t much space, so choose your words carefully.

• Anita Infusion
• R.U. Next
• Ima Goner
• Manny Bones
• C.U. Later
• Willy Rott
• Bye

Once that’s dried, place the cookie on the cup cake. Use gummy bears  (the living), pumpkins and green sprinkles to decorate.

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Dining options in college were limited and hardly palatable. Our dorm had a giant kitchen in the basement but it was so disgusting, I refused to eat anything that came out of it. My roommate, Lori, and I equipped our room with as many small-appliances as we could fit, and managed to make some pretty gourmet dishes with a toaster oven and a double-burner. In fact, Lori makes a damn good spaghetti sauce that I still crave, 4 years later. “Awesome Sausome” is what everyone calls it. Today is her birthday (Happy Birthday Lori!!!!) and she is kindly letting me share her recipe here:

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Ghetto Awesome Sausome

by Lori

Ingredients:
1 Pepper, your favorite color, chopped to your favorite size
1/2 Large Spanish White Onion, or 1 Small Spanish White Onion, chopped to your favorite size
1 jar red spaghetti sauce, your favorite brand
Some Olive Oil
Basil
Oregano
Minced garlic (I usually use about one head per jar of sauce, normal people should use maybe a tablespoon)
Cayenne Pepper
Parmesan
Red wine, your favorite grape
Pasta, your favorite shape

Pour yourself a glass of wine. Cook up your onion and garlic in a saucepan. Cook it in olive oil at medium heat ~3-5 minutes if you’re impatient; in butter at low heat ~10-15 minutes if you want it slower and sweeter. When your onion is soft and tasty, throw in the pepper (and add a tablespoon of olive oil if you had cooked the onion in butter). Cook for about a minute on low to medium heat.

Pour on the jar of sauce and reduce to low heat. Pour in 2-4 ounces of wine. Refill your wine glass.

Start cooking your pasta.

Add a couple teaspoons of basil and oregano. Use more basil if you want your sauce sweeter; more oregano if you want it spicier. Add 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne. Stir it up. Let it simmer for about a minute.

Now do an herb check: Stir it up, taste it real quick. Not enough cayenne? Add more. Probably needs more wine too.

Refill your wine glass. Might need to open another bottle.

Simmer the sausome for about 5 minutes. Add a couple tablespoons of parmesan.

Taste it. Tastes like victory, eh? Take a celebratory drink of wine.

Put the sausome on your pasta and eat up.

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My college dorm used to throw an Oktoberfest every year. There would be a huge chug-off between the classes - people would practice chugging beer every night for a week before the competition. Tom and Stefan would make German food for the entire dorm in exchange for a couple mini kegs of Paulaner Oktoberfest. There would be sausages, sauerkraut, apple crisp, and lots and lots of beer.  This year we tried to recreate that experience.

We started at 3 PM. Tom, Chrys and I drove to Saugus, MA to Karl’s Sausage Kitchen:

This is the best place near Boston for authentic German food. They do the sausage stuffing and smoke curing themselves. They have: knockworst, liverworst, bloodwurst, keilbasa, bauerenwurst, head cheese, landejaeger, various salamis and much much more. Unfortunately, this is a well-known secret, and we weren’t left with much selection. So, we picked up what they had left - bloodwurst and some bauerenwurst which we served with sauerkraut and mustard.

Our next stop was the liquor store… we picked up a couple mini kegs of German beer and headed home to start the festivities.

My mother suggested I make Saurbraten, a traditional German dish. I marinated 6 lbs of pork (rump roast) in vinegar, red wine and spices for 3 days and then slow cooked it over 3-4 hours. This is the recipe I used, loosely based on a recipe I found here.

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Bavarian Sauerbraten 

• 1 750-mL bottle dry red wine
  
• 2  cups red-wine vinegar
  
• 4 onions
  
• Leaves from 1 bunch of celery
  
• 2 tablespoons coarse salt
  
• 2 tablespoons sugar
  
• 1 tablespoon mustard seeds
  
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  
• 20 cloves
  
• 4 teaspoons black peppercorns, crushed lightly
  
• 4 bay leaves
  
• 6-lb rump roast, tied
  
• 2 tablespoons clarified butter
  
• 1/2 cup crushed gingersnaps

For the marinade: Mix the wine, vinegar, 1 cup water, 3 of the onions, quartered, celery leaves, salt, sugar, mustard seeds, nutmeg, cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaves. Add the meat and let it marinate, covered and chilled, turning occasionally, for 3 days.

Remove the meat from the marinade and reserve the marinade. Heat up butter in a skillet and brown meat on all sides. Strain the marinade and add to meat in a slow cooker. Cook for 3-4 hours, until meat is tender.  Boil down the marinade until it thickens. Serve with meat. 

