Hmmm, I meant to call the whole blog series Applecore, but that means thinking up individual titles for each one too…
I had already started this one before Christmas, but I should really make this a Christmas special, 🎄 so, I will include the Holiday Vegetable Salad, which I mentioned last week, because it has plenty of apples in it. We generally make it on Christmas Eve, but it could easily be made a day or too earlier as it gets better with age. Up to the point it starts to fiz. The original recipe my parents used when they began the tradition of introducing a dish from a different culture to our Christmas menu each year was from the Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas, but someone said it was possibly a Polish recipe originally…? The copy of the recipe in the original book burnt in our house fire (something I will probably say alot) and though my brother got a new copy of the book, it doesn’t contain the recipe so we’ve been doing it from memory ever since.
It contains boiled tatties (maybe 5) carrots (maybe 3), 9ish eggs, and a decent amount of peas. Also, a third or so of a small jar of pickled onions and the same of gherkins. Quarter of a raw onion chopped fine and about 4 apples or more. A decent amount of mushrooms that have been chopped and marinated in hot apple cider vinegar with spices overnight. Everything is chopped smallish and mixed in a big bowl with olive oil, salt, pepper, and some of the mushroom marinade vinegar. Then you make a mayo with 3 of the hardboiled egg yolks (put the whites in the salad).
For the mayo, put the 3 egg yolks in a blender with some lemon juice and mustard, and then you blend and gradually add olive oil till it thickens. Mine breaks every single year, god knows why, but I try not to care. You spread it on top of the flattened salad, and then you can decorate the surface with any colourful vegetables you like to make a pattern or scene if you are so inclined. Peppers and stuffed olives are particularly good. I never seem to have time or energy for this part. The kids or my sister Anna used to do it, but traditions are slipping. Anyway, it lasts all through Christmas if you make enough and makes a great lunch on its own, with crackers and cheese, or a starter for the main meal if you prefer.
Here is a bit about Christmas trees. Being a peace and earth loving hippy, I can’t really condone cutting down Christmas trees, nor plastic trees, but buying pot grown trees is one solution, or cutting a branch from a big living tree is another cheaper option, though I know obviously not everyone has access to trees. We used to know people who celebrated solstice instead of Christmas and who cut a small, leafless winter branch and decorated it. I liked this idea, but my kids were already hooked on the evergreen thing by then. Since we’ve been here at Coldhome, we have for years cut a branch from the fallen but still living Lodge Pole Pines, which grow by the roadside at the top of our track. But several years back, on two consecutive yers when we must have been feeling a bit flush, we also bought a pot grown tree for a local garden centre and then I planted them out, outside. They were the traditional Christmas tree variety, Norwegian Spruces, I think, and they shot up fast. they are not really rhe sort of trees you coppice, but I couldn’t let them get too big where they are, on the south west of our house, so I cut the top off one to use as our tree one year. The poor tree in the ground didn’t seem to suffer but didn’t look very pretty initially, but two new Christmas tree shaped tops grew in it’s place and it was restored to a proper shape. I cut the top off the other one another year, and the same thing happened. This year, I cut one of the two tops from one, and the tree in the ground still looks fine because it has a second top. Quite a good system, really. I may have an endless supply now.
This is the bit I wrote before Christmas –
Two more savoury apple meals. A very boring but hearty and satisfying lentil soup with whatever veg I have to hand and plenty of apples chopped and added near the end, so they don’t disintegrate into mush (unless you like them that way). We eat this whenever there are no other ideas, which would possibly be every night if I had my way.
But to save us from a third night of this soup Charlie said he could layer the apple, fried with onion and garlic and maybe carrot, under sliced potato and top it with grated cheese. I said maybe make a white sauce, or it might be a bit dry (the old dry/wet taste differences again). So, he made one with oat milk because we had some to use up. He boiled the potatoes, and diced carrots, first, so nothing really needed cooked once it went in the oven. This was just to consolidate it and melt the cheese I suppose? I don’t really know the cookie language. Anyway, it was great, and we had it with boiled kale on the side.
On the two beautifully sunny but incredibly short days that were the 20th of December and the 21st, winter solstice – the official shortest day of the year, I gathered kindling among other outside jobs. Throughout the year I cut back willow and other trees that need it, and pile the burnable branches to dry out, then break them up for kindling, sawing up the bigger branches and putting into longer, slower storage, semi-undercover, to season for firewood. I try to do it in an organised, systematic way, but it’s pretty haphazard, really. But it’s still a highly satisfying and therapeutic sort of job. Here is a pretty picture of some broken up branches in the low midwinter sunlight.
The metal container they are in is the fire-damaged top part of our old drinking-water, gravity filter, which, with its replaceable ceramic filters, claimed to have made even river water safe to drink. A connected story – a few days or weeks after the fire, my friend Kelly found a replacement version of this exact filter, in perfect condition, in The Bargain Box, a charity shop in Huntly. This was one of those kinda freak and very serendipitous events that I wonder at. Since it was an expensive and highly specialist piece of kit that I’d bought online, the likes of which I have never seen anywhere before, never mind in a charity shop, for a fiver, on a day, that probably one of the very few people who knew about our filter, happened to be in the shop to see it. I am very grateful to Kelly anyway for buying it for us. It is still in daily use.
Rachel Bride Ashton 