Sophia's jam pie

It is a recipe I got from my mother, and in her turn, she got it from her colleague, Sophia. Original recipe did not use almonds to top it; I added it once after forgetting to leave some pastry to do top crumbles and really liked how it turned out. Also original recipe did not require a plum jam specifically, but I like it best with a jam from Victoria plums.
As you can see, the recipe requires 8 egg yolks, which always got me wondering what the hell to do with them egg whites... One option is to make something else that requires only egg whites, like cake biscuit, or macaroons, or meringue, etc. Alternatively you can use 4 whole eggs instead, but the taste of the crumble will be slightly different then (still tasty though). If you use 4 whole large eggs, it is better to use 600g of flour.

Need:
500g of flour
250 g of butter
8 egg yolks
1 tea spoon of baking powder
200 g of sugar
300 ml of plum jam
a handful of almond flakes

Beat egg yolks with sugar. Mix baking powder with flour, add room temperature butter, add egg yolks, knead it well. Let it cool of in a fridge for 30 min. Put baking paper into your oven dish and crumble the pastry (or rasp it on a vegetable rasp). Bake it on 180C for 20 minutes, take it out, smear the jam on top, add almonds on top of the jam and bake for another 20 minutes. Cool it off, cut into a cookie sized squares and enjoy.

Corn, tomato and tuna salad, with thousand isles dressing

Long time ago, when I still was in the university, we went to lunch at the Arthouse cafe sometimes, because they had a wide choice of interesting and tasty salads. I did not think about noting down the ingredients at the time, then they closed it suddenly and I had to think hard what was in some of my favorites. This one was one of those, I remembered it had corn, tomato and thousand isle dressing, but I had no idea anymore what else was in it. I added tuna, liked how it tasted, so it turned into 1000 isle tuna from then on.

Need:
100g of canned corn
2 average size tomatoes
100 g of canned tuna (in oil or water)
2 spoons of thousand isles dressing

Dry the corn and tuna from the water it was swimming in. Cut tomato into bite size pieces, mix with corn, tuna and dressing. Simple and tasty.

(Non)sour bread with appel stroop

Since a proper sour dough rye bread is practically unavailable here, I keep experimenting with all sorts of recipes to achieve something similar, preferably without going through the whole trouble of make-your-own rye starter. I had a recipe using some molasses kind of thing, which we normally do not buy either; and there I came up with an idea to use appel stroop instead, because it is similar consistency thing, just with apple flavor, obviously. I suppose honey or any other honey like substance could work too, especially if it is on a sour side.

Need:

for plikinys (boiling water starter):
100g rye flour
2 table spoons of appel stroop or molasses
1 table spoon of caraway seeds
300 ml water
1 tea spoon of citric acid
2 table spoons of bran (zemelen, sėlenos)

for dough:
300 g of rye flour
100 g of wheat flour
1 table spoon of salt
1 table spoon of brown bastard sugar
2 table spoons of sunflower oil
14 g of dry yeast
250 ml of warm water

Part I: Plikinys
Boil the water with molasses/apple stroop, caraway and citric acid, stir it so it is evenly dissolved. Pour 100 g of rye flour into boiling water and whisk it like hell, so it turns into a smooth mass without lumps. Stir in bran and leave the whole thing to rest for a few hours.

Part II: Bread
To the bread baker add water, boiling water starter (aka Plikinys, kneaded/stirred a little) and the rest of the ingredients, with dry yeast at the end, on top. Set to whole grain program (longest possible). Alternatively, knead, let it rise, knead again, let it rise, bake till done.

Notes:
It is not a bread that rises much, if at all. It is worth exploring a possibility to use 200g rye and 200g of wheat mix for the dough. Also, I did not knead the starter before adding it to the bread baker, which seemingly resulted in some areas with a bit of more appel stroop. Not that it is a very bad thing, but I'd rather have it more evenly spread.

Sour cabbage and potato stew

In the times past we ate quite some sour cabbage based dishes, especially after spending a day oudoors. It was one of the first things I've learned to cook and it still is a lovely winter season dish, if you like a simple country style kitchen. For the best result it is wise to forget all what you have been told about the fats in your food for a day; sour cabbage generally needs some fat to taste good, bacon, lard or any other fatty meat is the best add. It's a farmers dish, not a supermodels dinner crumbles. ;)


Need:
200 g of sour white cabbage
4-5 normal size potatoes
200 g of fatback or bacon (preferably fat and not too salty).

Peel the potatoes and slice them into not-too-thin slices. Take the cabbage out of packaging and squeeze some of the liquid off it (you can wash it under a stream of cold water as well, in a sift, if you want less sourness). Take a pot and layer potato slices and cabbage: one layer of potatoes, one of cabbage, rinse and repeat. Pour water into the pot, so that the last layer is submerged, add a pinch of salt. Cook it for about 40 minutes on a medium fire.

While stew is cooking, slice the fatback or bacon into the small cubes. Fry it on the frying pan for 5 min or so. When the stew is done, pour the water off, mix in the bacon with all the fat. I like to wash it down with a glass of cold milk, have no idea why, it just goes right with it.

Kissel

Kissel is an old dessert/drink from North-East of Europe. The origin of the name seems to be a Slavic word kisly, meaning sour. In the old times it was commonly made from the oats or other local grain, often after a mild fermentation for a few days, resulting in a sour dish, commonly eaten with a bit of butter or bacon/lard scraps. I remember my grandparents making oat kissel when I was a kid; a few years ago I made it myself to see if it tasted as horrible as I remembered it - and yes, it did, you have to be used to it to like it!

Either way, a kissel I am talking about is the one made from berries and it is entirely different story taste wise from its oaty ancestor. Technically it can be made from any berry (or fruit), which can be turned into a more or less flavored syrup, however usually red berries work best. My favorites are strawberry-raspberry (either of them alone can work too, but together I like it better), cherry (sour cherry only), black/red current (both work well, black has dark purple and red - bright red color), cranberry (more sour and bitter), blackberry (rich purple).

Need (drink):
150 g of berries
1 liter water
3 table spoons of sugar
1 table spoon of potato starch

Wash your berries, take pits out from cherries and similar fruits. Save a half of a glass of cold water, bring the rest to boiling. Add berries and sugar, boil it for about 10 minutes. Sift the resulting sirup, as we need it clear, pour it back to the pot and bring to boil again. Mix a half glass of cold water with starch and pour it into the pot, stirring frequently. The whole thing will start thickening, bring it to boil, stirring, take from fire, close the lid and let it to cool of. Drink cold, possibly with a spoon of whipped cream on top if you want it as a dessert.

