Applecore

This may be the first of many savoury apple recipe blogs if I keep this up! Cheap, easy local Scottish meal inspo, with some off-grid/forest gardening and other life stuff thrown in, is sort of the theme. See what I did with Applecore there? Cottagecore…?

The following paragraph is the recipe in brief, so you don’t have to read all the unnecessary and often unconnected ramblings following it, which are, however, what makes it fun for me.

Apple and Beetroot Patties – onion, garlic, grated apple and beetroot, carraway seeds, a little chopped kale, dried oregano, nettles or any herbs, breadcrumbs, salt, black pepper, an egg and or milk if you want and maybe cheese. Mix, form into patties/burgers or one big thick or thin pancake and fry. Can be made vegan with obvious adaptions, and I reckon any ingredient can be replaced with any other, within reason. I’m afraid I won’t be giving quantities or cooking times because I’ve no idea, and I’d just be making it up if I did. More detail below, 11 paragraphs down.

I have finished my last essay of this term (Creative Writing Masters at Aberdeen University) and was really looking forward to various writing projects, as it was an academic course this semester and I’ve not been able to focus on anything other than the course work. I had two ideas for writing projects when I was finishing my last essay in my flat in Aberdeen which have now completely disappeared from my head. I was sure they wouldn’t, so I failed to make a note. Ah well, hopefully they will come back if they are any good. So, I’m going to write this instead, though apparently no one reads blogs anymore, so maybe it’s just for me to look back on when I can’t think of what to cook.

Charlie is smashing up dried-out old bread into crumbs, with a hammer, in the kitchen below while I write this. I suggested patties with onions, garlic, and grated beetroot and apples in them and cheese on top, or with a cheese sauce and some tatties. He’ll do some of the prep and I will assemble, as he doesn’t have much confidence with anything that isn’t a baked product (he used to be a baker) or one of the regular meals he cooks. The ingredients are all veg/fruit which we grow at Coldhome, though not all by me, mostly now by my brother Robin and our father.

I have no interest in cooking as such or eating much either and less interest in growing food since the kids left home (though hopefully that interest may return…). I find it an inconvenience to have to stop working and eat and irritating that I get all faint and shaky and angry if I don’t. If all the nourishment I need could be made into a soup or smoothie and constantly available to drink that would be easier (though obviously I don’t really wish for that!) The only time I really enjoy food is when I’m on my own, having tea and cake in a café in the afternoon or eating in bed, while watching a good series, last thing at night. I am of course aware what a spoilt bitch I sound like and am actually hugely grateful for the food I have access to and am really very into eating the plants that grow around us. I get particularly excited by the thought of the micronutrients and good bacteria in and on our weeds/herbs and in giving the same back to the soil through our waste.

We have never been fully self-sufficient and hopefully will never have to be. We have grown a lot of our own veg for decades and still do grow a lot but am very glad that I can buy all the staples that we don’t grow, like flour, oats and lentils, grain for the hens etc, plus dairy, and very occasionally fish or local venison. I am more interested these days in the fruit and the plants that grow without much help

So, it’s loosely a kind of forest gardening you could say I practice, which I used to have a book on, gifted me by my father, who bought us all books to help contribute to the big library resource we never got to build. He started the collection alongside my mother, in the years I was growing up, the late seventies and early eighties. Goat husbandry, Food for Free, bee keeping, country wine making, The Vegetarian Epicure, mushroom identification, medicinal herbs, that sort of thing. When we bought this land together (me, Charlie, Dad, Annie and our combined four young children, plus two teens) and moved here in 2007, we added Cob Building, Off Grid Living, separation compost toilets, homemade paints and plasters, strawbale building, Plants for a Future etc. Then they all got burnt along with everything else (except, some may be interested to know, the strawbales which formed some of our walls. They, being coated with clay, were only charred). This is another story, though, which anyone who knows me probably already knows. But maybe I’ll get some unknown readers!

Some of these books have been replaced since the fire, so maybe we’ll build up enough for a library again one day. Ben, my brother, has bought a good few and keeps them up here, but not Forest Gardening. Basically, it’s having a garden full of trees and bushes that produce fruit and nuts with other perennial herbs that grow in clearings. Also, having a patch for annual veg, and I can’t remember if having tough self-seeding type vegetables, like Burdock and Jerusalem artichokes, is a forest gardening or permaculture idea, but I do that too.

My kale, some sort of mix of Russian and Sutherland, now self-seeds itself all over the garden every year and keeps us in fresh greens all year round. It’s an asparagus kale, so it’s like having masses of purple sprouting broccoli in the spring, except not purple! I got déjà vu there, so maybe I’ve written this all before…probably have…oh well, someone can tell me. Also, this feels like very boring rambling, so if you’ve got this far, I’d like feedback on what’s interesting to read and what’s not. Thanks!

