Apple Butter

Yield:  5 to 6 cups
Time: 14 hours, mostly unattended

5 pounds (about 10 large) apples, preferably a mix of sweet and tart varieties, cut into 1-inch chunks
2 cups apple cider
1 cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup Applejack or Calvados
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
Zest and juice of ½ large lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ ground ginger
⅛ teaspoon ground cloves
⅛ teaspoon ground allspice

1. Heat the oven to 400°F. Spread the apple chunks in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast until they’re softened but not very brown, about 20 minutes. Transfer the apples and any juices they’ve released to a slow cooker.

2. Add all the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Cover the pot. Turn the slow cooker to low and cook until the mixture has turned brown and reduced to a chunky purée, about 10 hours. (This is convenient to do overnight.)

3. Remove the lid, turn the slow cooker to high, and cook, stirring occasionally, for an additional 3 hours or longer, depending on the desired consistency. (The longer you cook it, the thicker the butter will be.) Turn off the slow cooker.

4. Purée the apple butter with an immersion blender until completely smooth (or let the butter cool completely before puréeing with an upright blender or food mill). Serve the butter warm or at room temperature. (Keep apple butter in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a month, or can it and keep it at room temperature for up to a year.)

Muesli

How to Feel Competent by Dumping a Lot of Stuff in a Bowl

By L.V. Anderson | May 19, 2011

Do you, too, feel lazy, stupid, talentless, unproductive, boring, and generally like a failed grown-up? I mean, this is totally normal, right? Feeling grossly inadequate is a typical part of the human condition, as I understand it. Nonetheless, it’s nice to take an occasional break from self-loathing, and you can’t drink all day long, but there is one other thing I know how to do that makes me feel briefly like the most competent woman on earth: make muesli.
Muesli, as you’ll know if hitting “Random article” on Wikipedia has ever taken you to the page for Maximilian Bircher-Benner, is a breakfast cereal that was invented by a crazy Swiss dude about a century ago. It is basically uncooked rolled oats with other healthy and delicious things in it.
When I was younger and even stupider than I feel most of the time these days, I would buy boxed muesli at the grocery store, but eventually I realized that it tasted terrible. I first encountered a recipe for homemade muesli in Nigella Lawson’s wonderful cookbook Feast, in which Lawson writes, “There is something about muesli, real muesli, that makes me feel I am some intellectual, beautiful free spirit, throwing pots and writing poetry or political diatribes in 1960s Hampstead. And it’s a feeling I quite like.”
This quotation is quite seriously the closest thing I’ve ever had to a personal mantra (which maybe explains some things), and it pretty much sums it up: Making and eating muesli distracts you from your problems and makes you feel like a better person than you’ll ever be.
What took me years to figure out is that you do not actually need a recipe to make muesli. You just need a biggish bowl and a bunch of stuff to put in it. Here we go:
1) Dump a container of rolled oats (not instant, not quick cooking, and definitely not steel cut) into a bowl. You can use Quaker oats if they’re all you can find, but Quaker oats are, like my intellect, thin, ragged around the edges, and generally kind of sawdusty. I recommend using some of that fancy natural shit—Bob’s Red Mill makes some pretty good oats, in my experience, as does Old Wessex Ltd.
2) Add some shredded coconut, preferably unsweetened. (Bob’s Red Mill makes some pretty decent coconut, too. How do you do it, Bob? What do you know that we don’t?)

How much coconut should I add, you ask. Well, do you like coconut? Add a mountain. Do you loathe the taste of coconut? Add zero coconut. Are you ambivalent about coconut (as I am about so many things)? Add a cup or so, but just eyeball it; there’s no need to break out the measuring cups. (Let’s not go crazy here.) If you’re not sure how much to add, err on the conservative side; you can always add more later if you want to, but you can’t add less.
3) Add some nuts. I like walnuts, almonds, and cashews; they tend to be readily available, even at terrible grocery stores, and not insanely expensive. You can use whatever you want, depending on your taste and budget: macadamia nuts, peanuts, pistachios, pine nuts, pecans. You might want to chop them up a little before you add them, but I never bother, because I kind of like the feeling of having whole nuts in my mouth. (That’s what she … no, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t.)
Do you like seeds? Because seeds are also an option, my friend.