Need (dessert):
150 g of frozen berries for syrup
300+ g frozen strawberries or/and raspberries for adding to the kissel
1 liter water
4 table spoons of sugar
4 table spoons of potato starch

Since it is fairly difficult to come by fresh quality berries in the winter, and even then they tend to cost a fortune, I came up with a way to combine kissel and frozen berries in a more or less instant dessert, with much of a kiddie approval. I usually use strawberries and raspberries as fruits to add, since they seem to keep the taste best when unfrozen (aka do not turn horribly sour), but it matters less from which fruit you make the syrup part.

Save almost full glass of cold water, bring the rest to boiling. Add syrup part of frozen berries and sugar, boil it for about 10 minutes. Sift the resulting sirup, pour it back to the pot and bring to boil again. Mix the remaining cold water with starch and pour it into the pot, stirring frequently. Bring to boil, stirring, as it thickens quite fast (turning fire to soft might be a good idea too, as it is inclined to burn at the bottom). Add 300 g of frozen berries, wait for it to boil again, turn the fire off. Stir it for a bit, so the frozen fruit unfreezes faster and the juice gets mixed with the rest. Eat cold, with or without whipped cram.

Curd pudding

A common and simple lunch dish from home, eaten with a spoon of sour cream.

Need:
300g of curd
2 eggs
4 table spoons of semolina (here known as griesmeel)
2 tabble spoons of sugar
1 handful of raisins
a bit of butter for oiling the baking form

Note: Curd is not everywhere the same. Here they have mostly creamy curd, which is quite wet - because of that I do not use milk to soak the semolina in. In case you have a normal block of curd, then add about 100 ml of milk to the mix.

Mix everything, let it rest for about 15 min, so the semolina fluffs up a bit. Stir it through again, put in a buttered oven dish, bake for about 30 min on 180C. Best served warm, but can be eaten cold if you have leftovers.

"Novelty" chocolate cake

I am sorry for a poor photo of this cake, that's all what I could salvage in the morning! It is now officially our daughters favorite cake and it must run in a family, as it also was her grandpa's favorite. I never made it at home before though; normally we bought it from a cake shop back at home, ever since it appeared there in the 80ties, under a rather plain name "Novelty". I tried to find a recipe for that original one, unsuccessfully, but in one of the forums someone gave an idea that it must be a butter-whipped based cream in some proportion and I could puzzle it out from there. Mind, this is not a very big cake, so for a celebration you might want to do a double portion.

Need:
Cake layer ingredients:
5 eggs,
5 table spoons of sugar,
5 table spoons of flour

Cream ingredients:
200 g good butter
200 g cream for whipping
100g good dark chocolate (70% cacao)

100g dark chocolate and 2 spoons of milk for top

Separate egg yolks from whites. Beat the whites separately, beat the yolks with sugar. Sift the flour (do not skip sifting!) into the bowl and carefully mix it with egg whites and egg yolks. Do not use mixer for this, it will ruin it! Just easy, slowly mix with the spoon or hand. Also, if you are making double portion, first make and bake half, then make the other half. This pastry cannot stay long after it has been made, so it is wise to make only what you can bake at once.

Put baking paper on an oven plate, pour the mix on it, even it out. Bake at 160C for 20-30 min, depending on how thick the layer is. Cut it into 3 same size sheets (middle one does not have to be intact, as long as it is more or less covering same surface, the sides work well for that one).

While cake layers are cooling off, prepare the cream. Beat room temperature butter til white and fluffy (10 min, same add as for whipped cream). Melt chocolate in a water bath (smaller bowl with chocolate put in a large bowl with hot water). Whip cold whipped cream. Add melted chocolate to butter, then mix it with whipped cream.

Note: if you melt chocolate some other way, it has to be cool enough before you add it to butter. If it melts in water bath, it is similar process as if it melts in your hands, so that is more or less temperature you have to aim for.

Do a layer of cake, a layer of cream, a layer of cake, a layer of cream, a layer of cake. Pour molten chocolate (mixed with a bit of milk) on top and let it soak through in a fridge for a day, but this cake is best when it was out of a fridge for a bit before serving, so keep that in mind before bringing it to the table.

Egg and Cheese Salad

This surfaced up today in my memory as a solution to the frequent question what to eat for lunch. I like a yellow cheese with a bit more sharp flavor for this, though usually what ends up in it is that forgotten leftover piece you found at the back of the fridge shelf, deemed still edible after a careful inspection for the suspicious life forms.

I usually do not serve it in any special way, just eat it from a bowl (the amount bellow is for 2-3 people), but it has a potential to end up on a guest table, as a small bite something, on a toast, in the mini cups, etc.

Need:
100 g block of yellow cheese
3 hard boiled eggs
3 spoons of mayonnaise

The rest is simple, roughly grate the cheese on a vegetable grater, cut the eggs into small pieces. Mix, add mayonnaise, eat.

Christmas Eve Apple Pie, aka Fake Fish

From where I come from, Christmas Eve dinner is the most important feast in the whole winter festivities cycle. It is a somber family dinner on a Christmas Eve, while still upholding fasting tradition. Traditionally there have to be 12 dishes served (for 12 Apostles, 12 months of the year, you can take your pick) and at times it can be a rather challenging meal to put together, considering individual preferences of the family members. Last year we found this recipe in some article about Dutch Christmas food in the middle ages, and made it with some modifications. Even though it uses no dairy or animal based products, it turned out to be a really nice apple pie, definitely a keeper.

