Mondays at the Booth–playing catchup!

School is sort of kicking my butt.

I love it–it’s awesome, it’s exciting, but it’s bloody exhausting and I’m not 22 any more. (Er…and haven’t been for a really long time!) So when something has to give, it seems to be my life as a blogger. I’m not throwing in the towel just yet, but I definitely won’t be posting at the crazy rate I used to.

But I’m still blogging over at the Green Phone Booth every Monday–so come check things out over there! Last Monday I posted about using remedial sewing skills and thrift store purchases to make really cool and cheap Halloween costumes, and today I lamented about the passing of autumn…come on over!

Yet Another Autumn Cake Recipe (honey apple butter cake)

If y’all get bored with all these variations on my “what I put in my kids’ lunch” snack cakes, I apologize.  But this is where my own recipes go so I can find them.  And this is something fairly healthy that you can whip up really quickly and without any particularly fancy implements; I think I used a soup spoon to mix it. One doesn’t even need to dirty up the beaters.

This was another “experimental” cake that turned out lovely. As usual, my template was my “Bundt Cake of Endless Autumnal Substitution,” only I realized too late (and right after I sent my husband to the store for more oil and half-and-half) that I was almost out of sugar. But we had a lot of honey.

Apparently one can substitute honey for sugar pretty much one-for-one, up to about a cup, and then you have to start reducing other liquids. I only needed about 2/3 of a cup for this (and could honestly have gone with a little less, because the end result was very moist and almost a little too sweet) So I tried using all honey instead of sugar.  The only other adjustment to keep in mind with honey is that it browns faster than sugar, so it’s sometimes smart to reduce the baking temperature a little; I reduced this one to 325 instead of the original 350, and it baked almost as quickly.

I only made a half recipe, since I didn’t have quite enough apple butter for the whole deal (though I could have done maybe a cup of apple butter and a cup of canned pumpkin, and it would have probably been lovely).

Honey Apple Butter Cake

Preheat oven to 325

In a large bowl mix till smooth and maybe a little foamy:

• 1 cup apple butter
• 2/3 cup honey
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or other flavoring of choice)

Add (just till mixed):

• 1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour (or combination of white and wheat in whatever proportions you choose)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• (and/or other spices in lieu of the above, as you see fit and have in your spice rack)
• 1/2 cup or so of raisins, nuts, or other dried fruit

Pour into 9×9 square pan and bake 40 minutes or until top springs back when touched and knife inserted in center comes out clean.

******

I brought this into conducting seminar this morning; it went fairly quickly. Enjoy!

What I’m Reading (Catching up on Google Reader)

It’s been I-don’t-know-how-long since I’ve been able to settle down with my Google Reader subscriptions; I’m horribly behind on everything.  But in this blessed half-hour while the apple butter simmers down and the applesauce finishes in the canner (it’s been a steamy-apple-y kind of day) and the kids and husband are at the local park district Halloween event, I’m trying to get a little caught up…

So here’s what’s catching my interest:

More Stephen Colbert excellence, as he takes on the “Job-Killing EPA”

This one just makes me wonder…they did all these tests on public restrooms and found them all germy and gross; did they actually compare to average private restrooms?

If the world knew that global warming threatens our chocolate supply…would we be more careful?

I have a Windows Phone, but if I had an iPhone or Android, I’d be all over the new Fair Trade finder app…

I make roasted pumpkin seeds often, whenever I cut into a pumpkin (or acorn squash or pretty much anything with roastable seeds)–but I’ve never tried getting creative with the seasonings. I’ll have to try this!

When charitable giving does more harm than good…

And a recipe for making one’s own pumpkin pie spice.

Mocha-banana muffins? Count me in…I’m not a vegan, but this would easily transfer to ordinary-dairy yogurt, I’m sure. Wow.  I don’t generally stock instant coffee, but I’d bet that substituting strong coffee for half the almond (or dairy) milk would work too, though it wouldn’t have the caffeine kick of the original instant coffee recipe.  A very creative way to get one’s morning kick!

Speaking of awesome breakfast recipes–if I thought Crunchy Betty only gave crunchy cosmetic recipes, this one for Carrot Cake Oatmeal blows that out of the water. Especially since I planted carrots this year, forgot about them, didn’t know when to harvest them, and wound up with this strange bulbous thing more than two inches in diameter (forgot to photograph it!)…

Betsy the Eco-Novice has a really good post about trying to find a natural/eco-type bed without breaking the bank. Makes sense–even those of us who don’t get anywhere near enough sleep probably spend a quarter to a third of our lives in bed, and our kids are closer to a half…

I entered Food In Jars’ giveaway for a Wusthof vegetable knife, since I think Wusthof cutlery is da bomb, but since there are already well over 1000 entries I think it unlikely that I will be tapped.

