Apple Pie

My new recipe for this week is a Skillet Apple Pie. I live apple pie in the in the fall; in many ways it *is* fall to me. The combination of baking butter, apples, cinnamon, crust: when it all comes together, especially on a cool night with the windows open it just defines the feeling, the sense of leaving summer behind and looking forward to colder weather to come.

I picked this recipe out because I wanted to make my first apple pie, but was intrigued by the possibility of not having to do all of the work required around making two crusts and then running the oven for an hour an a half to bake the thing. It's out of Cooks Illustrated (Number 94, September and October 2008). The recipe speeds the process of making the pie by sweating the apples in butter on the stovetop to cook them down. Once they've been cooked down a bit (I think I cooked them for about 10 minutes) you add some additional liquid ingredients (maple syrup, apple cider + cornstarch) stir and let them cool for a bit. Then you put the crust on top and bake the whole thing in the oven.

This is really a pandowdy and not a true pie, but for the first pie of the season, it seemed like it was worth the effort. (A pandowdy is a fruit dessert where the fruit is cooked on the stovetop, a crust is rolled out and placed over the cooked fruit and then cut strategically to allow steam to escape and juice to come through and then the whole thing is baked in the oven to brown the crust.)

I chose to use my cast iron skillet (10 inch) because it can do the stovetop->oven so perfectly. Have I said how much I love my cast iron? I get so much use out of these pans, it's hard to not consider them the most perfect pan ever created for the kitchen. I live my All Clad, it's great too, but if I could only choose one pan for the rest of my life, I would go with my cast iron every time.

The details of the recipe are here:

Crust

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon table salt

2 tablespoons shortening (chilled)

6 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

3-4 tablespoons ice water

Filling

1/2 cup apple cider

1/3 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons cornstarch

2 1/2 pounds sweet and tart apples (about medium), peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2 inche wedges

The crust comes first. The recipe says to use a food processor, which I'm sure is more convenient, but I don't own one. So I did it the old-fashioned way, the same way I've made my pastry crusts for the last 30 years now. I mixed the flour, sugar and salt together and then cut the buttter and shortening into it until I got the "coarse crumb" texture. Then I added the water, starting with 3 Tbs. I think that this was perhaps a bit too much, because the dough was a bit sticky. But since I didn't want to over mix it and I knew that I didn't have to do a lot with it (it just goes on top) I let it be. I wrapped the dough in a ziploc bag and put it in the fridge for about an hour.

I used Golden Delicious apples. That was what I had, but I've found for these sorts of baked apple recipes they are my favorites. Somtimes I like to use a red apple to provide more contrast (Jonathans are my very favorite red for baking, though Winesaps are good too) but Goldens by themselves provide just the right amount of sweet, crunch and tang all by themselves for most baking recipes.

So I cored and peeled the apples and cut them into moderately thin slices (about six per half apple). Melt the butter in the frying pan and then the apples go in. I added a pinch of kosher salt here even though the recipe doesn't call for it. I believe that salt is an intricate ingredient in most everything, but especially in these sorts of sweet dishes; it really brings out the flavor if it's used correctly. The goal here is to sweat the apples, not to saute them. The heat is low, and you're just cooking the apples down, breaking down the internal cell structure to release all of the flavor. You don't want to cook them hot because the sugar that they release will burn and ruin the whole thing.

Preheat the oven to 500°

Once the apples were sweating, I mixed up the liquid ingredients. Basically you just mix the cider, syrup, lemon juice and cornstarch with a whisk and hold them. I didn't have any cider, which I'm sure would have added to the flavor, but I just used 1/3 cup water instead.

After the apples had sweated pretty well (it took about 10 minutes to get to the texture I wanted) I turned off the heat, added the wet ingredients, mixed them and set the whole frying pan aside to focus on the crust.

I rolled the crust out; I was right to think that the dough was too sticky. But between the cold dough and using enough flour, I managed to roll it out to about 10 inches round.

Next is to get the crust on top of the frying pan. I liberally floured the top of the rolled crust and rolled it around my rolling pin. Then I moved it over the frying pan and unrolled it. The recipe says to cut the crust to allow steam to escape and to provide some area for the liquid to bubble up from below. The recommended cut is to cut in half, all the way across one way and then in thirds all the way across the other way (perpendicular).

Next into the oven, and then the fun begins. The smell of apple pie baking is somethin all of its own, the mingling of the apple, cinnamon, caramelizing sugar and pastry smells all mingling into a wonderful mix this is a true snapshot of fall, especially on a cool night with the windows open.