Need
... for pastry:
500 g flour
120 g sunflower oil (at least I used it, other oils probably will do fine too)
40 g grinded almonds
250 ml of water

... for filling:
3 large apples
90g sugar
1 table spoon ginger
1 table spoon cinnamon
60-80 g grinded almonds (depends on how much there was in a package)

... for decorating
a handful of nice whole almonds
1 raisin or prune

Rasp apples on a vegetable rasp (the rough part). Don't have to peel them, but if the skin looks crap, which often is the case with own apples at this point of the year, you can peel them. Obviously, seed pods go out, we do not want them in a pie. Mix apples with other filling ingredients.
Knead the pastry from pastry ingredients, divide it into 3 balls, 2 big ones (one slightly smaller than the other) and 1 tiny one, that one will be for decoration elements. Roll an oval shape from the bigger ball first, that will be a bottom of your pie. Put a baking paper in your oven plate and place the rolled out pastry sheet on it. Put a filling on it, so that it is about a good 2 cm from the edges. Note: It is important to first put a bottom pastry sheet on an oven plate and only then add the filling, because otherwise it can be rather annoying to lift the whole thing and transport it to the oven plate.
Roll the smaller big ball of the pastry, put it on top and fold the edges. Make a fish tail and fin from the tiny ball, also a rope thingie to separate the "head". Decorate it with whole almonds to make scales and use a prune/raisin to make an eye.
Prick the pie with a fork next to the "head" rope, and around the edges so the steam can get out when baking, otherwise the top layer can burst open in the places where you do not want it to do that; while it does nothing for taste, it can ruin a presentation. Bake in an oven on 200C for about 40 min.

Fruity Herring

Over the years my mother's contributions to Christmas and other celebrations' table were new herring salad recipes. Well, its not really a salad, more like appetizer, cocktail or whatever you want to call it; it is eaten cold, with a piece of a dark bread, quite traditional around those parts, especially in the winter season.
Here I usually get my herring filet mildly marinated from a local fish source, however if it is seriously salted or marinated, you might need to soak it first for about half an hour to get the saltines or overkill vinegar out. There are some taste gains in buying a big fat herring which hasn't been fileted for you, but it is quite a bit of work to get the bones out, and you might want to look first for some tips how to do it properly. Either way, ready filet normally works just fine.

Need
3 average size herring filets (cleaned, mildly marinaded or salted)
2 normal size carrots
2 normal size onions
1 handful of dried plums
1 handful of dried apples
1 handful of raisins
1 table spoon of ketchup
4 spoons of sunflower oil
a pinch of salt and black peppers

Put plums, apples and raisins into a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave them to soak for about 15 min.
Cut the herring into bite size pieces.
Grate the carrots on a vegetable rasp.
Cut the onions into small pieces.
Add oil to the frying pan and start frying carrots. Add salt and pepper, and when carrots start softening up, add onion. Fry until ready (aka onion is golden, carrot soft), then add ketchup and put in a mixing bowl to cool off.
Dry the soaking fruits and cut the plums and the apples into the small pieces. Add to the carrot mix, together with the raisins.
If the carrot mix is cooled off (only warm to the touch), add herring. It is important not to do it too soon, because if herring is mixed with the hot oil and veggies, it will start cooking and can taste a bit weird. Mix it and serve cold.

Black Forest Cherry Cake (Schwarzwälder Kirsch)

Black Forest cake, also known as Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte is a well known German dessert, with tons of different recipes how to make it. The one I use is a bit adapted recipe from the 70-ties cook book. While some of this can seem like a bit of an advanced magic, it is really not that difficult to puzzle out once you are busy with it. A note though, it is not a cake that is well suitable for a star shape cake, like the one I made in the picture, as it is rather soft and soggy cake, which does not keep sharp edges that well. Normal round shape is no problem at all, I suppose classic look, with black chocolate sprinkle on sides or top and cherries is a thing to go for.
Since you normally bake a cake part and then cut it into 3 layers, this recipe is for 24 cm cake form, if you want bigger or smaller diameter, adjust proportions accordingly.

Need:
Cake biscuit part:
150 g of black chocolate (70% cacao)
150 g of butter
150 g sugar powder
2 satchels of vanilla sugar (10 g each, can do with one)
6 eggs
150 g flour
1 satchel of baking powder

Filling part:
1 liter of cherry compote (aka full jar of sour cherries, without pits, swimming in syrup/juice)
2 table spoons of starch
5 spoons of sugar
5 spoons of kirsch (or any other cherry liqueur). If you are not familiar with kirschwasser, it is a form of cherry vodka, 40% strong and clear. It can be substituted with sweeter cherry liqueur or fruit brandy, or, just pouring vodka on cherry leaves and leaving it for 1-2 days.

Cream part:
1 liter of cream for whipping
50 g sugar
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Decoration part
Chocolate sprinkles, a few nice fresh or candied cherries to put on top.

Start with making the cake part. 150g chocolate has to be broken into smaller pieces and melted in a hot water bath. For that, you take a smaller pot or bowl, put the chocolate in it, so that most of it touches the pot surface on the bottom, and then place it into a larger pot, with hot water. Chocolate will slowly melt.
Room temperature butter has to be beaten with 150 g of sugar powder. If you never have done that, you do it with the same mixer whisk as what you use for the whipped cream, in the beginning it tends to cling to it and look a bit scary and wrong, but further it softens and fluffs up. It takes about 5 to 10 min to beat it well, until it doubles in size more or less, and turns white(ish).

Separate your egg yolks from whites. Add yolks one by one to the butter mix, beating with the same whisk. Add chocolate to the mix at the end.

Beat the egg whites separately, till they are stiff.

Add sifted flour to the chocolate mix. You have to sift it, because it ensures the fluffiness of the cake and can make really really significant difference to the end result. DO NOT SKIP that step, ever, when making cakes.
Slowly add egg whites to the chocolate mix, stir it slowly, with a hand or a spoon. Do not use mixer by all means, it will mess things up.

Take your cake form, add baking paper on the bottom (or use the form that does not leak). Bake for about 1 hour in 160C oven (always put cake into already pre-warmed oven). When it is ready, cool it off and cut into 3 layers with a bread knife (the tricky part, but even if it is not a perfect cut, it still can work just fine inside the cake).

When cake part is ready and cooled off, start with the filling. Separate the cherries from the syrup. Ideally there would be about 2 cups of syrup, but if there is less, add water to it.

Cherries: First take 1 cup of syrup and mix it with starch and 3 spoons of sugar, so that there are no lumps. We do this when it is cold, as it is much easier to evenly add starch that way. This cup we put to boiling, so starch can thicken it up, cook it for about 1 min after it boils, stirring vigorously so it does not burn on the bottom. Then we wait for it to cool off a bit, mix in 3 spoons of kirsch and add cherries, so they get coated with the mix.

Syrup: Then take 2nd cup with syrup, put it to boil with 2 spoons of sugar, when it is a bit cooled, add 2 spoons of kirsch to it.

Last is the cream part, when everything else is ready. Before you whip the cream, cool it off well in the fridge or even throw it in a freezer for 10-ish minutes. If cream is warm, you will get a butter, not a whipped cream. So, whip the cool cream with added sugar and vanilla sugar and then the cake is ready to be assembled.