(Holy Cow, still over 1000 in the unread pile…this is gonna take a while.)

 

 

Turning into a Pumpkin

‘Tis the season. Pumpkin recipes abound…

If you are foresighted enough (and have time) to bake and puree the flesh of an actual real-live pumpkin, awesome! Bake it, puree it, and freeze it in half-cup portions–I put them into muffin tins and freeze them, and then take them out and store them all winter to pull out whenever I need some.

And the recipes themselves? Here are a few of my favorite things to do with pumpkin:

Pumpkin French Toast. I tried this last winter, and it’s amazing; give it a shot! Or, similar but different, Pumpkin Eggnog Bread Pudding.

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal. You can do the overnight steel-cut version, or just put a couple of spoonfuls of pureed pumpkin into your easy microwave oatmeal.

Pumpkin Pie without the Pie. Pumpkin custard is a favorite in our house, and it’s amazingly healthful. We wouldn’t dream of saving it for Thanksgiving–we eat it all winter.

One of my husband’s favorites: Crockpot Baked Pumpkin with Apples.

And of course, Pumpkin Cake is sort of a no-brainer, right? And Pumpkin Gingerbread?

So….bon appetit!

 

 

 

Mondays at the Booth: Responding to the New York Times

Last week sometime several of the bloggers at The Green Phone Booth were contacted by a writer for the New York Times who wanted to do an article on the intersection of sustainability and the rough economy…I was interviewed, but he didn’t end up using anything of mine for the article. Which is fine, because he did use stuff from another of the bloggers, and she is pretty ticked off, because he sort of spun everything to say what he wanted to say and left out pretty much everything that was Her Whole Point…

Come over to the Green Phone Booth and read our response!

Crockpot Chicken Mushroom Piccata recipe

I’ve posted about this before, but over the past year and a half I’ve refined the recipe a good bit. This is one of our favorite crockpot meals, and one of the few that actually gets semi-rave reviews from my mostly taciturn husband. (His idea of “praise” is “This isn’t bad.” Humph.)

So, another really good toss-it-in-and-have-dinner-by-nightfall meal:

Chicken Mushroom Piccata Recipe 

Place the following in the crockpot, more or less in order:

• as many chicken pieces, boneless or not, as will fit into the pot.  I did 4 breasts and 3 large boneless thighs. Frozen is fine, better even if your pot cooks hot.
• Prepare the night before in a bowl if you want to be really quick in the morning: half a pound sliced mushrooms, half a chopped onion, 2-3 tbs capers, 1/2 tsp paprika, 1/2 tsp black pepper, a couple of shakes hot pepper sauce (optional, but we like spiciness), 1/2 tsp salt (also optional), 1/2 cup white wine or sherry, 2 tbs lemon juice.  Before cooking, dump all this into the pot with the chicken.
• 2-3 thin lemon slices placed on top (or maybe a little lemon zest instead?) if you want to be really fancy. (I pretty much always skip this step.)

Cook on low 8 hours or so.  Serve over rice or pasta. If you like thicker sauce, you can make a slurry out of equal parts cool water and flour, drizzled into the crock while stirring, to thicken. Up to you…

That’s it. (I should specify that I didn’t really measure any of this stuff, just sort of glug-glugged and guessed.  I doubt it matters much.) Keep in mind that the ingredient list is fairly fluid–in order for it to be “piccata” I think you sort of need the capers and lemon juice. A vegetarian could probably double the shrooms and skip the chicken. You could use red wine instead of white and then you’d call it Coq au Vin (although there’s a better recipe for that here). The paprika is one of my favorite things, but it’s not absolutely necessary.  But this is delicious and company-worthy. Or just something nice for dinner that you can then eat for the next few days, or stretch into soup, or all kinds of things.

I love fall, when the crockpot comes out…

Having a cow doesn’t mean the right to drink its milk. Apparently.

No, this is not a vegan plea for animal compassion or assertion that it’s not our right to keep animals for milk, eggs, meat, whatever.  If it were, I could have a little –honestly, a lot of–respect for it.

