#171 Excellent Fairly Low Calorie Desert (01/30/13)

I originally found this pin on Pinterest late yesterday.  I’ve added the original blog link here.  It  It seemed too easy to be good, but seeing I love pineapple and angel food cake is the lesser of evils when dessert is concerned, I wanted to try it.  We made it last night as a quick dessert and was very worth learning it.   Here are the Ingredients/Instructions from Tammilee Tips

Ingredients
1 package Angel Food Cake Mix
1 20 ounce can of crushed pineapple

Directions
Combine Angel Food Cake Mix and crushed pineapple in a Mixing Bowl  by hand. Make sure and mix thoroughly so everything is combined

Pour into a 13 x 9 Baking Pan

Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees

Once made we cut the cake into 12 squares, which is a fairly decent size piece and here are the nutrition values after calculating with My Fitness Pal.

Total Calories  166 per 1/12 recipe

Total Fat                                           0 g

    Saturated                                     0 g

    Polyunsaturated                         0g

    Monounsaturated                       0g

    Trans                                              0g

Cholesterol                                       0g

Sodium                                     189 mg

Potassium                               52.2 mg

Total Carbs                                38.8 g

Dietary Fiber                                0.4 g

Sugars                                             28 g

Protein                                           3.4 g

Vitamin A                                        0%

Vitamin C                                     7.5%

Calcium                                           6%

Iron                                                0.8%

The slight downside to this recipe, you really want a second piece.  But we did manage to resist and save the rest for another day.

#135 Adventures in Apple Sauce (09/26/12)

Well, as mentioned in #130, we have a LOT of crab apples.  This is our adventure in making about 150 pounds of apple sauce.  This post is picture heavy. 

To start the mass production of apple sauce, we needed a plan.  This is what I came up with.  First day we tried this procedure. 

Pick large bowls of apples using the parachute method, holding a sheet under the person picking to catch the apples.  After the first afternoon of picking two bowls at a time, we then switched to picking a Rubbermaid tote at a time, and for the de-bugging (literally) fill the bowls and leave outside while processing the previous bunch. In the picture below, is my wife (left), me (middle), and my FIL (right). 

Here are a few pictures of our crab-apple trees. 

  

We then leave the bowls outside for a while to de-bug.  The freshly picked apples have a lot of lovely lady bugs, and a few other icky things that we try to have vacated from the bowl before bringing into the house. 

Alas, only a portion of them do leave, as this is our capture container that we empty after each bowl set.

  

We bring the mostly de-bugged bowls inside to our sorting station; our couch/coffee table with a chuck-it platter/bucket and a container for the good ones.  When full the good bin is approximately the two large bowls sorted down, which will fill our two cooking pots well. 

 From there we take them to the wash basin; our kitchen sink.

Then, as is, the apples go into the boil pots.  We add water to the pots, just below the top of the apples, about two depths down.

We bring the pots to a boil, and then let them simmer for about an hour.  Till they look like that, and can be smooshed with a spoon.

None of the water gets drained off.  Per put the contents into our food mill. 

Once a pot is process this is what remains, one pot equals about one of these bowls of apples sauce, and a bunch of stem/seed/pulp mess.  In this whole process we found, we have three crab apple trees, one tree that produces rose wildish apples, and one that produces white apples.  The picture below shows the variation of sauces; rose (left), white (Top Right), crab-apples (Bottom Right).  The two wild apple trees didn’t yield much.  The shown apple sauce was the total yield. 

 

We leave the apple sauce in the bowls to cool, usually ends up being overnight, due to timing.  Then we put about 4 cups of apples sauce into Ziploc baggies, in order to freeze them.  This is a very small portion of the apple sauce bags.  Each bag weighs just shy of two pounds, and we have about 150 pounds of apple sauce, so far.

 

While talking with a neighbour, he let us know, apples run in three year cycles, small, medium and lots yield.  This was the LOT’s year.  Our first run at sauce was just picking the apples that could be easily reached from the crab apple trees. 

In our first bunch of turning sauce into something we made fruit leathers with just crab apples and some corn starch.  They were very sour/potent.  The next run we tried something a little different.   We followed this recipe inspired by Sunrype fruit/veggie leathers.

               3 Cups Crab Apple Sauce

               3 Cups of Boiled Carrots

               1 Cup of White Sugar

               1 Cup of Boiling water

               Blend the sauce and carrots together. 

Add the sugar to the water to create syrup

Add Mixture to blender

Mix a bit more. 

Pour onto dehydrator tray liners.

Run the dehydrator for about 8 hours.  This yields about 12-16 fruit leathers.

In an epiphany, we also tried the same recipe substituting carrots for yams (sweet potatoes).  Both recipes turned out quite nice, however fairly sweet.  On the next bunch we are going to try and cut the sugar in half.  Each fruit leather has about one fruit serving and one vegetable serving. 