First sprinkle all 3 cake layers with a syrup we made from the 2nd cup of cherry syrup. It is nice to use some tool to spray it, but in an absence of it, just pour it on a cake layer with a table spoon, so it gets soaked evenly.

Put a layer of cake on the plate you are going to serve it on, or on a circle of a baking paper if you plan to transfer it to a proper plate later. Add a layer of cherries filling (the one we made from 1st syrup cup), a layer of whipped cream, second layer of cake, a layer of cherry filling, a layer of whipped cream, a last layer of cake (the prettiest one) and a layer of whipped cream. Basically you need to split cherry filling in 2 parts and whipped cream into 3 parts. Fix the sides of the cake with the whipped cream as well.

Put it in a fridge for half an hour at least and then decorate it. I usually leave decoration for the day I plan to serve it (usually the next day, everything has to soak through overnight), because sometimes the moisture in the fridge can ruin the decoration. If I want to decorate the top with whipped cream, I make some extra, using a fixer for it to be more stiff and hold form better. Big black fresh cherries look awesome on top, but sky is a limit for how to make it pretty.

Mom's favorite cookies

My mother got this recipe from her long time friend and colleague, Grazinele. The recipe is easily 30 years old if not more, as I can remember my mother making these when I was really small. She usually formed the cookies by using a special add for the meat mincing machine, while her friend just rolled them out normally and cut out moon shapes. Either way, they are really easy to make, but that's a point really, sometimes simple things are the best. Kids and hubby definitely share that opinion about these, they hardly last til the next morning. For some variety there is a more chocolaty off-spin, when you add a spoon of cacao powder into the flour, or you can make them normally and then dip into molten chocolate.


Need
200 g of butter,
120 g of sour cream
3 cups of flour
1 egg,
0.5 cup of sugar

Knead everything together (butter can be either soft room temperature, or melted), cool of in a fridge for 15 min, roll out, cut the shapes.
Bake on 180C, for about 15 min (or untill the top is nice and brown.

Oat Cookies

These are great for digestion, reasonably healthy and taste awesome with milk. You can make it with kids, and there is no chance that they will eat too many of these, because they are quite filling. Simple old good oat cookies.

Need:
200 g of butter
1 cup of brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups of flour
3 cups of rolled oats
1-2 cups of raisins
2 tea spoons of baking powder

Mix soft butter with sugar and eggs.
Mix flour with baking powder and then with oats.
Combine both mixes, knead well, add raisins, knead some more.
Form cookies, put them on oven tray line with baking paper. Bake at 180C for about half a hour.

Flat Apple Pie

Ever since our apple trees started yielding more than one apple a year, it became a rather common subject for contemplations about what else we could possibly make from them. Last weekend I remembered that when I was growing up we hardly ever had a traditional apple pie, with crumbly pastry and apples on top. Instead, in all shops you could buy this flat apple pie, which generally gave an impression that something was pressing on it while it was baking, so it never had a chance to rise. I did not particularly like that one when I was a kid, because it often was too sour and too moist, but now, when I did not have it for a decade, I got an urge to try and make it at home.
Finding a recipe, however, proved not so easy. Eventually I found a few that looked plausible, compared them and put together something in between. The result was not exactly what I was looking for, because a texture of the pastry was different from the pie I remember, but non the less it is a really good apple pie.

Need:
250 g of butter
200 g of sour cream
400 g flour
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
2 eggs
1 kg of apples (more or less, sour kind)
1 table spoon of brown sugar (not flattened heap, a big one)
1 tea spoon of ginger powder
1 tea spoon of cinnamon powder

Soften the butter and knead it well with the sour cream, flour and vanilla sugar. Note, essentially this apple pie is not very sweet, so if you want something a bit more sweet-toothish, you can add a good spoon or two of a regular sugar into the pastry mix. Divide pastry into 2 balls and put it into a fridge.
While the pastry is cooling, prepare the apple filling. Peel the apples, take the seed pods and cut them in small pieces or grind them on a vegetable rasp. I prefer cutting, because then there is less juice coming out, but you get the point, small pieces.
Beat both eggs, then separate 1/3 of the mix to a separate bowl - that one would be for the top of the pie.
The remaining 2/3 of egg mass mix with brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon and then with apples.
Take out the pastry and roll it into two sheets, roughly a size of your pie form. The sheets have to be about 0,5-1 cm thick, not more, so a form has to be not a very tiny one. Put one sheet on the bottom, put the apples in, put the other one on top, and brush the remaining egg on top.
Bake at 200C about 30-40 min (until the top is nice and brown).

Sweet and Sour Chicken with a Pineapple

An idea of this dish is that of an Asian kitchen, but as usually, there is an European twist to it, to make it easier and faster to make from what is widely available in a local supermarket. We all are familiar with a typical Chicken-tonight or Chicken Sweet&Sour sauce jars. Those usually are great if you want to stock pile the jars themselves, but at some point I really got fed up that usually it is only a few scraps of vegetables swimming in it. Figuring it can't be that hard to make it, I decided to try and do my own. Result actually does not take longer than making it from a jar, and definitely is more filling.

Need:
200g of chicken filet
1 large carrot (it can be small as well, just more annoying to cut)
1 red sweet paprika
1 normal size onion
1 can of pineapples (300 ml one or smaller. As long as you get them swimming in half a cup of juice, it is fine.)
1 mug of basmati rice (aka about 300 mil, roughly)

3 spoons of plain tomato ketchup
2 spoons of soya sauce (ketjap manis or any other darker kind)
1 spoon of corn starch (here in NL it is Maizena)

Spicing: a pinch of pepper, salt, ginger powder. Though, to be honest, there is enough flavor in this to skip on spices entirely.

So, first put a pot with water (about 2 liters) for rice on fire, it will take a while for it to start boiling.

Start with the veggies, clean the carrot and shop it into pieces, more or less what you normally see swimming in pre-made sauce. Put a bit of oil in the pan (bigger and deeper is better), throw a carrot in, put it on medium fire so it does not burn too quickly, etc. Chop paprika into similar size pieces, throw in. Cut the chicken into more or less half bite pieces, add to the pan. Cut the onions into blocks, add to the pan. Open your pineapple can, fish out pineapples (save the liquid you will need that later!), cut the pineapples if they are not in the blocks already, add to the pan. Fry it for 3-5 minutes, while you are making the sauce.

