I learned something last night.  Something very important.  How to make the most amazing apple sauce ever and be a lazy ass.  Let me teach you.

Lazy Ass Applesauce

or, How to Wake Up to a House That Smells Like Strudel

Ingredients:

• Apples.  Enough to fill up your crock pot.  In many varieties
• Water
• Brown sugar
• Cinnamon
• Vanilla
• Salt

1. After you finish dinner, cut up apples.  I know, what a pain in the ass, right?  But don’t worry about cutting them up into tiny pieces.  As long as you avoid stems and seeds, all is well.  Leave those skins on.  Don’t you like fiber?
2. Put apples in your crockpot.  Basically you will yield 1/2 the volume of the crockpot.
3. How sweet do you want it?  Brown sugar is more of a flavoring here than a sweetener.  Put in a tablespoon at least, but just crumble some on top.
4. Put some cinnamon in.  I like a lot.  How about you?
5. Put in a very small amount of vanilla.  Less than a teaspoon definitely.
6. I have kosher salt.  i just sprinkled a little bit on top.  You can always put more on later.
7. Now, I have a tendency to put more water than needed in a crockpot, because I forget it doesn’t evaporate.  More water=watery-er applesauce.  I put a few ladles full, in order to wash off the spices on top of the apples.  You shouldn’t be able to see the water through the densely packed apples.
8. Put the top on.  Put it on low.
9. Forget about that.  Do some other stuff.
10. Go to bed.  This is a marathon not a sprint.  Sleep a good 7 hours.
11. Wake up.  Feel extremely happy about the delicious smell in your house.
12. Use a hand blender to mash the now brown and gooey apples.
13. Eat
14. Optionally, you can add a teaspoon of lemon juice in step 4, but it’s mainly for color.

Eating local: Earnest or Elitist? is a really great post/article.  As much as I agree with the idea of eating local (and support it with as much as my food money as is viable/convenient), that the movement continually ignores the fact that being able to make the choice to eat local is, in most communities, improbable and overly expensive, annoys me.  Also, building an infrastructure around local/”good” food to parallel the existing food delivery structure only gets “good” local food to people who have the money to afford it and creates an ever widening divide for everyone else.  I want to get money to farmers who want to deliver the best possible food to my house.  But I’d also like everyone else to get that too….

Can I just mention how excited I am that this recent salmonella outbreak (which is terrible and horrible) is veggie related?  You know in ten years when I mention eating a tomato, no one is ever going to say, “OH I’d never eat those! All those people got salmonella from them!”  Yet any time I mention how much I love Jack in the Box, I get a hearty laugh and people say they’d NEVER eat there (even though fewer people got sick in that incident, and JitB now has the most extensive food safety testing of pretty much any restaurant) because of their food poisoning incident.   I mean it’s horrible that we have to be skeptical or frightened of any food, but the fact that, for some reason we have been frightened into believing things that grow from a literal pile of excrement are less likely to make us sick than things protected from it by hide is bizarre to me.  Obviously proper handling is necessary for both, and there are temperature issues for meat, but how saintly are vegetables that it never occurred to people that they too could poison people?

Now I want a Jack taco.  Sadly the nearest one is over 600 miles away.

Every Wed. is vegetable day, which generally means super cooking extravaganza. Generally I make stuff with the veggies I already know are tasty. Then I research a whole bunch of recipes for the other veggies that I am either ignorant of or scared of. Generally there’s a 3:1:1 ratio of stuff I like: stuff I know nothing about: stuff I have had before and not liked but am willing to try. Generally at least one of the food experiments turns ugly and I either suffer through it, mess it up, or end up throwing it out. Now, being raised by the Depression-era son of grocers I am paranoid about throwing out food, but sometimes, it has to be done. Like in the bok choy experiment. I couldn’t choke that stuff down.

Today though, I have triumphed over my farm share with an awesome cooking lineup. Usually I would have to at least buy some stuff to make the ingredients work.  But not today!  I got tomatoes and blueberries, which I will eat by themselves, and an onion, which I will eat in other stuff. I also got a cucumber, which I use in cucumber water to beat the heat. However, I got yellow squash and eggplant. While I like yellow squash, I had only broiled it. Though today I made a cream squash soup. Yumtastic.

