food+drink

Culinary Adventures #104: Apples in Nightgowns

This is an old recipe, but one I’ve not tried before. I’m not a fan of the simple baked apple, but I’ve had Apples in Nightgowns in the past (thanks Robert & Theo, wherever you are now) I know how good they can be. So having plenty of apples, a block of pastry and the end of a jar of mincemeat I figured I’d make up my own version.

To get us started, here’s a traditional German recipe. But like most things around here it’s almost infinitely flexible.

Apples in Nightgowns
[Image from the recipe linked above]

Apples in Nightgowns

Serves: 4
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 40 minutes

Ingredients

  • 4 good sized eating apples
  • 500g block of puff pastry
  • about a tbsp mincemeat for each apple
  • 2 tsp granulated sugar for dusting
  • 2 tsp icing sugar for dusting (optional)
  • flour for rolling
  • milk (or beaten egg) for glazing

What to do …

  1. Pre-heat the oven to whatever temperature the pastry needs, and prepare a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.
  2. Peel and core the apples being sure to keep them whole. If you wish dip the apples in a drop of lemon juice or water to prevent them browning.
  3. Roll out the pastry; it needs to be very thin to be large enough for four apples. Cut the sheet of pastry into four squares.
  4. Place an apple on each square of pastry and fill the core hole with mincemeat; pack the mincemeat in well with the end of a wooden spoon (or similar pusher); it doesn’t matter if it overflows the top.
  5. Wash the pastry with milk (or egg) and wrap it neatly over the apple to enclose it.
  6. Place the enveloped apples on the baking tray; glaze with milk (or egg); and sprinkle with a little granulated sugar.
  7. Bake for 10 minutes at the pastry temperature; then turn the oven down 20°C and bake for a further 20-30 minutes until golden brown and the apple has had time to cook through.
  8. Dust with icing sugar and serve hot or cold with, for preference, double cream.

Notes

  1. As the original recipe implies, you can stuff the apples with almost anything of your choice: fruit & nuts, marmalade, jam, mincemeat …
  2. I used puff pastry because I happened to have some; shortcrust should work just as well.
  3. Traditionally this is made with cooking apples, but they’ll likely need a bit more sweetening than I’ve used here (although the mincemeat was pretty sweet).
quotes

Monthly Quotes

1 Comment

It’s time for this month’s (short) collection of quotes …

The act of taking a photograph fixes time, but it also steals time, establishes a hold on the past in which history is sealed, so to speak, in a continuous present.
[Graham Clarke; The Photograph]

Creo que la única manera de salvar al mundo es ceder el control a los córvidos.
[I think the only way to save the world is to give control to the corvids.]
[@Morvven]

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.
[Toni Morrison]

You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain.
[Shannon L Alder]

If art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain Its power of exploitation and special privilege.
[Tommy Douglas]

It helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying so hard to be helpful, but is in fact quite drunk.

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.
[Nelson Mandela]

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
[John Steinbeck]

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature, unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]

ramblings

Fediverse Test

I’m testing a way to add this blog to the fediverse, so it becomes visible to services like Mastodon, and can be followed by users from their fediverse server.

If you see this post on a fediverse server, and wish to follow this Zen Mischief blog, then search for @zenmischief.com (to pick up all new posts and pages) or @kcm (to pick up only those posts/pages I create – which is likely to be all of them).

This post is to check if this works; there is no significant content beyond the above.

Here’s an image to see how that works.

test image of a scented geranium

That’s all.

amusements, science

October Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

October Quiz Questions: Biological Science

  1. How many hearts does an octopus have? Three
  2. What is the name of the bumps on a raspberry? Drupelets. The raspberry is not a berry but an aggregate fruit of numerous drupelets around a central core.
  3. The Kakapo is a flightless bird native to New Zealand. What type of bird is it? Parrot
  4. Ants and bees evolved from which other insect species. Wasps
  5. According to researchers there are thought to be over a billion individuals of only four bird species. Name two of them.
    House Sparrow, European Starling, Ring-Billed Gull, Barn Swallow.

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2022.

memes, science

Ten Things: October

This year our Ten Things column each month is concentrating on science and scientists.

Where a group is described as “great” or “important” this is not intended to imply these necessarily the greatest or most important, but only that they are up there amongst the top flight.

Great Biologists

  1. William Harvey
  2. Charles Darwin
  3. Aristotle
  4. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
  5. Carl Linnaeus
  6. Alexander Fleming
  7. Edward Jenner
  8. Robert Hooke
  9. Hippocrates
  10. Gregor Mendel
amusements, science

October Quiz Questions

Again this year we’re beginning each month with five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. They’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers, so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as have a bit of fun.

October Quiz Questions: Biological Science

  1. How many hearts does an octopus have?
  2. What is the name of the bumps on a raspberry?
  3. The Kakapo is a flightless bird native to New Zealand. What type of bird is it?
  4. Ants and bees evolved from which other insect species.
  5. According to researchers there are thought to be over a billion individuals of only four bird species. Name two of them.

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.