Somewhere in between this process a water for rice started boiling - add rice, stir it with a fork and cook for 8 minutes, occasionally stirring so it does not stick to the bottom. Try to not overcook it.

Now action moves to the pineapple tin can (or a cup if you poured the juice out). To the pineapple juice add 3 spoons of ketchup, 2 spoons of soya sauce and 1 spoon of corn starch. Whisk it, so the starch is not in the lumps (children toy whisk is lovely for that, but simple spoon/fork can do too). Add this liquid to the frying pan and stir, stir, STIR, so everything gets coated well in sauce.

Get the excess water off the cooked rice (aka sift) and serve with the chicken.

Apple in a Scarf

Over the years my mother collected a bunch of recipes from her friends and colleagues. In my notes, this one is attributed to someone called Danute. Though I can't recall who that person was, I still make these - lets call it cookies - sometimes. It is a variation of what the Dutch know as Appelflap, Frenchies as Chausson aux Pommes; and there probably are similar things in other cultures as well, apple in a pastry wrap. It is also doable with other fruits, as long as they are reasonably dry, the wrapping itself also can be more creative than this basic version.

Need:
4 eggs
250 g margarine (can also be butter)
200g sour cream
2 tea spoons of baking powder
4 cups of flour
4 apples
2 spoons of sugar
1 tea spoon of cinnamon

Short version would be "knead the pastry, let it cool off in the fridge for half an hour, roll it out". A bit longer version depends on a state of butter/margarine you use and how much you want to fuss with it. In a quicker version you melt the butter, knead it with the rest (except apples, obviously), but then it needs to cool off a bit longer for rolling, and sometimes butter can somewhat stiffen in chunks, making a rolling bit annoying. The more fussy way is to warm up butter/margarine in room temperature until it is soft, mix it with the rest, knead it well and put it to cool off in a fridge.
Either way, once it is cooling off in the fridge, prepare the apples. Cut it in 4 pieces, get the seed pods out. If the apples are huge, cut them somewhat more. Mix the apples with half of the sugar and cinnamon for some extra flavor (you can skip on cinnamon if you do not like it.
After pastry spent a good half an hour in the fridge, you can roll it out, cut it into stripes and wrap around the apple pieces. Sprinkle tops with the other half of the sugar and cinnamon.
Bake, for about 30 min on 180C (depending on how big your apples were it can take +/- 10 min extra).

(Non) Goulash with Prunes

A specialty of Hungarian cuisine, goulash made its way across the Europe. To my country it probably got together with the traveling Hungarian doctors back in the 19 century, if not earlier, especially through the manor and merchant culture. Either way, the further it traveled from home, the less goulashy it became it seems. What my grandparents knew as "goulash" does not have much in coomon with an original Hungarian dish. Actually, what we used to have as a popular dish of the same name in the infamous soviet lunch eateries did not resemble the original either; there it mostly consisted of a few tasteless pieces of a leathery beef swimming in the rather suspicious substance called sauce.
The home made version of our (non)goulash has a few versions, you can add carrots to it, make it with flour based sauce, or even make it with pork, but that recipe I will split to some other post. I usually make this version, with dried prunes and a touch of tomato. The exact amount of beef depends on how many people are at a dinner table, we usually take about 600-800 g for 2 adults and 2 kids to last for 2 days. As it is slow cooking dish, it is something you make one day and then warm up leftovers on the next.

Need:
600 g of good beef, suitable for long cooking.
100 g of boneless dried plums (prunes)
1 spoon of tomato paste or ketchup
50 g of butter or oil
3 onions
3 cloves of garlic
Spices:
a pinch of black pepper,
1 tea spoon of salt (actual amount depends on how salty you like your food, tasting is the key)
1 tea spoon of paprika powder
1 tea spoon of dried oregano
1 tea spoon of dried thyme

Boiled potato for garnish, possibly in a combination with a red cabbage.

Cut the beef into the pieces, more or less a bite size. Chop the onions in half rings.
I use heavy cast iron pot for making it, but it is possible to make it in any pot with a thick bottom. Melt the butter in the pot and add the spices: garlic, paprika, herbs, salt and pepper, then put the meat in, together with onions. Fry it for a few minutes, until it turns sort of glistering and not red anymore. Pour the water in, about 1.5 liter and let it come to boil. Add roughly chopped prunes and tomato paste, turn the heat down and slowly cook it on low fire for 3 hours.
When there is about an hour left to cook, start with the potatoes, so they are ready around the same time when the meat is done. I like boiled potatoes most with it, but fries or other kinds work well too.

Fluffy Apple Pie

There are a lot of apple pie recipes, but there always is the one you tend to fall back to, an all time favorite if you will. This one is definitely the one for me, even though I have a few more apple goodness related sentiments.
So... good 20 years back I used to go to this university cafe, with a very presumptions name "Lambada". It had nothing to do with Latin culture, nor with the famous song; actually it could not have been even more far from it, as it was located in a thick walled old Gothic cellar ("The flight of the Valkyr" probably would have been a more suiting name), but they did have a great apple pie (that was about the only thing that was exceptional about that place to be honest). It took me a bit of puzzling to figure out how to make something similar (because, obviously, they do not print recipes on the menu), but after some trial and error, it turned out to be very simple and fail proof recipe.
Need:
4 eggs
200 g of sugar
200 g of sour cream (thick)
2 cups of flour
50 g of butter
2 tea spoons of baking powder
5 apples

The choice of apples matters, I prefer them to be rather dry and sour, some kind of winter variety. I usually do not peel apples if the skin looks all right, just cut them in chunks (after taking out seed pods of course), but if you peel them it is fine too. Further it is fairly simple:
Melt the butter (microwave works fine too), use part of it to butter the sides of the baking form (I use 20x20 cm form);
Mix eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and left over butter, until it is smooth;
Pour half of the mix into a form, put in the apples, pour the remaining half of the mix on top of them, make sure that no apples are sticking out (because they tend to burn).
Bake for about 40-60 min on 180C, check with a wooden stick if it is ready (stick should come out clean out of the pie.
Take out of the form (carefully, as sometimes it does not want to come out nicely, plops out and breaks), let it cool off and enjoy; or if you feel like you deserve it, add some sugar powder on top or eat it with a good spoon of whipped cream.

