Apple Raisin Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce

Sense of Home Kitchen

It is nearly apple season, but not yet, at least not around these parts.  For some reason, as soon as September hit, I started craving apples.  I can't wait to sink my teeth into a crunchy red apple, letting the juice run down my chin.  And yet, the apples are not ripe, I will have to wait for another couple of weeks and a good hard frost to pass before I can pick apples.

So I turned to the applesauce I canned last fall and I started thinking that applesauce paired with golden raisins in a bread pudding with caramel sauce poured over the top would be delicious, which is odd because I have never been a huge bread pudding fan.  However, once I started thinking about the combination, I couldn't get it out of my head, and I'm glad, it was just as delicious as I had imagined.  It is not crisp like a fresh picked apple, but it sure tastes good while impatiently waiting.

I took a recipe I had seen in an old Bon Appétit magazine for pumpkin bread pudding and reworked it to fit my desire for apple raisin bread pudding.  The results may not be exactly photogenic, but the taste of creamy apple bread with caramel sauce is out of this world good.

Apple Raisin Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce
~From the Sense of Home Kitchen, adapted from Bon Appétit, November 2000~
Makes 6 servings

Bread Pudding
2 cups  half and half
2 cups lightly sweetened chunky applesauce (homemade, if available), excess liquid drained through a fine sieve
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
10 cups 1/2-inch cubes day old challah (egg bread)
1/2 cup golden raisins

Caramel Sauce
1 1/4 cups (packed) dark brown sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup whipping cream

For the bread pudding
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Whisk half and half, drained chunky applesauce, dark brown sugar, eggs, cinnamon, and vanilla extract in a large bowl until well blended.  Fold in bread cubes.  Stir in golden raisins.  Transfer mixture to an 11 x 7-inch glass or enamel covered stoneware baking dish.  Let stand 15 minutes.  Bake bread pudding until tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 40 minutes.

For caramel sauce
Whisk brown sugar and butter in a heavy medium-sized sauce pan over medium heat until the butter melts.  Whisk in cream and stir until sugar dissolves and sauce is smooth, about 3 minutes.  Resist the temptation to stick a finger into this hot, yummy sauce until it has cooled.

Serve the bread pudding warm with the caramel sauce drizzled over the top.


Sense of Home Kitchen / Recipes / Desserts

Pressure Canning Chicken Stock Or Is That Chicken Broth?

Sense of Home Kitchen

With this year's chickens in the freezer it is time to take out of the freezer any chickens left over from last fall.  Which makes this the time of year I pressure can chicken stock, or is that chicken broth?  Although they seem like the same thing, there is a difference between chicken stock and chicken broth.  Chicken stock has a richer flavor and when used to deglaze a pan it will bind the pan drippings, making it a good substitute for butter in sauces.  The reason for this is gelatin is released when bones are simmered for a long time.

Chicken stock is made by simmering chicken bones for several hours, approximately six to eight, to release the gelatin. The back and neck are good parts for this, as are the breast bones with little meat left on them.  Chicken broth on the other hand is made from the meat, as well as other parts.  For broth the bird is only simmered for approximately 3 hours.

So why do I call what I made chicken stock even though I used the whole bird?  Quite simply because of the length of time I simmered the bird.  Look at the gelatin in that cooled stock in the above photo.  When stock is refrigerated it will turn to a gel consistency, scrape the hardened fat off the top and you are left with a very flavorful and nutritious gelee that turns liquid when heated.  I like to use the whole chicken as well as celery tops, onion ends, mushroom stems, garlic, herbs, and even a few carrot ends.  For several months before making stock I save these ends while cooking and place them in a freezer bag in the deep freeze.  Then on the day I make stock I take the bag out of the freezer and place the vegetable pieces straight into the pot.

Making and pressure canning stock is really best done over the course of two days.  The first day the chicken or bones are covered with water, vegetable pieces are placed in the pot and slowly simmered for approximately six to eight hours.  Any chicken meat on the bones will be falling off and the carcass will easily fall apart.    I do this both in my crock pot and on my stove top since I always make several batches at the same time.  Once the stock is done and cooled enough to handle, strain it through a fine sieve, discard the vegetables and bones and save the pieces of meat.  I then place the meat in 2 cup measures, in freezer containers, this provides for a quick meal, such as soups, casseroles, or sandwiches later.  Then the stock is placed in the refrigerator overnight, uncovered.  The following day scrape the solid fat off the top of the stock, reheat the stock, prepare your jars and pressure can according to the directions that came with your canner.  Mine says to can at 11 pounds of pressure for 25 minutes for quart jars, however, yours may be different and if you are at a higher altitude you will need to adjust for that.


