Cleaning up the garden, Dolliver style 6WS

After a hectic kitchen day yesterday we were all ready to get outside in good weather and clean up the patio, pick the last few flowers and herbs, sweep up the cherry tree leaves, and generally render the place okay for the winter, and ready for the spring.

The Ds explained that they were happy to supervise the process, and pick flowers, but the labor of heaving pots and dead foliage around was for lesser folk such as Boud.  

Good as their word they sat in style, minding the flowers and the scissors since she loses them all the time.   Elton explained that the weather is far too cold to take his piano out of doors, so we would have to hum along any musical accompaniment.  

So the Dollivers improvised with The Flowers We Pick in the Fall, TraLa, Green Grows the Parsley O, and Autumn Leaves.

No pix from yesterday, since there was so much cooking, one way and another that there was no time to take pix.  Handsome Son is in the throes of setting up a small biz in home computer assistance, already has started with clients here in central NJ, and I've been inviting him over at the weekend for a large supportive meal.

Yesterday I was using vegetables from the farm, and experimenting with a new cake thing, as well as tripping over glackity recipe instructions, and having to stop everything and make an ingredient before I could continue.

So we had a tureen of squash, roasted bell pepper and shredded cabbage soup with thyme and sage sausage, with a full dish of new baked hot biscuits, followed by large wedges of rum raisin, apple, walnut cake.

The soup went fine, no surprises there, hot biscuits likewise, however the cake was a different issue. I waited till afternoon to embark on it, after the soup and biscuit work in the morning and a large load of laundry. Laundry not germane to cooking, just saying it was going on at the same time because of a shortage of clean clothes.

The cake, anyway, I'd seen a great looking recipe and wanted to include some of this week's farmshare apples, and finally use some of the bottle of rum I was given ages ago and have never used.  

This involved a trip to the store for golden raisins.  Then as I was assembling the ingredients, many of them, for the recipe, I realized that the amount of butter was incomprehensible.  Three WHAT?  sticks? tablespoons?  pounds?

So I went off and found a different one online that I could follow better, and many attempts did not succeed in getting it to print. 

So back to the drawing board, and I pulled out the trusty old Silver Palate, and got a nice looking recipe under way.  Failing to notice that it was appleSAUCE cake.  Halfway through the proceedings, stopped everything and rummaged in the freezer for a bag of those apples I got from that local tree.

An hour later I had some terrific applesauce, ready to use.  Never made it before, so this was new. And when I mixed the cake batter, I put in the rummed raisins anyway (soaked in the rum), and a shake of crushed walnuts, and since I was determined to use some fresh apples, chunked one up and added it into the applesauce. None of these was in the recipe, but I was undaunted.

Then found I don't have a great big cake pan of the size they mentioned.  So I used my biggest cast iron pan and put the spare batter into the smallest pan and went off to read and to let the cakes get on with it.

Result was a small cake, baked faster, taken out earlier, pretty nice, and a large one which was really really good.  And really really large.  Many slices now in the freezer.  

Dessert after today's lunch (baked squash, sigh, but with sumac and coarse sea salt and white pepper and a dot of butter), anyway, dessert was a slice of this cake, with a few frozen blackberries and a few spoonsful of plain yogurt, good honey over the top, microwaved for two minutes.  Ooooooohhhhh, that was good.  And demolished too fast for pix, sorry.