Elf Ears

My grandma used to make these from a left over pastry from the sweet bread she was making. I never got an actual recipe from her, even though I made lots and lots of these when I was a kid; it always was "a more or less" thing, she usually just put about a kilo of flour into a bowl, and then added the rest by the "feel". The name for it also varies, from "little ears" to "little twigs" and similar, but since its ring gets lost in the translation, after moving the country we started calling them Elf Ears, because it is just much more cool. :)

Need
1 kg flour
200 g of butter
1 cup of sugar
7 g of dry yeast (or equivalent of the living one, usually 20g of living one = 7 g of dry)
3 eggs
100 ml of milk

Now there is traditional way to do it, or bread baking machine way. Ever since I got the later, I just set it on Dough program and done, but if you do not have one...

First you mix yeast with sugar and a bit of hand warm milk. When it starts bubbling happily (especially important with dry yeast, to sort of resurrect them back to the living), it is ready to be used. Then you put flour in a bowl, pour yeast into the whole thing, mix it gently and leave to rise for about an hour in a warm place, with a moist towel on top of the bowl. When it rises for the first time, add the rest of the ingredients and knead it properly. My grandma used to take a knife, get a chunk of a dough, cut it and see how much bubbles there is in it - the more the better. Either way, after about half an hour of kneading workout, you put the dough to rise for the second time. Once it is done after another hour, it is ready to be rolled.

So, we get our dough, prepared either way and roll it out. Then cut the dough in stripes, and after that you cut the stripes every 10-ish cm, in an angle, and make an incision in a middle of each piece. Then you take one end of it, and pull it through the incision, forming the "ears" (see image bellow).

The dough tends to dry fast, so it is handy either to have a kid on stand by, making the ears, while you fry those already made, or you have to use a cling film, to preserve the moisture.

Pour about 3 cm layer of oil in a frying pan and fry them on both sides for a minute, until they are nice and golden. Sometimes part of them will bubble out, aka get a "bear belly", which seemed to be a lot of fun and more tasty when I was a kid. Alternatively they can also be fried in a deep frying pan, in oil, just of course you want it to be a fresh oil, not to smell of fish, chicken or fried onions.

After they cooled off a bit, sprinkle with sugar powder for extra sweetness.

Pretsie Cookies

Sometimes I need to make something cookie(ish) with the kids. This recipe is perfect for that, no sharing of the roller/shapes/no drama. You make the pastry, they roll it with their hands into mini snakes, form the pretzel like cookies, sprinkle with sugar. Simple, easy, preschooler can make (and eat) it.

Need:
200g of butter
1 cup of sugar
2 eggs
3 cups of flour
2 tea spoons of baking powder

Knead the pastry, make the cookies, sprinkle cookies with some sugar, bake for 20 min in 180C oven, done.

Po-Stroganovski (Beef Stroganoff)

By most accounts this well know dish dates back to the second half of the 19th century. It originated in the kitchens of count Alexander Grigoriyevich Stroganov, who, like many other wealthy gentleman of that era, was keeping an "open table" in Odessa, which could be joined by any educated and properly dressed member of the society. The dish became popular, due to its taste and the easiness to divide it into portions (novelty at the time) and subsequently spread to the other establishments of fine dining in the Russian Empire.

There are some disagreements over the ingredients and serving. The recipe bellow is the original Russian version, served in the restaurants of Kaunas governorate at the turn of the century (~1900). It does not contain mushrooms, and usually it was served with potato fries and brined pickles. Back in those days mushrooms were available year round (fresh in the autumn, marinaded, salted, dried for the rest of the year), but those were mostly real forest mushrooms, which generally have much more defined flavors than the common button mushroom in our shops. As for the french fries, they were known in Russia due to the popularity of the French culture among Russian nobility, kitchen included, however in some restaurants it was served with a buttery potato mash. Brined pickles work much much better with this dish than the marinaded ones (especially what usually is available at the local supermarkets), because they have less overpowering and more natural flowing flavor.

Need:
About 200 g beef filet (tender parts of sirloin).
2 average sized onions
200 ml beef stock (preferably home made, but cubes can do too, as long as it does not have too much spices, need 1 cube)
100 g sour cream
100 g butter (quality one)
1 table spoon of french mustard (paste without grains)
3 table spoons of flour
Pepper, salt

Garnish: French fries, brined pickles.

Cut beef in bite size cubes or stripes (if there is some doubt about the cut you bought, slightly tenderize it before cutting). Roll them in a spoon of flour, so the beef is lightly dusted.
Cut onion in cubes.
In a pan, melt half of the butter (50g). Add onions. Then, gently place beef on top of the onions, so that it does not touch the frying pan surface. Fry for about 3-5 minutes, until meat starts glistering (but not browning!). Its important not to overcook it, otherwise it will be hard. Take off the fire and transfer meat and onions into an oven dish.

Now the sauce. Mix about half of a glass of the cold beef stock with 2 spoons of flour, whisk it so there are no lumps. Have the rest of the stock at hand. Note: if you are making stock from cube, dissolve the cube in 100 ml boiling water and add the other 100ml cold afterwards, so the stock is not hot when you need it.

Melt butter in a clean frying pan, on a slow fire. Add the stock with flour, mixing vigorously, then thin it out with the rest of the beef stock. Add sour cream, mustard, a pinch of pepper and a pinch of salt.

Pour the sauce over the beef and onions, cover the dish with foil and put into the oven (180C) for about 15 min.

Karpatka pie

Right, I should probably have called this pie Paris- Carpathian Lass, or Karpatka-Brest. The story goes like this: I quickly saved a few recipes for Karpatka (Polish pie) and Paris Brest (French pie) to the same text file, with a though, that I will sort it out later. Later of course came about 2 years too late, when I could neither remember, nor trace back where and what came from; nor to which recipe the random parts of the text belonged. I still wanted to try it though, so I mixed what seemed to be a logical part of each recipe. In the end, after trial and error, there was one version of pastry and 2 versions of cream that were nice. I make the first version of cream most of the time, but some people who tasted it, preferred the second one.

Need:
Pastry:
250 ml of water (can be half water, half milk)
50 g butter
50g sugar
200 g flour
1 tea spoon baking powder
5 large eggs

Cream I:
1 l of milk
3 egg yolks
150 g sugar
1 cup of starch
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
150g butter
400 ml whipped cream

Cream II:
300 g curd cream, without any flavors
100 ml of condensed milk
100 g of butter
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Pie part:
Boil 250 ml of water, melt butter and sugar in it. Fetch a whisk. Quickly pour all flour into boiling water and whisk like hell! The pastry thing in the pan should turn into one consistency without lumps. Boil it for about 2-3 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon, then take of the fire and cool off till it is hand warm. It is important to cool it off properly, because if you are not patient enough and start adding eggs too soon, they will basically cook in the pastry and the pie won't fluff out in the oven. So.... WAIT!