Eggplant is touchy for me. Either I love it or it seriously makes me want to heave. I was a little frightened. I have always wanted to make baba ganoush. Once my Romanian roommate made it years ago and it took HOURS. It involved slaving, grilling, baking, blender. So much work! But I thought it was worth the try. And it turned out great. What I learned:

• Don’t be that picky about not including skin or seeds. It’s fine.
• You can get a pretty good smoky flavor by roasting/burning some of the eggplant with skin on (2 eggplants).
• The rest can totally be microwaved (3 more eggplants). While mushy watery eggplant is usually gross it’s a positive in the baba ganoush situation.
• Do not use tiny eggplants. It will be a pain in your ass.
• Use rounder types with white flesh–not the stringy kind.  I used some roundish purple and white striped ones.  I don’t know what kind they are, but this is the closest photo I could find:

In other food news, I found this table which shows you what your body actually wants when it craves things.  Mainly my body craves cheese.  But apparently that’s the good thing you eat when your body craves bad things.  My body has skipped the middleman.  I don’t know how much I buy this chart, but it’s interesting.

Today I learned to string peas.  i did not know you had to string peas.  I have never had fresh peas.  Is that why string beans are called string?  No idea.

Anyway, sugar snap peas that are fresh are amazing.  I sauted them with butter, lemon, salt, ginger, white wine, and garlic.  Yummity Yum.  Sadly they’re all gone, but I don’t know if a bowl of peas is enough of a lunch to justify dessert.

Now if only I knew what to do with kohlrabi….

I know there are mayonnaise naysayers, who look disgusted at the sight of mayonnaise. Who give you holier than thou looks when you eat mayonnaise. And then there are the Miracle Whip fanatics, who preach the gospel of one brand of mayonnaise over another.

I have been neither. I like mayonnaise on some things, particularly if it is flavored, but not on others. I am just sort of “eh” on mayo.

Until today, my friends. When I made my own mayonnaise. And even my mom, whose worst case scenario for my life is me getting married and having children and being a homemaker, was impressed by my cookery. And she found my question “Have you ever made mayonnaise?” totally a ridiculous query.

Back up: I got snow peas in my farm share this week. I like snow peas and I haven’t made them in a while, so I thought I would look up some recipes. Usually I saute them with sugar, because I am a freak like that.

Anyway, it’s hot here. Way, way too hot. So I didn’t want a whole cooking production (IRONY!). But I found a recipe for snow peas stuffed with crab egg salad. Holy moly. I love crab (and had imitation on hand) and I love egg salad. I had to try it.

At this point, one should realize the snow peas, which were once the focus of the dish, completely fade to the background as some low carb bread alternative for egg salad. Snow peas are tasty, but anything I can use as a delivery device for egg salad is fine by me. They’re actually sort of awkward for this purpose, but totally pretty. If I were having a party, this would be an excellent fancy appetizer.
The one part of this equation I failed to notice was that I had no mayonnaise. I failed to notice this, because I usually use plain yogurt instead of mayonnaise in egg salad. I failed to notice as well that I used all my yogurt 2 days ago to make tzatziki sauce (which I kick ass at, btw) and another batch of serrano cheese kale-spinach (which was better consistency wise since I didn’t use the ribs of the kale). I use yogurt in everything, since a million years of greek cooking can’t be wrong, I figure. So I have some mustard and green onion and crab and hard boiled egg all mixed and dressed snow peas. And it all ain’t jiving together since there is no mayo. It is utterly weak, crumbly, and pathetic.
And I am a little scared by making my own mayo. I mean that’s raw eggs, people. I am supposed to fear those. And all emulsification seems mystical. And then, there’s the fact that if I make my own mayo, I discover EXACTLY how much oil is in mayo, and that’s one of those things I may be better off not knowing.

But my culinary hero Alton Brown has a recipe. And I try it assuming it will fail since all I read is about how making mayo is really hard. But my egg separation is totally awesome. I might have high fived myself after this completely righteous egg seperation, were that humanly possible. And I begin whisking. And HOLY SHIT EMULSIFICATION.

People, I have no idea what it’s like to birth a calf, or save a dying bird, but I feel the emulsification of oil and egg into living mayonnaise must be similar. In the “I stay inside all day and think touching dirty animals is gross” sort of poindexter way. And people, I am so that way. I am also of the way that I don’t get many religious experiences. But the sudden thickness of liquid into colloidal suspension is freaking great.
So make some mayo today. It is fucking beautiful.