Then, after about 20 minutes, it's done. You can tell by watching the crust till it gets that perfect golden-brown color. Take it out, set it on a cooling rack and give it some time to set and solidify a bit. I'm sure it's good with ice cream or whipped cream or whatever, but to me a true apple pie needs absolutely nothing. And I wasn't disappointed by this one. It was divine, and given how little work it actually took, I was in heaven. At least for a little while.

Shortbread Cookies

New goal for the fall: bake at least one new recipe each week. Try to write about it...

It's so nice that the hottest summer in Austin's history has finally come to a close. I guess it says something about how hot the summer was to have a day like today, where it's a mere 90 degrees and have it feel so nice.

Anyway, now that the summer is over, and we don't have to worry about paying for AC to fight off those 107 degree afternoon temperatures, I can finally use the oven again. I've already baked bread twice in the last week, which is such a joy. Though one good side effect of three months forced abstinence from homecmade bread, is that you realize how great it really is, and you just how much you really did miss it.

Today's new recipe is going to be shortbread cookies. I happened to catch the "Everyday Baking" show on PBS yesterday afternoon and this is one of the things that they were making. Now ordinary shortbreads are good, but what really caught my attention was when they used the plain shortbread dough to make cranberry-orange cookies by adding orange zest and dried cranberries. That sounds good and it sounds like fall. Oh, and Patty is crazy for cranberries, so

that will win me some brownie points too ;-)

The recipe turns out to be really easy. You can see it yourself here:

http://www.pbs.org/everydayfood/baking/recipes/icebox_shortbread.html

it's your basic shortbread cookie recipe:

1 cup butter (room temperature)

1 cup confectioners sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups flour

You mix the first three ingredients until they're combined and form a dough. Then you mix in the flour just to get a good dough. You definitely don't want to overmix on the flour because you want cumbly shortbread and if you mix too much on the flour it will make them tough.

After that, I divided the dough in half. One half I left plain, the other I mixed in about 1/2 cup cranberries and the zest of once orange. Then you take each half and roll it into a log using wax paper. It's sitting in the refrigerator now cooling; I'll do the baking here in a while after it's gotten

nice and firm.

--- Later ----

Wow, these turned out excellent! Even better than I had hoped/expected. Much better.

They were really easy to make; you just unwrapped the wax paper and cut the log into slices on a cutting board. About 3/8 inch thick I would say was perfect. From there, it was easy to just lay them on a cookie sheet and pop them into the 350° oven. In my oven, it took about 20 - 25 minutes; I like them with just a little bit of brown on them (I think it gives them more flavor). I'm attaching

some pictures.

And the flavor, wow! Especially the ones with the orange zest in them. The flavor really came through. The cranberries were an excellent complement, providing some texture that you don't get from the cookies themselves. I think

that adding some pecans might make them even better.

And the plain ones were great too. The flavor and texture of the baked cookies is really, really good.

Rating: ****

Difficulty: easy

Training in the Austin Summer

It's not even quite the end of July yet and already we've had something like 40 100+ degree days this summer. I've been in Austin for 20 years now, and this is, hands down, the hottes summer I've lived through yet. And we haven't even gotten to August yet.

I have to admit, that I came out of the Chicago Marathon in the fall kind of worn out. I didn't feel like I really recovered my running speed until recently. And even then, I'm not sure if speed is the right word or not. I'd like to think that there's still room to get faster, but at some point I'll have to accept that all I can do is to try to stave off getting slower. I hope I'm not there yet, but I can't tell for sure.

Anyway, training through the Austin summer is always a tough thing and this summer is the hardest one yet. I gave up running at lunch back in June. The real heat started sometime around the middle of that month, and so I started running exclusively in the mornings. However, I was still swimming at the UT Swim Center three or four days a week, so that limited the time I could focus on running. Once the Swim Center closed (it closes every August for maintenance) I was better able to set my schedule to run regularly in the morning. They closed it early this year, so I have had the last couple of weeks and have up until after Labor day to train on my own.

My general schedule has been run: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; swim Wednesday and Friday mornings; bike on Saturday if I can. Monday is nominally a swimming day, but I usually end up laying in bed thinking, "I need a day off..."

I feel like my running fitness has been finally coming back to me. I try to do hard intervals or tempo for my Tuesday/Thursday runs and then run long with the guys on Sunday. I should do a race at some point to see if I can gauge my running fitness, but then again every time I think about running a race in 80+ degrees with lots of humidity, I think again. Especially if I'm paying to run ;-) I can suffer like that for free, so maybe the races will have to wait until September or October when we (maybe?) start to see some cooler weather.