Turn oven on for 220C. Start adding eggs to the pastry, one by one (so the pastry can absorb them) and mix well. Now you can either split pastry into two separate sheets, or bake it at once, but then the layer on the oven plate should be a bit thicker. Put it in the preheated oven when it reaches max heat, bake for about 30-40 min. Can turn heat a bit down in the last 10 min.

Take it out, cool off. If it was one sheet approach, cut it in half (aka layers). Add cream in between, sprinkle with the sugar powder on top, or glaze with chocolate/white icing.

Cream I:

Beat egg yolks with sugar.
Slowly bring 800 ml of milk to boil, stirring occasionally as it is inclined to burn at the bottom. Add butter, melt it, add vanilla sugar. Whisk remaining 200 ml of cold milk with starch, add it to the boiling milk, mix it well until it boils again. Add eggs, mix well, boil it for another 2-3 min on slow fire.

Beat cold whipped cream. When the boiled cream cools off a bit, mix it with the cream, gradually.

From this amount there is a lot of cream, proportions can be a bit adjusted according to the own preferences. It is also very good cream for other sorts of pies.

Cream II:
Beat the room temperature butter, until white and fluffy with the mixer (about 10 min). Add condensed milk, beat some more. Add curd, mix it well in (if curd is very wet, get a tea towel and let the water dribble out a bit).
After combined with the pie part, this version has to stay in a fridge to stiffen a bit.

Lil' Taters

At home these cookies are called Little Potatoes, for the obvious resemblance. I called them "cookies" for a lack of a better word for it, as it is something in between a cookie and a cake. Its that kind of sweet you can make when you think there is nothing tasty at home, or when you have some crumbs from the previous project. Or just... when you feel like eating something earthly.


Need:
500g crumbs (plain bread ones normally used for roasts, or cookie/spondge crumbs... as long as it crumbles)
200 g of sugar
100 ml milk
200g butter
1 table spoon cacao powder

Heat milk up, melt butter and sugar in it. Mix cacao with crumbs, then gradually add milk mix and knead it through. Let it cool of in a fridge for 30 min, then make small balls and put back to the fridge to stiffen. Taste can be enhanced by adding nuts to it, or a wisp of cream on top.

Plav

Plav is a dish typical to the Middle-Asian kitchen. There are many regional versions of it, but essentially it consists of meat, rice and carrots, all mixed through in a process of cooking. Generally any meat can do, (lamb, chicken, beef, even fish), as long as it has a bit of fat; which usually poses a problem here, as the only fatty meat you can get is pork, and that normally is not used for its traditional preparation. Traditions aside, pork does just fine, you can even add some lard to it. Rice wise the best are local Middle-Asian rice cultivars, but Basmati rice is good enough substitute for everyday cooking. There are two ways to make it, a real one and a quick one, depending on what you want to achieve (feast or everyday meal).

Need:
300 g of faty beef, lamb or pork
2 large winter carrots
2 onions
1 head of garlic
200 g of dry Basmati rice
1 table spoon of tomato puree (can be replaced by barberry berries (original), or a paste from dried sour plums)
1 table spoon of yellow raisins
2 spoons of butter, sunflower oil or lard
Spices: 1 tea spoon cumin powder, 1 tea spoon coriander powder, a pinch of black pepper, a tea spoon of salt


True version:
Generally making of plav is a bit of a ritual, a communication event with your guests while plav is slowly cooking in your kitchen or even outside on a brazier. Its a good alternative for a BBQ if you have a nice kettle to cook it in over the fire. Tomato puree is used here as a substitute for barberry berries, which are less commonly available, its there to give a bit of sourness to it. Raisins are an optional ingredient, a variation of recipe, I like it better with them though, especially if I use tomato instead of barberry as a sour additive.

So, cut the meat into bite size strips. Cut the carrots into thicker straws, cut onions in halt rings.
Clean and chop garlic. Now in the original version you cook the whole head of garlic, sort of stick it in the middle of the pot, and then squirt garlic paste out of it, but I like to improvise here and just add it normally.

To a pan in which you are going to cook your plav, add a good chunk of lard, and turn the fire to max. Add spices, add meat, fry it until it starts turning golden at the edges, then add carrots, garlic and onions. Stir fry it for a few minutes, then add about 1 liter of water - so it is a bit above the meat and vegetable mix by a few inches. Add tomato puree and raisins. Reduce fire, and cook it for about half of an hour. When it is done you have what is called zirvak - a basis for plav (which, if prepared in larger amount, can be frozen for the later use).

Then we add rice to our zirvak, simply pour it over the vegetable and meat mix, and then carefully pour about a liter of water over it - so, that it does not mess up the layering. Generally water should be more or less a few inches above the rice. Turn the fire hotter and cook it further - somewhere about 15 min or so. To check if it is done you can do two things, one is to do a few holes in the rice, so the steam from the bottom can go up (eating stick is a fine tool for that). Do that and see if there is still bubbling at the bottom, if not, plav is done. Also taste rice from top and see if it is edible, if not, add a bit of extra water. The idea is that the steam cooks the rice. When it is done-ish, mix it properly through, cover a pot and let it rest for another 15-20 min.

Traditionally the drink to accompany it is tea, it also can be served with fresh cucumber salad.

Quick version:

It is for those days when you come home from work and have no time for rituals.

Cut meat, carrots, onion and garlic as above.
Fry meat and vegetables on a frying pan, until soft and done. Mix with tomato paste with a bit of water and add to it at the end.
At the same time, make rice: boil water, add rice, cook for 8 minutes, get the water off the rice.
Mix everything and eat.

Apple sauce

Dutchies love their apple sauce, or, as they call it, appelmoes. I love it too, though I am more familiar with a chunkier version of it, which we normally use as half-jam and a sweet fix (white bread + apple puree = instant cake, or something along those lines). It goes surprisingly well with savory dishes as well; with fish (especially a fattier kind, like salmon), slow cooked beef and lots of other things. It is also one of the simplest things to make and keep for the winter if you have your own apples.

