Anita's Apple Crisp Pie

This pie has a topping you'd normally find on apple crisp. I love how crunchy good the crispy topping is. Much nicer than a pastry topping!

Normally, if I have almonds around, I'll leave a 4" diameter circle in the centre with no topping, so that the apples peek out. Then I like to arrange some almonds around in a pattern on the topping, makes for a nice presentation!

(For two, 9” deep dish pies, shells prepared separately. I just use pre-made shells since I'm so bad at pie crust!)

Filling
11 McIntosh apples (Note: try using a mix of three types of apples for an interesting blend throughout the pie)
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 cup whipping cream
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup butter
Lemon juice

Topping
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
Pinch of salt
1 cup melted butter, cooled
Almonds (optional)

Directions

1. Blend egg, cream, and vanilla extract in a large bowl.
2. Blend together sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Gradually add to egg/cream/vanilla mixture.
3. Wash, peel, core, quarter, and thinly slice apples
4. Add sliced apples to sugar/egg/cream/vanilla mixture. Turn to coat apples
5. Sprinkle a little flour into the bottom of each of the two pie shells.
6. Divide apples in half, distributing evenly into the shells.
7. Dot with butter, and sprinkle with lemon juice.
8. For topping, combine flour, oats, sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Add melted butter, tossing well with a fork. 
9. Sprinkle evenly over top of pie.
10. Arrange almonds on top

Bake at 450F for 10 minutes, turn down heat to 350F and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until apples are tender and stop is lightly browned.

Croutons

At the grocery store the other day, picking up a bag of croutons, I thought, this is enough. They want $2.50 for 140g of croutons?! And they are always way too salty, to boot! That is crazy.

So from here on out, I have decided to make my own croutons for salads and soups, from MY OWN day old breads. Everyone always wants today's fresh-out-of-the-oven bread anyway, so this will be a perfect way to re-purpose yesterday's bread.


Pre-heat oven to 300F.

Start by cubing 3-4 slices of bread.

Toss them into a large bowl.

Mix together 3 tablespoons of melted butter, or olive oil; 1 teaspoon of garlic power, and an optional pinch of salt; 1 teaspoon of dried parsley flakes, or herbes de Province, or any combination of whatever herbs you desire!


Pour this mixture over the cubed bread, tossing to distribute evening. Add a little more oil and herbs if needed. Spread the coated bread cubes out on a cookie sheet, in a single layer.

Bake for 15 minutes. Check to be sure they are drying, turn them over and bake for another 15 minutes until dry, crispy, and golden brown. They make the house smell soooo good while baking!

Once cooled, store your croutons in an air-tight container or ziplock bag.

You'll never buy store-bought croutons again after playing around with your own delicious variations of home-made croutons!

Multigrain Raisin Bread

Lately I've been making the previous recipe as it was intended, as a raisin bread. I must say, it is absolutely delicious and the family goes through it pretty quickly!

I have altered the recipe and put in 1 1/4 cups of raisins, so that is more than you see in this photo. It makes quite a difference and really makes this loaf perfect.

It's so nice toasted in the morning with coffee, or for a snack in the afternoon!

Here are the steps to this very easy, completely done in the bread machine, bread (as opposed to my usual way of just using the dough cycle on the bread machine to do the hard work of kneading and the first rise).

But before we continue, I must say, I absolutely love my particular bread machine.  It is a Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme® Breadmaker BB-CEC20. Its loaf pan lays horizontal, with two paddles, not like most bread machines which make a vertical, tall and skinny, loaf of bread.

Completely unnatural!

The ingredients...
1 1/4 cups of water
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons honey
1 1/2 cups White Bread Flour
1 1/4 cups Multi-grain Bread Flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon bread machine yeast
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/4 cups of raisins

Add 1 1/4 cups of water to the pan, then add 2 tablespoons of butter.

 Add 3 tablespoons of honey.

Add 1 1/2 cups of white bread flour, then add the 1 1/3 cups of multi-grain bread flour.

 Add 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, being careful to distribute it around the outer edge of the pan.

Make a small depression in the middle of the two flour layers. Be sure that the depression does not penetrate through to the water.

Add 1 teaspoon bread machine yeast into the hole.

You want to be sure it does not touch any liquids, and also make sure it stays away from the salt.

 Sprinkle the 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon around the outer edge of the pan.

Put the pan back into the bread machine, set it to run on the "wheat cycle". Sit back and wait.

After kneading is under way, this particular machine beeps in case you want to add something. This is the time to throw in the 1 1/4 cups of raisins.

After 3 hours, 40 minutes (this includes the machine's preheat time), the bread is ready to come out of the pan.

Set it on a cooling rack to cool completely.

Sliced open, here it is.

It didn't turn out too bad considering I completely ignored, or didn't hear, the "ADD" beeps! When I realized what had happened, I pulled the dough out during the first rise and kneaded the raisins in by hand.