Sense of Home Kitchen / Homemade Living / Kitchen and Pantry

Hollandaise Sauce

Sense of Home Kitchen

Summer time is a busy time around here, it seems we always have some place else to be or some project to work on (currently we are preparing for drain tile to be put in our basement) and there is no time for complicated dishes, the simpler the better.  I'm either battling slugs in the garden, canning garden produce, stocking the pantry for winter, butchering chickens or I am headed across town to my new job managing my parents health food store.  Life has slowed down for me, I only work part-time now, but I haven't really noticed the slower pace yet since the late summer, early fall, season is so full.

Yesterday I canned 14 pints of our zesty tomato salsa, made from our garden produce.  This may still be a busy life, but I love spending the day harvesting, chopping, cooking and canning.  All that future food preparation does not leave much time for preparing the evening's meal though.  When I thought of what to make for dinner, I remembered the 3 dozen eggs we have in our refrigerator, we had just received another dozen eggs from friends who raise chickens for the eggs.

Somewhere, sometime in my past I had a hollandaise sauce that was quite lemony and I wanted to repeat that experience. Besides, I hate to admit it, but, I have never made a hollandaise sauce and found the thought rather intimidating.  Which, of course, meant I had to give it a try, never be intimated by food.  I found this sauce to be very simple to make and the end result made it taste like you had slaved over dinner, or breakfast if you choose.

I searched through a few of my cookbooks and found a basic hollandaise sauce recipe in, what else, Mark Bittman's cookbook, "How to Cook Everything".  I made a few adjustments, more lemon, a little smoked paprika, and I used a combination of both the stove top and the blender method.

With the sauce under way I quickly fried an egg, a slice of Canadian Bacon, and a slice of fresh tomato.  Placed on a toasted, crusty piece of bread, with the hollandaise poured over the top this is a meal fit for a king.

Hollandaise Sauce
~from the Sense of Home Kitchen, adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything"~
Makes about 1 cup

The key to this recipe is to start with really fresh eggs that you trust, preferably eggs from a local farm.  This way you don't have to worry so much about how hot you are heating your eggs and if they are safe.  Try this sauce poured over a fried egg, Canadian bacon, tomato, open-faced sandwich.

3 egg yolks
Salt
6 tablespoons butter, softened
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

Put the egg yolks, 2 tablespoons water, and a pinch of salt in a small saucepan over very low heat.  Heat, whisking constantly,until light, foamy and slightly thickened, about 2 minutes.  In a separate pan, over low heat, or in the microwave, melt the butter; careful not to let it brown.  Combine the heated egg yolks, lemon juice, and paprika in the blender, and begin blending.  While the blender is running slowly drizzle in the butter, the mixture will continue to thicken.  Taste and add more paprika if desired.


Sense of Home Kitchen / Recipes / Sauces / Eggs / Breakfast 

Slugs in the Kitchen Garden

Sense of Home Kitchen

With all the rain we have had this summer we have an unusually high number of slugs.  Thanks to our cold winters our slugs are small, nothing like they grow them in the Northwest, but they do a tremendous amount of damage to the produce.  They have eaten 1/3 of a good sized cucumber, the green bean leaves look more like lace than leaves, and it is a race to see who can get to the tomatoes first, which means I pick tomatoes before they are completely ripe, cheating us out of that extra flavor they get ripening on the vine.   To make sure we have enough produce to preserve for winter use I have had to become more aggressive in my efforts to rid the garden of slugs.  

I was recently at a local community harvest festival where there were booths set up for everything from gardening to canning to making cheese to dying wool.  I settled in at the gardening booth for a while asking various questions, but what I was really anxious to learn was how to control my growing slug population.  The horticulturist I spoke with said that slugs do not like to crawl across sand or gravel, this jogged my memory all the way back to a conversation I had with the man we hired to till our garden this spring.  He suggested we add a few bags of sand to the garden to make the soil more friable (we have lots of clay).  I had intended to wait until we tilled again to add the sand, but I figured now might be a better time if it discourages the slugs.  So off to Tractor Supply Company I headed and came home with two good sized bags of sand.  We just sprinkled it over the garden like we were sprinkling powdered sugar on a a cake.  Some fell on the tomato vines, the tomatoes, the beans, potatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and some on the soil itself.

This trick has worked amazingly well.  The slugs are now avoiding the areas of sand and when I do find them they are not looking as plump and healthy as they were before.  My next move was to use beer traps, I say let them die happy.  The beer traps also work very well, the slugs crawl into the beer and, some say, dry out from the beer.  Or perhaps they are just attracted to the smell and end up drowning in the beer.  Either way we have reduced the population considerably.

Tonight when picking tomatoes I noticed that there are a few frogs in the garden helping us reduce our slug population as well.  With the combination of these methods to reduce or discourage slugs, I have seen much larger fruit and vegetable yields.  I now have 25 quarts of whole tomatoes canned and enough tomatoes to make and can salsa for the winter, I would not want to go all winter without my homemade salsa.  I also hope to make and can several jars of tomato soup this fall.

Sense of Home Kitchen / Homemade Living / In the Garden