Apple sauce is cooked&mashed apples, with sugar. How much sugar depends on a particular apple cultivar, how you close a jar, etc. If you close your jars hot, in theory you can do it without sugar at all, especially if the apples themselves are a bit on a sweet side, however I would say add at least 100g of sugar per 1 kg of apples, just in case. Sugar acts as a preservative, and the last thing you want is your entire winter stock going kaboom if your apples were tad too sour. Kaboom is not a joke by the way, a pressure building up in a fermenting jar can literally launch it from its shelf.

Need:
1 kg of peeled apples
300 g of sugar

There is no sure way to measure sugar vs non cooked apples, as the amount of water, structure, etc. differs. If you have very sour apples you might want to use more, if you have very dry sweet ones, there can be less. Experiment is your friend there, but 300g/1kg seems to be pretty reliable.

The rest is fairly simple. Peel apples, cut them in quarters, take seed pods out. If apples are on a monster side, cut them a bit smaller. Peel 1kg, add it to the pot in which you are going to cook it, add 300g of sugar, so it coats them, then peel the next 1 kg, add sugar, repeat till the pot is almost full (about by 10 inches from top, otherwise it will splatter annoyingly all over the place when cooking). Cover it, leave it over the night.

The next day you will notice, there is some liquid in the pot. Great! Stir the whole thing through, so you do not have too much sugar stuck to the sides of the pot and put it on fire. Cook for about 10-15 min after it starts boiling - generally to the point that apples start to fall apart, which also depends on variety. I love the local one, Groningen Kroon, the most, as it turns into a perfect sauce pretty much instantly and without much of extra effort required, but there are plenty of other good varieties too.

Either way, when cooking is done, you have to either blend it for a smooth sauce, or mash manually. If you cut apples smaller, you can skip the whole mashing part entirely, and just have it a bit chunkier. Whichever is preferred really, but keep in mind that the whole thing is very hot, so you need to wait before blending it, not to screw your blender. After you blend it, you have to boil it again before adding to the jars for the winter keeping.

Jars:
There are different methods how to close jars for the winter and how to sterilize them. What I do is using glass jars and metal lids which you screw on a jar. It is possible to use the same lid a few times, but eventually it start loosing the tightness, so all in all it is more reliable to always use new lids.

I wash the jars very well with a dish washing soap, then rinse them with boiled water. You can also rinse it with vodka, but I rather keep it to water, does not seem to be much difference there. After washing, place them upside down on a clean towel, so the water can dribble out.

Put lids in a boiling water for 5 minutes.

Take one jar, pour boiling apple sauce into it (with soup spoon), fish out a lid from a boiling water,put it on a jar and close it tight with the kitchen gloves on your hands. Actually that's a hubby job, men can screw it tighter if they put some force to it.

Place all closed jars on a towel, and cover it with a blanket, so they cool off very gradually. Move to a storage after 2 days.

Whipped Cream and Strawberry Cake

In my notebook I have a couple of whipped cream cake recipes, which generally consist of a)some form of cake/sponge/baked basis in general b)whipped cream c)fruits to put into the whipped cream. In the summer, the simple strawberry version just does it for me, sweet, fruity, pretty much a perfect summer cake.

Need:
Cake layer ingredients
1 egg, 1 table spoon of sugar, 1 table spoon of flour (x times, depending on how big the cake will be)
0.5 liter of cream
2 leaves of gelatine (for 200 ml of liquid)
0.5 kg of fresh tasty strawberries

I purposely did not mention that this cake required 4 eggs. Thing is, with whipped cream cake you can make it as large as you want, just by following the proportion of 1 egg/1 spoon of sugar/1 spoon of flour for the cake basis part. It is very handy when you make elaborate cakes for the children birthdays, where there is no sure way to guess how much of the materials you will need.
Also, this cake pastry cannot be kept for long before baking, so it is easier to make a mix from 2 eggs (if you make usual round cake), bake one layer, then mix other 2 eggs, bake the second layer.

So, the cake layers. Separate egg yolks from whites. Beat the whites separately, beat the yolks with sugar. Sift the flour into the bowl and carefully mix it with egg whites and egg yolks. Do not use mixer for that, it will ruin the fluffiness of the egg whites. Just easy, relaxed, mix with the spoon.
Pour the mix on a baking paper, even it out, bake at 160C for 20-30 min, depending on how thick the layer is. For this cake I used cake form, but sometimes I also just make it square, without any form. Bake a square, cut it into 2 and there you go, it does not matter if you cut it in smaller pieces anyway.

While cake layers are cooling off, put gelatine leaves in cold water and let them soak. Cut the the strawberries in half, get rid of the leaves, save a few to decorate a top if you wish. Warm up 50 ml of cream, so it is hot, but not boiling (boiled gelatine is not suitable for consumption). Take the cream from fire, get excess water from the gelatine leaves and put them into hot cream, let it melt. Whip the rest of the cool cream (very important in the summer to keep it cool before whipping, otherwise you will be making a butter), then carefully mix in gelatine bit.

Assemble the cake, layer of cake, whipped cream, strawberries, cream, layer of cake, layer of cream, some strawberries on top. Leave for at least half a day in the fridge to stiffen and soak into the cake layer.

Apple/quince cheese

Quince cheese, also known as membrillo, is an ancient dish originating from the Mediterranean region. It seems it was known to the Romans; and a word "marmelade" originally meant a jam made from quinces. Quince trees, howeve,r are not reliably winter hardy in the colder parts of Europe, but there we have plenty of winter apple varieties available that do just fine; and we have an apple cheese instead of original membrillo. It's a lovely dried apple jam thingie, which can last for months even outside of the fridge.


Need:
3 kg of winter apples or quinces (peeled and cut)
0.5 kg of sugar

Apple variety matters a lot here, you need the proper winter apples, which ripen late in the season.

Peel and cut your apples. Pour the sugar over them and leave over night.

The next day pour the resulting liquid away. Put the apple pieces in an oven dish and bake for about 30 min. Boil the liquid part for about 30-40 min. Combine both and cook for another 60 min on a slow fire, constantly stirring, it is not a thing you can sort of leave and go away to check FB.

Once the apple mass thickens and does not run back after you separate it with a spoon, it is ready. Take it out and place it in the cheese sack or plastic bag, put a cutting plank on top and something heavy on it. Leave it for a day and then dry for the later use or eat fresh, it goes very well with some goat cheese.

Alternatively for the instant use can let it set in a form.