Celebrating October and soup and crumble and women's talents

The immediate Good Thing TM,  is the chicken pasta soup, which was great. That broth made it taste really old fashioned, like your grandma might have made it.

Seen with a sprig of Thai basil, now growing in the kitchen, slice of wholewheat and oat bread, Vermont butter.

And yesterday's apple cranberry crumble. I combined again Martha Stewart and Rose Birnbaum. Martha's recipe for oatmeal crumble is gluten free, a big deal for some, not an issue here, I just like it. And I learned to macerate fruit from Rose.

Since you're doing a lot of steps making crumble anyway, may as well make it even better by macerating the fruit.

Just prepare the fruit as usual, then add the brown sugar, cinnamon, cornstarch, lemon zest, ginger and salt, mix up with the fruit and leave for an hour. 

Then drain off the liquid it's made, reduce it by half and add it back to the fruit now in the buttered glass pan. Add the crumble bit, bake.

You get to a flourishoftrumpets good crumble with your afternoon cup of tea.

Handsome Son will get some of this. Gary is still away so he's missing it.

It's the taste of October. And here's some more October from Edith Holden's diary.

And seasonal drawings, look who drew these horse chestnuts, conkers, beloved of kids 

Never assume that the thing you know a person for is all they do. I have a real life example: a visitor invited into my recorder group while she was on a project at the Institute for Advanced Study, just along the street, was chatting with us, introducing herself.  

I said, oh, then you know my voice coach, the opera singer. I named her and the visiting prof said, no, can't be her, she's our department admin. I explained that by day she was the admin and by night taught singers her operatic techniques. 

She didn't tour in opera since her son was born, but still did occasional recitals. First the visitor had heard that people do more than one thing at a professional level. Around here that's not at all unusual.

Then there's the Nobel. It's Nobel season, so let's honor

Happy day everyone, enjoy whatever crumble equivalent is in your plans for the day.

Ukraine has taken back an "annexed" city and cut off vital transportation from the invaders, yay.

The glass pans earn their keep

Late July, height of the farmshare season, needing ingenuity to make meals of veggies as well as prep and freeze them, to keep up with the supply.  Roasting is a great way to do this, particularly since I've been using balsamic vinegar to sort of sprinkle over.

And the salt potatoes I learned from Deborah Madison's book on farmmarkets, redskins boiled with a ton of seasalt, took their place in this dish. I had Handsome Son come to dinner the other night, and help me eat the zucchini quiche with a big side of roasted potatoes, squash, onions and corn, and the rest of the frozen lima beans from an Ottolenghi recipe.  

The corn went in the dish raw, but I steamed the others, and boiled the potatoes in the saltwater.  Tossed the veggies in a mixture of olive oil, seasonings, black cherry balsamic vinegar.  Roasted them at 475F for about 45 minutes.

Dessert was a peach crumble, fresh farm peaches, done the way Rose Levy Beranbaum does them in her Bible of pies and cakes, this month's Bite Club selection being desserts. 

And HS pronounced the potatoes great, were there any more, the squash okay, the quiche hm, is there any  ketchup.  But the peach crumble vanished in short order.

The different way Beranbaum does the fruit is to macerate them for a while in sugar, drain off the juices to make a reduction, while mixing the drained fruit with a mix of spices and cornstarch, mainly ginger and cinnamon.  Then the reduced liquid goes back on the fruit and into the pie dish.  I didn't want to make the fancy pastry shapes for the top, so I used Martha's old standby oat crumble, and very good it was.  Not too juicy, but very flavory.

This week there were, among other exciting things, peaches and peppers and corn,  berries in the farmshare -- farmer explained apologetically that they ran out of cherry tomatoes the previous day, and had to sub with berries.  NO problem here with that!

So here's a berry and Granny Smith apple crumble, as per Beranbaum, using ginger and cinnamon, and the crumble part as per Martha, using oatmeal and ground oats.  

This is the kind of thing that's making me lean toward investing in a second little freezer for the kitchen, so I can have this sort of thing in the winter.

Since we are in a heatwave, with those heat index things zooming past 100F there are those who might question the sanity of a person who bakes on such a day, but I had to use the fresh fruit, and well, I was just needing activity indoors.

I finished the window sail for my neighbor, who came over last night to see, and was mad with joy, big hugs and thanks and it went down well.  His house is in an uproar, with wiring and tiling and workmen all over, so he asked me to hold onto the sail for the moment until the dust settles, literally.  I'll post a pic when it's installed.

And the dyeing is moving on, with black walnut dye on what was linen pants and will be a linen skirt with pockets, but that adventure's in Art the Beautiful,  here  http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com/2015/07/transformation-from-linen-pants-to.html