Dehydrator Fun

I haven't blogged in forever. I fail. Anyhow.... Susie and I agreed to update our neglected blogs, so here I go:

When my tax refund arrived, I headed right to EverydayDish, my favorite source for amazing cooking equipment. One of my purchases was an Excalibur food dehydrator, which I bought with a mind to use it for some raw food recipes. However, I am discovering that it makes a great incubator for soy yogurt, tempeh, salt rising bread starter, and other fermented projects that need a warm temperature below what the oven can offer.

My mother used to dehydrate lots of apples when I was a kid. (We had a bunch of trees.) Yesterday, I processed two big bags of apples in the dehydrator. Not only are they tasty on their own, but they can be used to make a delightfully unhealthy treat - fried pies. Around here, THE filling for fried pies is based on dried apples. This is my great-aunt's non-recipe:

Take 1 quart of dried apples, add just a little water, and cook in a saucepan till tender. You can add sugar, cinnamon, or whatever else you like. Mash the results until you have a fairly thick paste.

Make a double batch of your favorite pie crust. Take a ball of dough (golf ball size or bigger), and roll out into a flat circle. Cover one side with the apple mixture (leave space around the edges), then fold over and seal with a fork.

To cook: Heat vegetable shortening in a dutch oven - maybe an inch or so of melted fat. Fry the pies until brown on one side, then flip, and fry the other side. The second side goes a lot faster. If this is too terrifying, brush with melted margarine and bake at 400 until they look done.

Enjoy!

Vegan MoFo Day 13: The Complete Book of Pies

I wish I was able to do the Vegan MoFo Iron Chef Challenge that Katie is orchestrating, but life and travel keep getting in the way. (I just drove back to Tennessee.) Maybe next week. In the meanwhile...

I have been eyeing the Spiced Apple Pie recipe in Julie Hasson's The Complete Book of Pies. It's on the cover of the book. As I had all the ingredients, I decided to give it a go tonight. If you really need another reason to buy this book, here you have it. This apple pie manages to be traditional and homey at the same time that it is complex and interesting. (It's not even finished cooling, but I had to cut into it!) I was lazy and had no shortening in the freezer, so I made her Sweet Oil Crust - excellent texture, foolproof, and fast.

Julie's book is not vegan, but it has many, many vegan recipes, all of which are clearly marked. And I strongly suspect that, with a little creativity, even the recipes not marked vegan-friendly can be veganized.

Vegan MoFo Day 4: Saturday shout-out

I don't have time for a proper post, so I'll give a shout-out to 2 excellent recipes from other MoFo participants which we made today:

Breakfast: Julie Hasson's Creamy Rice Pudding made with hemp milk. We had it with roasted hazelnuts, dried cranberries, and cinnamon. It took me right back to bygone days of rice pudding in New York City diners, except better!

Lunch: Bryanna Clark Grogan's Caponata from her book, Nonna's Italian Kitchen. (If you do not own this book, buy it now.) When T was in Sicily, one of his favorite things was caponata, and he doesn't even like eggplant. As we had a lot of eggplant from our Community Supported Agriculture box, we decided to give it a try. Bryanna never disappoints, and this was totally delicious. We used all the optional ingredients. For the olives, I pulled out my precious jar of mesquite-smoked, almond-stuffed olives from the Queen Creek Olive Mill, which the wonderful Veg-in-Training sent to us.

Thanks Julie, Bryanna, and ViT for such a tasty day so far. We've got piles of errands to do, so dinner may be cheap Mexican on Nolensville Road.