No, this is a Wisconsin judge (what is it with Wisconsin these days, anyway?) asserting that people who own a cow do not have any fundamental right to drink the milk from that cow, but that the government can and does have jurisdiction over this issue.

Read and weep.

Unbefrickinglievable.

Viva La Broke-Ass Grouch!

I read Broke-ass’s Grist article “memo to ecovores, it’s cheaper being green” back when it came out in December, when I was still keeping up with my Google Reader and before I fell out of the blog-sky.

Then today Green Bean forwarded this New York Times article, which I started reading, and even without the strong language I immediately recognized the Grouch’s inimitable style and story.

Somewhere in the interim, she published a book. Where have I been? And she has a blog, which I also missed.

I’m delighted to have re-connected with her writing…she is, in my opinion, one of the heroes of the world, an ordinary person in this crappy economy trying to make it work.

Easiest Crockpot Apple Butter

Last Saturday we went apple picking. One of our annual pilgrimages.

We now have an unimaginable number of apples in our garage–I will be canning and saucing and preserving for weeks. I’ll try to throw up some recipes as I go…

This is the first, and the easiest: Apple Butter made in the crockpot. The best part of this is that you don’t have to peel the apples or run it through the food mill. And if you have one of those stick immersion blenders you don’t even have to take it out of the crockpot at any point in the process. It takes some babysitting, but other than that it’s incredibly easy.

Crockpot Apple Butter

Cut up enough apples to fill your crockpot (mine’s a 5-quart). Leave peels on unless you really want to remove them.

Cook on low for about 6 hours.

Add spices (for mine I did about 1 tsp each cinnamon and ginger, with a few sprinkles of ground clove) and brown or white sugar to taste (how much depends on how sweet your apples are). Stir well

Blend with an immersion blender till smooth. (Or remove to a blender or food processor in batches.)

With the lid offset a little, or propped open with a chopstick, continue to cook on low for a few more hours, stirring every hour or so (though you probably don’t need to). When it gets thick enough that you can drop a spoonful into it and have it stay mounded, you’re done. Turn off crockpot.

Can in a hot water bath by whatever instructions you want to use–this got me about 2 pints total of apple butter; just under, actually.

Give this a try…it’s really easy. And by the way, if you start it the night before you can let it sit on warm overnight and then start up again in the morning.

Military testing near a wildlife refuge? REALLY?

Assateague Island is a beautiful barrier island near Ocean City, Maryland. It is host to dozens of species of birds and mammals, particularly a flock of wild horses that have lived there for I believe centuries. A beautiful place to visit, a beautiful place to know exists whether you visit it or not.

So check this out. Unbelievable:

Pocomoke-based Hardwire LLC, a locally owned and operated company that develops and manufactures a wide variety of military-grade armor for a variety of uses from buildings and bridges to armaments for the U.S. military, has requested a special exception to utilize a remote area in Worcester County for the detonation of military-grade explosives as part of a testing program. The special exception request was scheduled to come before the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals last night, but before the private sector could make its pitch to the county, the Assateague Coastal Trust (ACT) was already rallying the troops in opposition to the proposal.

Worcester County is considering leasing a portion of the publicly-owned 400-acre tract along the Chincoteague Bay to Hardwire for the detonation of military-grade explosives as part of the company’s testing program for new armor systems. While no one appears to question the validity of the tests and their potential benefit to the armed services, or the economic value of the local company in terms of job creation, ACT is questioning the wisdom of detonating explosives in the environmentally-sensitive testing area.

“Do you think setting off 25-50-pound explosives over and over again in the Resource Protection zone of Worcester County along the Chincoteague Bay is compatible with the general character and intent of the Resource Protection District?” the ACT’s call to action memo reads.

Um, no. I do not think it is compatible with the general character and intent of the Resource Protection zone. Nor, I suspect would any intelligent thinking human being.

And now some effing morons are trying to convince the public that Blowing Up Bombs directly across the bay from the Island is a great idea.

I am trying to find information about whom to call or write to; I can’t help thinking that while the locals are the ones with the most clout in, duh, local government, an area which depends as heavily on tourism as Ocean City and its environs do might respond to noises from those who visit and feed that great machine of tourism. There is also a Facebook page on the topic for those who wish to follow it more closely…

UPDATE: Aha! from the Facebook page:

If you will also stand up and say NO Military Testing Facilities in Worcester County, then please write a letter to the Worcester County Commissioners c/o Bud Church, President. 1 West Market Street, Snow Hill, MD 21863

There. We have a name and an address to which to write.