Food

Let's wrap up the apple postings. We have two types of apples left. Juice- and wax apples.
In our orchard we have both red and green juice apples. When you microwave them they behave similar to compote-apples, though you feel the difference when you eat them. They are so moist so they drip when you cut into them.

Let's continue to talk about apples. In our garden these apples are the next batch to mature and I simply call them Apple-pie apples, since that's what they do best. You can probably find them in different colors; but our varieties are yellow-red and slightly larger than our other apples, more oval than round in their shape.

We are lucky enough to have a small orchard, a total of 28 apple trees and three pear trees. The oldest trees was planted 130 years ago and they still give us fruit, so I feel blessed. The first apples mature in early august and then it continues until early November, depending on the weather. During a normal apple season we have 7 tons of apple, that’s around 14000 lb apple, so it’s a lot of apples.

Is there a difference between stock and broth? I had an old relative that was a chef and this is how I learned the difference. It’s basically the same thing, except for one major difference; broth is a seasoned version of stock. My relative used to say that; broth is nice to drink on a cold winter’s day, stock in a bowl and you call for the chef.

According to Washington Post yesterday, the sales of dried pasta has fallen 6 percent since 2009. The trend is the same all over the western world, even in Italy where the sales of pasta has plummeted by more than 25 percent. There’s mainly two reasons, gluten and carbs. Anti-carb diets have banned pasta as something evil.

When I was a kid, I was probably the only one who didn’t like to eat macaroni and cheese… or for that matter any other type of pasta. The reason could be traced back to my childhood summers in Italy. I don’t remember that much from it, except the food. We stayed at this family owned seaside resort, run by the matriarch of the family.

I remember her as a large, loud and generously warm older woman. She had the firm belief that no meal was complete without pasta, and by that I mean NO meal. We ate pasta for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I can still remember the taste and smell of her breakfast pasta soup, far away from my usual cornflakes and milk. I think my father was the one who handled the situation best. He gladly ate his pasta soup with coffee, toast and bacon. My mother looked like she never wanted to see a bowl of pasta again and it took her forty years before she started to enjoy a nice pasta dish.

So when I grew up I only ate pasta if I had to; it took some time before my mother realized that I didn’t really enjoy mac and cheese, especially since she made it because she believed that I liked it. My Grandma thought that pasta should be cooked in milk and that one didn’t enter my list of favorites either.

Today I spent the entire day baking Christmas cookies, one of my favorite things to do. It’s for the Christmas Magic cookbook.
Even if it’s recipes I used for many years, I wanted to make them one extra time, just to be sure that they work as they should.

One more picture from my new cookbook that will be out the week before Thanksgiving. The weather is getting cold, but that didn’t stop me from doing a nice barbeque yesterday and of course I need a picture.

Right know I’m working on a Christmas cook book, the first book in a new series called “The Ultimate Christmas Handbook.”
The first book is called Christmas Magic and is all about Christmas traditions and where they come from. This is just a small sneak peek at one of the pictures in the book.