I grow tatties too, and I’m into fermenting and any kind of preserving that doesn’t involve a freezer as we don’t have enough electricity to run one. We have so many apples, I personally planted three different varieties, and there are several other kinds managed by other members of my family. Mine are all eating apples, Sunset, Discovery and one which I can’t remember the name of, so they are not supposed to store well. But I think they do pretty well in a cold room in trays. They gradually get a little soft and eventually wrinkly, but are still sweet and delicious in or on the side of pretty much any meal, I have decided. That’s what brought about the idea of writing down savoury apple recipes because I feel they are an underused and underrated resource. If I don’t get though them all, the ones that don’t go brown and soft (bruised or damaged ones) turn into apple raisins, I am calling them, though I haven’t decided what to do with them yet.

I used to make juice with them when we lived in Fife with mains electricity and could freeze them in batches for three days, then put them under weights in a funnel type contraption I made until the juice came out, and just drink it fresh. Nowadays, Dad and Robin make cider and wine and I sometimes make a lacto-fermented drink/wild soda with them (non alcoholic), or chop them into a jar with a little salt till they go fizzy and eat them as a kind of kimchi. Talking of bacteria…

Here’s an unconnected yucky story. Skip this paragraph and the next, if you’re squeamish. Charlie makes fruits scones with flour, butter, egg, sultanas, and no sugar, plus apple sometimes when I remind him to use apples in everything! While I was away last week, he made some with an egg I had found in a hidden nest in the garden, revealed by the rotting back vegetation. They had the pale ghosts of nettle leaves imprinted on them. (The hens have been free-er-range than usual this year). I floated the eggs, and they sunk, which would suggest they were still ok to eat as no air had found its way in. But I forgot to tell him to test them in a cup before using any when I left. He told me he broke it straight into the mixture and didn’t notice there was a bit of a smell until he’d made up the mix and then didn’t want to waste it, so he baked them off and has eaten several.

I noticed the smell from the eggshells as soon as I got home, which were still in the compost. But the scones don’t seem to smell, and he seems none the worse for eating them, though after I sounded disgusted and refused to eat them, he thought he began to feel a bit icky. But we decided it was all in his head because anything bad would have been killed by the baking process anyway. If 100-year-old eggs can be eaten, then I think 100 days or less must be ok… Five days later he said they had a sicky flavour especially when he adds cream, which for some reason he says he is perversely enjoying! He made eight and has two to go. Six days have since passed, and he’s still fine… I don’t know why he doesn’t just give the last two to the hens…

So, anyway, I fried the onion and garlic, added grated apple and beetroot into the pan, cumin or carraway seeds, a little chopped kale and dried oregano – I have managed to dry three jars worth for the first time ever (I always have enough, but never remember to pick enough before it gets past its best). I added the dried stuff to the bowl of breadcrumbs with some black pepper, oh and some dried nettles (I’ve dried loads of them too this year for tea and as a dried vegetable) and one of our good eggs. I also had some old milk that was smelling a bit sharp, so I added that too. I couldn’t really get the mix to hold together though, probably another egg would have helped but I am saving our eggs for our traditional Christmas Holiday Vegetable Salad, so (our eldest, who will be home for Christmas, will eat it – vegan, but will eat our eggs only). I tried adding a little flour, but it was getting late, so I just threw lumps in the frying pan, with plenty of oil, and bashed them flat with the fish slice. (I switch back and forth between olive oil, which is supposedly the healthiest to heat, and cold pressed rapeseed oil, which is local and cheaper).

They crumbled a little at the edges but not badly. I put a little grated cheese on top of each one as they lacked protein (I’d meant to cook some lentils to add but ran out of time). We ate those on Charlies homemade wholemeal bread with poppy seeds on top, with some of Dad’s chutney, which he just called ‘Brown something’ (I forget), and which had turned a little alcoholic, because I opened it then forgot about it in the warm kitchen, but it’s full of great flavours. We also had the second half of a bag of French beans we’d bought frozen the day before, which had to be eaten because of lack of freezer. And some reduced coleslaw – I often make it from scratch (though not the mayo unless I am feeling very inspired) and add grated apple, but tonight, I just sprinkled chopped apple on the shop stuff instead. I am really hoping this level of detail about what we eat is interesting or inspiring to someone, or is it just a worse version of the pictures of people’s dinner on facebook? I can write one on the contents of our compost toilet next if you prefer?

The second half of the mixture, I added some grated cheese to, to help it stick together, and formed it into one large pancake in the pan to cook on the woodstove while we ate the first batch, watching Resident Alien on Charlies tablet. No cheese sauce or tatties because we ran out of time. I’d have preferred them with a sauce or gravy, but the wet beans with melted butter and the coleslaw did the job ok. I like wet food, and Charlie likes dry food, so it’s a constant compromise for both of us! God, I’m even boring myself now, so I’ll stop!