Once we had finished the adventure of saucing, there were still so many crab apples left in the trees.  That added with the knowledge that next year we might not get as many, we decided to pick more.  Last night we picked another 110 pounds of apples.  We still haven’t picked the trees clean, just got a little higher with a small step ladder.  On our first bunch, we did our first run at actual canning.  We just heated the sauce to boiling again, sanitized the jars by added boiling water then emptying, and putting the sauce directly into jars and adding the snap lids.  This morning, they had snapped.  Yay.  A movie quote comes to mind where a city lady inherits a farm and starts making baby food with the produce.  As she is leaning to can, she says “I will be domesticated.”  We have officially, successfully canned.  We are domesticated. 

I will try to remember to take a photo of the frozen apple sauce, and whatever we can right away, along with a picture of the finished reduced sugar fruit leathers. 

Any suggestions on recipes involving crab apples and sauce would be appreciated.  I think our next trial run, other than leathers, is apple butter. 

#118 Fruit Trees Galore (08/20/12)

In case I haven’t quite mentioned this in my blog yet, between our house and MIL’s house we have a lot of fruit trees that need to be dealt with.  There are six apple/crap apple trees, one Nanking cherry tree, a Saskatoon (?) berry bush (still developing though), and two large trees yielding berries yet to be identified, maybe chokecherries. 

As a starter tool for something to use for this fruit we bought a dehydrator.  It took us a while to give it a go, but finally have tried it.  First round we made some strawberries, apples, and pears.  We need to tweak our strawberry process; they aren’t quite like the Special K Red berry version yet, but still taste nice on cereal.  The dried apples were good.  We left the peal on and they turned out nice.  Next time I think we will try and make apple chips and see what happens.  The surprise was the pears.  They were fantastic.  I can’t wait to make a LOT more of those.  Each food processor tray holds about two apples or pears or about one pound of strawberries. 

To help picking the nanking cherries we picked a cherry picker from Lee Valley Tools, as seen below. 

This is a fantastic tool.  I highly recommend it if you have berries en mass to pick and process.  In the process of learning to pit these lovely cherries my wife came up with the best method.  She would slightly crush the berries between two bowls of slightly different size, kind of like a pestle and mortar action on a larger scale.  She would then put them into another bowl for my MIL to take the pit out.  By crushing them first, this saved breaking the skin by hand and squirting juice across the table. 

On the first bunch of cherries we just boiled them down a bit and froze half of the portion and made the other half into a version of pudding that we usually make with rhubarb.  It was very good. 

On a more recent use of the food dehydrator, we made fruit leathers.  This was a good experience.  On the second batch of cherries, which we weighed this time to be around 10 pounds, we boiled again as above.  In one pot, though, we added pineapple, and some strawberries to the cherry mix.  Once both pots had cooled we put the mixed bunch into our blender and crushed it up.  It was still very sour due to the Nanking cherries, so we added some corn syrup, and blended some more.  For some reason part way through this exercise our blender started leaking out the bottom.  It had slightly come unscrewed. 

Once we got the flavour tamed a bit, we poured onto the sheets of the dehydrator.  I am very glad the dehydrator we got had a fruit leather liner for each tray.  On some of the trays we sprinkled coconut, and some shaved almonds, and one plain.  Originally we were going to freeze the other pot of just cherries, but ended up whipping that in the blender, adding corn syrup and making just a couple trays of just cherry flavour.  Then we still had some blended smoosh left.  My wife wanted to try and add some bananas.  (I can’t eat bananas, as they cause my stomach a lot of pain.)  So for the last two trays it was a banana/cherry mix with coconut or almonds. 

What did we learn from this experience? 

1.      Mixing a small amount of the cherries with some of the apple sauce I’m sure we will be making, in order to create the fruit leathers will be a good way to utilize the cherry flavor.  These leathers were very strong flavor so we can cut them down quite a bit with apples and or maybe trying melons, but the apples are free. 

2.      We need to watch the amount of corn syrup we put into the trying to be healthy snack. 

3.      Putting a small nut under the fruit sauce to create a peal spot is probably a good idea, but yet to be tested

4.      Don’t put too much sauce on the liners.  Put it in the middle then shake to even out, but if it is too much, or too close to the edges, it will leak over and make a mess. 

5.      Make sure the bottom of the blender is screwed on tightly, along with the top is on before you hit go. 

The next tool we purchased for handling the mass amount of apples is a food mill.  From what we have looked up the best way to process crab apples is to boil them whole until they are very soft.  Then put them through the food mill.  In theory the food mill will push the sauce through the mill, and keep the seeds and such in the mill to be cleared away. 

I think before we have MASS quantity ready, we will do a test bunch and see what happens.  If we wait, I have visions of I Love Lucy in the factory and things getting out of control and food getting everywhere.  The test will have to be before we head out on the Alaska Cruise at the beginning of September.  Stay tuned for Experiments in the Kitchen: Testing Crab Apples.

There is still more cherries to be picked though, trying the food mill on them might be the easiest way to get the pits out.  We’ll see.