4) Add some dried fruit. Raisins are nice and, again, easy to find even at the World’s Worst Grocery Stores. I also enjoy dried cranberries, which are apparently called not dried cranberries but Craisins. (“Dried cranberries,” I suppose, does not sound sexy enough. Either that or the Ocean Spray marketing people thought people wouldn’t know what dried cranberries were unless they compared them to another more mainstream dried fruit. I’m not sure which is worse, actually.)
Dried cherries and blueberries can be expensive and hard to find, but they taste quite pleasant. With most other things—figs, dates, pears, apples, apricots—you’ll have to chop them up a little bit before you add them. For me, this is a deterrent to using them, but if you’re industrious, go for it.
5) Add some salt. Salt is what makes everything taste good. You know how pharmaceutical commercials always depict the world of depressed people as being in black and white and slow motion? That’s the way food tastes without salt: colorless and inert. Food without salt is as unthinkable as life without alcohol. So please add a good pinch or two of salt here. Your muesli won’t taste salty; it’ll just taste like muesli.

6) Stir.
7) Look at your muesli. Are you happy with its appearance? Does it look like it has enough coconut, nuts, dried fruit? Add more of anything you want until the ratio of ingredients pleases you.

8) Put some in a smaller bowl, add milk or yogurt (or homemade soymilk, if you actually are competent), and eat it, quietly, alone in bed. (That’s where normal people eat, right?) Put the rest in a jar or Tupperware or some other receptacle and store it at room temperature. You’ll have enough to last for at least a week, unless you eat muesli for every meal, which, hey, there are many worse things.

How do you feel now? Healthy? Competent? Capable of taking concrete actions to improve your life? Good. The feeling lasts only as long as it takes to eat a bowl of muesli, in my experience. But do your best to enjoy it while you can.

Margherita Pizza

Yield: About 6 servings

Time: 2 to 2 1/2 hours, largely unattended

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 3/4 cups whole-wheat flour, or more all-purpose flour

2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast or one 1/4-ounce packet active dry yeast

Salt

5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for greasing and drizzling

1 medium yellow onion

3 garlic cloves, minced

Black pepper

One 26-ounce box or 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes

1 pound fresh mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced and blotted dry with a paper towel

About 30 fresh basil leaves

1. Combine the flours, yeast, and 2 1/4 teaspoons salt in a large bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of the olive oil and about 1 1/4 cups warm water—about the same temperature as the inside of your wrist—and stir with the dough-hook attachment of a stand mixer or by hand. Knead the dough with the dough-hook attachment of a stand mixer or by hand until it feels smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Grease a large bowl (it’s fine to use the same one you mixed the dough in), add the dough, and turn it over to coat it lightly with oil. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel or plastic wrap, put it in a warm place, and let the dough rise until more or less doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hours.

2. Meanwhile, put 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. When it’s hot, add the onion and garlic and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until the onion begins to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes and adjust the heat so the mixture simmers steadily, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is thick and saucy, about 30 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

3. Heat the oven to 500°. Punch down the dough and let it rest for a minute or two. Generously grease two 13- by 18-inch baking sheets. Divide the dough in two and put each half on a baking sheet; gently and gradually stretch each into 13- by 18-inch rectangle. Spread the tomato sauce in an even layer over the dough, and top with the cheese and basil. Drizzle with a little additional olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper if you like.

4. Bake until the cheese is bubbly and the edges of the crust are golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Let rest at least 5 minutes at room temperature before cutting and serving.

Smoked Paprika Hummus

Yield: About 5 cups (10 to 15 servings)

Time: 20 minutes

6 garlic cloves, chopped

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 1/2 teaspoons pimentón (smoked paprika) or other paprika

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

4 cups drained cooked chickpeas, cooking liquid reserved

1 cup tahini, peanut butter, or other nut butter

1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

1. Put the garlic, 2 tablespoons of the oil, 2 teaspoons of the pimentón, and the salt, black pepper, and cayenne in a large bowl, food processor, or blender. Mash or process until relatively smooth.

2. Add the chickpeas, tahini, and lemon juice, and mash or process until the hummus is uniform in texture and as smooth as you like it, adding the reserved garbanzo cooking liquid as needed if the mixture is too thick. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Sprinkle the remaining 1/2 teaspoon pimentón over the hummus, drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, and serve immediately (or cover and refrigerate for up to a week).