Thursday, July 17, 2003

So I took y’all’s advice and found some southern hemisphere apples for the Aspic de Pommes.  Can’t tell you where in the southern hemisphere, though, because though the label on the bin of apples in the Turkish grocery said they were from Argentina, the apples themselves were labeled with stickers that said New Zealand.  So take your pick.  In any case, it was obvious when I peeled them that they were a better class of fruit – crisp and fragrant.  Of course, as I say, what do I know about apples?  My confession of the day is this:  I have only ever eaten one bite of raw apple.  I was eight or something, and my father just finally decided he’d had enough with this crazy no-fruit-eating daughter of his, and he made me eat a bit of apple.  I promptly threw it up into the kitchen sink.  He must have pretty much despised me at that moment – how did he manage to raise a child so stubborn and melodramatic and picky?  But he never made me eat another apple.  And now I don’t know anything about them. So I peeled and cored and sliced the apples while Eric and his brother installed our new air conditioner.  That’s right, folks, we’ve entered the 20th century, we’ll be joining you all in the 21st any time now.  Of course, we only have it because my mother got sick of listening to me bitch and moan and bought it for us, so though we are in the 20th century, we could not yet reasonably be labeled adults.  It’s one of those fancy portable ones with the ventilation tube that sticks out the window.  It looks like the robot on Lost in Space.  It’s very quiet – not really an advantage; a loud one would drown out the freight trucks – and rolls on wheels.  The only bad news is that it doesn’t seem to work.  We’ll keep tinkering with it.  Anyway, while they were messing with it, I peeled the apples, then boiled three cups of sugar with ¾ cup of water and a tablespoon of lemon juice.  When the sugar had dissolved, I dumped in the apples slices, and let them boil for twenty minutes or so.  In another pot, I boiled a cup of sugar with 1/3 cup water until it got to 230 degrees, and dumped in the orange peels I’d the day before trimmed into little delicate thin strips and simmered in water, plus some vanilla.  I was supposed to let the oranges sit for at least half an hour in the sugar water, until I was ready to use them, and then “drain” them.  Only problem was, the sugar stuff hardened into this block of sugar stuff, so when I was ready to use the oranges, I had to heat it back up until the sugar melted – with the aid of a good bit of pounding with a wooden spoon – and then run it through a sieve, rinsing it with hot water so the sugar didn’t totally clot the sieve.  I’ve probably ruined the thing anyway.  In any case, I placed half the little strips of orange, which were now crispy, in the bottom of the charlotte mold I’d greased and lines with wax paper.  The other half I minced up and stirred into the boiling apples.  When the apples had cooked for half an hour or so, and were nice and transparent, I took them off heat, stirred in some rum, and poured them into the mold.  They were to chill for six hours, so brother-in-law Ethan didn’t get to have any.  Instead he ate leftover pork tacos and guacamole, and we watched the Daily Show.  Have I mentioned that we all of a sudden mysteriously have the Comedy Channel, even though we don’t have cable?  Well we do.  Weird, but lovely. I feared, given the rock-hard sugar issues I had with the orange peels, that the Aspic de Pommes would similarly transform into an uneatable apple rock, but on the contrary, I find this morning that it didn’t set at all.  Instead, I have a charlotte mold full of sliced apples floating in sugar syrup.  I just ate one.  It tastes like a really really really sweet, and rather sticky, apple.  But I have no urge to throw it up into the sink at least.  I feel like I’m growing.   8:04:27 AM    comment []