Day 2 – My zero waste week challenge

Home baking is my focus for day 2 of zero waste week.  I’ve been trying out recipes to deal with my cooking apple glut and so far I’ve tried out apple flapjacks, apple cake and apple pie – it’s a good job I love apples!  The apple flapjacks were moderately successful, but were so sticky with apple that we had to eat them with spoons.  I took the recipe from BTCV’s Grow Your Own Food Guide which is available free. Adding custard made them into a pudding which was quite nice, but I’ll keep looking for an apple flapjack recipe that I can use for picnics and lunch boxes.

Next up is a recipe that I’ve tried before and that I love: Annabel Karmel’s Tea-Time Apple Treat , which is in her Baby and Toddler Meal Planner.  Her recipe uses eating apples, but I make it with cooking apples and some extra sugar.  This is a cake that uses up quite a lot of apples – about 5 of my small-medium sized windfalls.  I first baked this cake after eating it at a friend’s house and other people have made it after eating it at mine.  I’m making 2 and putting one in the freezer to see if that works well.

Last but not least, I tried my grandmother’s apple pie recipe.  My grandma’s pies were legendary in our family and some years ago, I watched her make them and wrote down the recipe.  Since then, I’m ashamed to say, it’s sat in my recipe clippings book and I’ve never made it.  So I got it out and gave it a try.  It was a real blast from the past tasting it again – I think I pretty much got it right.  It’s a robust pie that you can eat in slices using your hands and isn’t too sweet, so I’ve been known to have it for breakfast.  If you’d like to try it, here’s the recipe:

Core and chop 5-6 medium cooking apples into small pieces, add 4 tablespoons of caster sugar and stew for a few minutes on a strong heat (don’t add any water, but do stir regularly).  Meanwhile rub 8oz of self raising flour into 4 oz of room temperature margarine.  Then add a little very cold water at a time until you have a nice pastry dough.  Roll out on a floured board and line a large pie dish with the pastry (I used a little over half the dough for this).  Put in the apples and place a pastry lid on top.  Seal the edges with a fork, slit the middle with a knife and few time and decorate with scraps of pastry, if you like.  Cook at gas mark 5/190 degrees for about quarter of an hour.

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