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Before

After

The pork turned out amazing. It was sooooo tender. Lucia made pretzels, Stefan brought home made beer and cider. I had made a German copper ale for the party, but it didn’t turn out so great… I did a bad job of rinsing the bottles after soaking them in bleach and TSP and the beer tasted very “clean” to put it nicely. Anyway… the party was a huge success, lasting until about 3 am with half of us passed out, and the other half singing along to Stefan playing Dave Mathews. It kind of felt like college again…

Tom and Kathryn threw an Ital-Mex dinner party. The rules were simple, all food had to be a combination of both cuisines.

The menu:

• Prosecco Margaritas
• Ital-Mex sodas = Corona with Italian soda syrup (tasted like a lambic)
• Jalepenos stuffed with mozerella and wrapped with prosciutto.
• Bruschetta with guacamole and shrimp
• Another bruschetta with homemade no-knead bread with pico de gallo and farm fresh cheese
• Salad with green leaf lettuce, red peppers, avocado, corn, sopressata, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella, red onions and jalepeno-lime vinaigrette.
• Mexican Lasagne with tortillas replacing pasta
• Chicken Marsala Guadalajara (recipe below)
• Quesadilla with bolognese sauce
• Mexican chocolate gelato and dulce de leche gelato
• Spicy Tiramisu

Angela’s Beautiful Salad

I was surprised that no one brought any pasta-based dishes. I guess that was too obvious. Here is Tom’s Ital-Mex chicken recipe:

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Chicken Marsala Guadalajara

by Tom

Beat chicken breasts with a hammer until about 1/4″ thick
Cut into chicken finger sized tenders covered with a batter, which was flour, salt, pepper, cumin fried in 1/4 c. olive oil + 1/2 stick of butter set aside chicken
fried a chopped med. onion in the mixture till they were getting limp, then added 1 c. mushrooms, sliced. also added 1/2 c. marsala wine.
cooked till mushrooms were limp then added the chicken and 1/4 c. cream. reduced to a simmer and let simmer for about 10 minutes.turned off heat and covered with grated monterey jack cheese and allowed to melt. all was done in cast iron skillet. :)

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Lucia made southwestern pizza tonight, a specialty of her Dad. She bought dough from trader joes, smothered it with olive oil and topped it with tomato pizza sauce, chicken, parmesan and most importantly, black beans. She served it with salsa. Yum yum yum.

Tom gave me an ice cream maker for the sole purpose of making bacon ice cream. I know that might sound gross to some people, but think about all the sweet things bacon goes well with: pears, apples, balsamic vinger… Not to say that savory ice cream is bad either. But we decided for our first attempt to go the sweet route. We candied the bacon with brown sugar and used a vanilla custard ice cream base following a recipe from Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie.

Here is the recipe we used:

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Bacon and Egg Ice Cream

• 8 bacon slices (1/2 lb)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
• 2 cups whole milk
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 6 large egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F.

Arrange bacon slices in 1 layer (not overlapping) on rack of a large broiler pan. Bake 15 minutes. Turn slices over and sprinkle evenly with brown sugar. Continue to bake, checking bacon every 5 minutes, until bacon is crisp and deep golden, 15 to 20 minutes more. Transfer to paper towels to drain.

Heat milk, cream, granulated sugar, and salt in a 3-quart heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until sugar is dissolved and mixture is hot.

Meanwhile, beat yolks in a medium bowl with an electric mixer at high speed until thick and pale. Reduce speed to low and add hot milk mixture in a stream, mixing until combined. Transfer custard to saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is thick enough to coat back of a spoon and thermometer registers 170 to 175°F (do not let boil). Stir in vanilla.

Quick-chill custard by transferring it to a bowl set into a larger bowl of ice and cold water and stirring frequently until cold, about 15 minutes. Freeze custard in ice cream maker until almost firm. Meanwhile, cut bacon into 1/4-inch pieces.

Fold bacon into ice cream, then transfer to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden, at least 2 hours.

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Tom made waffles… the perfect combination! Honestly, this was pretty amazing.

I’ve been meaning to blog about my weird cooking experiments for a while, but was waiting for the right inspiration. While dissecting the axilla and telling my anatomy partner, Ariel, about my plans to make bacon ice cream, she commented on how i was quite the ‘alternative homemaker’… i went home that day and bought the domain… thanx Ariel!

I stole the picture from here. I was going to put a picture of a real cadaver, but was reminded that this is a food site… don’t want anyone to lose their appetite after reading the first post. Then again, anatomy has only made me crave meat more… am i sick?