Syrian Pita

Today I dumped everything into the bread machine to make my new favourite Multigrain bread (listed in a previous post) and left for a nice, long motorcycle ride. Came home and had some wonderful, fresh bread waiting for us.

After another ride in the late afternoon, I remembered I had to make pita for the the BBQ later. So I rushed home, threw the ingredients into the bread machine and put my feet up while it did all the mixing and kneading for me.


Ingredients

1 1/8 cups water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Add to bread machine in your manufacturer's recommended order. Select Dough cycle, press Start.


After it finished rising, I cut the wonderfully tender dough ball into 9 equal pieces.

While the sausages were cooking on the BBQ, I warmed up a skillet and started rolling out the balls. I like to keep the balls covered with plastic wrap to prevent them from drying out while I fry each pita.


I roll out the first one as thin as I can, throw it into the skillet and by the time I finish rolling out the next pita, the one in the skillet is done.

 I don't use flour on the counter when rolling. All that does is make your pita slip around with the end result being you'll have a very difficult time getting it as thin as needed.


I'm not that great at making it perfectly round, but it's close enough.

In the skillet, I start off with just a little olive oil to season the pan, then after that I add nothing. Just the teflon pan is good enough.



Here, on the right, you see it starting to bubble up. I love it when it does that.

I've heard that the thinner you roll it, the better your chances are of that happening!

Here it's been flipped and I'm cooking the other side. It really only takes 2-3 minutes on each side.

A little bit of blackness adds to its character.

The batch is nicely cooling on a cooling rack.



And there's a nice BBQ'ed sausage in a pita fresh off the skillet!

Multigrain Bread

Just tried this new recipe I found at the Robin Hood site and it worked out great! Very tasty, the crumb is perfect. Love it.

For this one, I used my Zojirushi bread maker for the whole thing.

I like to have some good fall-back recipes I can rely on to make a nice loaf when I'm not going to be around to work the dough into whatever shape I want and put it in the oven.

My fall-back recipes are easy to toss into the machine, walk away, and return later to a perfect, delicious loaf of bread.

This recipe originally called for raisins and cinnamon, however, I opted out on them and the loaf still turned out great. No other adjustments to it were necessary.

Below is the recipe as found at Robin Hood:


MULTIGRAIN BREAD (optionally can be made as Raisin Bread)
Ingredients:
LARGE LOAF (1 1/2 lb/3 cup or 2 lb/4 cup machine)
1 1/4 cups (300 mL) water
2 tbsp (30 mL) butter or margarine
3 tbsp (45 mL) honey
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) ROBIN HOOD Best For Bread Homestyle White Flour
1 1/3 cups (325 mL) ROBIN HOOD Best For Bread Multigrain Blend
1 1/2 tsp (7 mL) salt
1 tsp (5 mL) cinnamon (OPTIONAL)
1 tsp (5 mL) bread machine yeast
1 cup (175 mL) raisins (OPTIONAL, can make it 1 1/4 cup)

Directions:

1. SELECT loaf size.
2. ADD ingredients to machine according to manufacturer’s directions.
3. SELECT White or Whole Wheat Cycle. 

1/2" of foaminess

I will leave this out for the night and feed again in the morning.

One hour after feeding

It is looking pretty active. It's foaming up and making lots of tiny bubbles.  Let's see what it is doing in an hour.

Resurrecting the sourdough starter

I had 8 cups of starter,  dumped 5 cups,  bringing it down to 3 cups.  Then I added 1 1/2 ups of flour and 1 1/2 cups of water which has brought it up to almost 6 cups,  almost doubling it.  Let's see if this works.  Here it is after having just fed it.

Problems with my starter

For some reason, my sourdough breads are not rising as they used to.  I'm going to take a break from sourdough bread making and send my starter off to "boot camp"!

In this pic you can see there is a little action, small bubbles on top. I have put it in a wider mouthed vessel for now while I clean its regular jar and doctor the beast itself. The wide mouth container will also allow more surface area for capturing whatever natural wild yeast float into my kitchen.

I have poured out 1 cup of starter and will feed it soon. First I want to see how much action I have in it before feeding it.

Unfortunately, I had to abandon my wild yeast project. I tried to make bread with it, but it tasted like bread made from home-made playdoh. Not good!

I'll attempt it again some other time.

Tiny bubbles...

Looks like we have some action in our wild yeast experiment!

End of Day 2

This is how it looks after day one..

Day 2...Time to catch some microorganisms

Cover with some cheesecloth, held with an elastic, and wait.  Stir twice a day, keep bowl inside or outside.  In two days there should be bubbles.

Day 2...Ready to go

Here is the mixture of 1 1/2 cups of declorinated water and 2 cups of flour.

Day 1...A simple start

Today is Day 1 of my homemade sourdough starter experiment.  It all begins with 1 1/2 cups of water, left for 24 hours to declorinate.