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.

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).

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).

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.

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.