Eating and cooking with family . . .

and some work travel too has led to some skimpy posting. Hopefully that will be sorted out this evening. For a little preview, the work trip included visits to Zingerman's Roadhouse and Bell's Brewery's Eccentric Cafe. I'm normally tied to Ohio and Michigan for work trips. It hasn't been a problem.

As for the family eating, there's not much to the sweet potatoes above, so here's our nutless and honey free charoset recipe, bastardized from a recipe my sister found somewhere:

Ingredients:
- Apples, diced finely (we peeled ours and added a drop of lemon juice so they didn't brown)
- Cinnamon, ground
- Sugar (we used regular granulated sugar)
- Wine or grape juice (we used a little of each)

Method:
- Mix diced apples with cinnamon and sugar to taste
- Macerate apple mixture in wine/grape juice for a few hours in the fridge (The alcohol in the wine helps--pure grape juice won't be the same.)
- Drain excess liquid and serve

It was good charoset (haroset), but I don't think honey or nuts would have hurt. They just weren't in the cupboard (if you can't tell from the picture, it wasn't, sadly, my kitchen).

Dessert?

Or a savory snack? A trip to the farmers' market yielded an abundance of onions (Little cippolinis from Snake Hill Farm, an amazing piece of land in Geauga County, Ohio. The pun--the farm is run by Savory and Lou--is unintentional.) and apples (Galas, and a Honeycrisp, from a local orchard.). Also, the flours from my food purchasing group were adding up, so a tart/pie was in order.

I combined Oak and Spelt flours, and it resulted in a good tasting base for the apples and onions. Not too much like a pie or tart dough though. I don't think going for the free form thing was such a good idea in this case either.

The addition of Cardamom made the filling great. It brought out the sweetness of the apples and onions, and added a great flavor of its own. It made the whole thing work.

Crust:
- I more or less followed this recipe: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001127perfect_pie_crust.php. As noted above, the flours were changed, and I halved the recipe to fit it into my mini food processor.
- My half recipe made enough dough for four of the pies (I used four smallish apples)
Filling:
Ingredients:
- Apples, peeled and roughly chopped
- Onions, halved and sliced pretty thinly
- Cardamom (crushed seeds)
- Sugar

- Butter
- Salt
Method:
- Melt butter in a pan
- Add sliced onions with some salt and sugar (not too much of either, I used a pinch of salt and about a teaspoon of sugar to a good handful of sliced onion
- Cook onions until soft and starting to caramelize
- Then add apples and a bit more salt and sugar, mixing everything well
- Once apples are softening, add cardamom
- Stir well again, and when everything is pretty soft turn off heat Pie/Tart
- I free formed the dough to hold the filling and put it into a 350 degree oven on a cast iron griddle (I'll use a pie tin if I make this again. As you can see, the dough collapsed)
- Once the crust was dry and the apples were just beginning to brown, I removed the pie

This tasted great, especially the filling. I'll experiment with the crusts more in the future. I don't think oak and spelt are the way to go here. The taste was great, and so was the color, but the texture was a bit too cookie-like.