A few kitchen things!

Happy Memorial Day! We’ve spent the extra day getting some chores done and getting ready to make burgers and yam fries for dinner!  Plus, I’m getting my hair chopped off in a couple hours! I don’t have a plan and am trying a new stylist, so hopefully all goes well! Cross your fingers for me 🙂

Check out our new grill for the stovetop! I am really excited about this thing! The other side has a flat griddle, which will be wonderful for PANCAKES!

In the pan next to the grill, there are some onions cooking down for a really fun and delicious new sauce.  We had rhubarb in our CSA box this past week and I have never cooked with it, so I wanted to do something other than just Strawberry Rhubarb pie.  I found this recipe from Gourmet magazine that used golden raisins, onions and rhubarb to make a chutney to go along with some pork.  This turned out really great! I got distracted and forgot to get a picture of the final product, but here’s the chutney as it cooks down:

It worked really well with the pork, and we served it with some parmesan toast and some grilled asparagus (way to go grill pan!!) Also check out my meat thermometer at work…

the pork was cooked perfectly!! I cooked it to 160 degrees, the setting for Pork-Medium.  Then let it rest, wrapped in some foil and it came up to a perfectly moist, thick-cut pork chop. Yum!

Earlier in the week, we used up some ciabatta rolls and made italian garlic croutons to go on a salad with: lettuce mix from Full Circle Farm, frozen popcorn shrimp, random veggies and a parmesan dressing.  A very satisfying and light-ish dinner (the popcorn shrimp was not the healthiest thing we could have chosen, but it hit the spot and is exactly what we were craving!).  The croutons are super easy…tossed in a little olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and italian seasoning.  Baked in a low oven. The ciabbata bread got nice and crispy on the outside, but kept a tiny bit of chewiness inside.  I almost lost track of them, but managed to pull them out just in time to avoid burning the edges!

As promised, I tried out my mom’s Crockpot apple butter.  Well, it comes from a local newspaper at home, but it was easy and I am excited to try it on some toast!

Slow-Cooker Apple Butter

• 5-6 pounds apples – peeled, cored and chopped
• 4 cups sugar
• 4tsp cinnamon
• 1/4tsp each ground cloves, salt and ground nutmet

1. Mix everything together in a large bowl and add to the crockpot.  You should use enough apples to have your Crockpot heaping full.
2. Cover and cook on high for 1 hour.
3. Reduce to low heat and slow-cook for at least 9 hours. (I planned this poorly and woke up at 4am to turn it onto “warm” so it wouldn’t burn while I finished sleeping).
4. Remove lid and continue to slow cook until thick and brown with no liquid left.
5. Even though the recipe doesn’t call for this, I wanted smooooth apple butter, so a little before there was no liquid left I pureed it with my amazing stick blender and then let it  bubble away for a little longer.
6. Fill containers.  The recipe says you should use sterile jars and boil them in a hot water bath to seal.  Neither my mom or I did this.  A) I don’t have the equipment. B) I don’t have the patience.
7. The butter will thicken a bit when it cools.  I put one container in the fridge and the rest in the freezer.  It made about 7 small containers of apple butter.  And it is GORGEOUS.

This is what the apples looked like after I woke up in the morning:
 

And the final smooth product:

Use this apple butter in things like my mom’s pork dinner.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Family, Fun, Leftovers, Magical Magical Animal, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.