Black CD player

I had to grab a cd player to put in my room this evening. I got the old black one from the guest bedroom. Now I'm sitting here listening to my Loreena McKennett "Nights from the Alhambra" CD. But as I put the cd in and started to turn it on, something took me back...

I didn't know that a piece of plastic and electronics could hold a key to my past like this, but as I turned it on, I was almost magically transported back in time, way back to an earlier version of myself, circa 1991 - 1994, driving on those dark roads out 2222 to 360 and then up Shepherd's Mountain again. Back to sit in my dark office, in the dark quiet high-tech interior of my Tivoli office. Hacking away at some sort of code or build in the dark, listening to Pink Floyd, Tish Hinojosa or Todd Rundgren while I tried to help make a crazy dream of success around distributed systems management company come true.

I don't know exactly what it was about flipping the switch past FM and AM and then to CD, or perhaps the little high-pitched almost screech that the cd makes as it starts to turn, but it was an immediate feeling, "I've been here before; I can smell the carpet and the office furniture, I can see the world in it's sleeping darkness outside of the window in front of me as I stare at the bright-lit text on the screen in front of me."

I remember that feeling, being outside in the summer air and staring up at the stars outside of the Shepherd's Mountain building. I would usually head back to the office around 10:00, after getting Kelson down to sleep and telling Patty goodnight. Then it was work alone and in the dark until one, two, three or sometimes even later. Sometimes I listened to Larry Monroe on KUT; on Saturdays it used to be Howie Ritchey's "Alternative Wave" (after "The Hearts of Space" finished at midnight) in a KUT program schedule that is at least 17 years gone...

I remember best Pink Floyd's "The Division Bell," Tish Hinojosa's "Aquella Noche," and Todd Rundgren's "Second Wind." Those CDs carried me through the pain of my part of delivering 2.0:

if I have to be alone
then I should make my mind serene
after all you're born alone, you die alone
you might as well spend every moment in between alone

I can remember those nights with my mind, and I do from time to time. But the more visceral level of memory is locked up in those feelings, the memories of the smell, the night air, the darkness, the sense of loneliness that remains in me forever, just looking for a key to unlock and let it out. A black Sharp CD player is just such a key.

Speedwork

I haven't been running enough lately. Ever since the marathon last fall, I haven't been able to really get into a groove. I've had a couple of 12-15 mile weeks, but mostly I have a hard time getting out for three runs a week, and I haven't managed to do any kind of consistent interesting workouts, like speedwork, hills or tempo runs. I keep telling myself that I need to get out after work at least once a week and go to the track. The other option is to get out early in the morning, which is a great option with only one downside. It's not happening; no matter how many times I tell myself I'm getting up early, it never happens. I can manage to get out of bed for swim practice, but for running I just can't seem to do it.

Anyway, finally today I got over to the track after work. This morning started out cold and rainy, or drizzly at least. By by late morning, the cold front moved on through and it turned into one of those days that you dream about as a runner. Sparkling blue skies, low humidity and temperatures in the 60s. By the time I left work it was dark, but still beautiful outside.

I've been feeling pretty slow lately. Ever since I got well into my marathon training back in July, I haven't really done any speed work or intervals or anything like that. My runs lately, which have mostly been 4 milers with the occasional 6 or 8 miler have just felt slow. I keep telling myself that it's just how I feel, and that once I get back to the track things will feel better. Well tonight dispelled that idea pretty quickly.

I ran an easy mile to warm up and then did two sets of the standard Texas Iron drills and strides. My plan at that point was to do 6x400 with a 200 recovery between each. I've done enough 400s at the track to know that I should be able run around 1:35 and even down to 1:25 on a good day. However, tonight wasn't a good day. My first interval was around 1:45. Which might not be so bad, except that it hurt like I was running hard. And the others didn't get any better. I stopped at 4 because I didn't want to go on an more; they were all around 1:45 - 1:50.

I suppose that I could use the excuse that I had swum a hard workout in the morning, my first in two weeks. But it wasn't like I felt that bad or tired before running. I've just lost my speed it seems. But now that I know, I guess it's incentive to be back at the track every week. At least I know that things have to get better.

Oh, and one benefit of being out tonight. It really was a beautiful evening. In fact, as it got darker, I could actually see my shadow on the track cast by the moon.