International Correspondent!

Today the International Correspondent brings the thrilling news that autumnal splendor is assaulting the Lothians, and my fair city is strewn with food in the manner of a forager's paradise.

Two weekends in a row I have gone foraging at the Hermitage of Braid, where beyond plentiful wild fruit there are also plentiful domestic dogs and toddlers vying for the International Cute and Muddy Playfellows Award.

This weekend it was APPLES. My precious green bucket, a remnant of the gardening blog of yore, was filled to the top with apples shaken from the very tops of the tallest trees.

I concede that that is not a FULL bucket. Just use your damn imagination and pretend it's full. It was full at some point.

The first step was easy enough. Buy loads of packaged shortcrust pastry cause I'm a lazy baker and make a couple pies. Lucky I got that nifty apple corer last time I was at Ikea!


The second pie was frozen raw so I can gift it to Ross's coworker who just had a baby on Friday! (6lbs, girl, named Autumn. YAY!)

The completion of the pie-for-keeps required lots of nom-ing. But how can you nom a pie when you don't have any heavy cream or ice cream or custard cream?

TRIGGER PANTRY CHALLENGE!!!

So I combined extra thick french creme fraiche (fuck you guys, I am not going to even TRY to do any accents francais), 2% Greek yogurt, vanilla, and icing sugar. It ended up a bit sweet but since the pastry was unsweetened it all balanced out.


The rest of the bucket, along with the cores and peels of the pie-encased apples, ended up in the massive lovely high end stockpot that is and remains the best wedding present EVER.

Since weights and measures are for jerks, I enriched the apple crap with undetermined amounts of raw sugar, orange zest, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla and some water, and then cooked it for about a million hours. Ok it was more like 6 hours.



During which time I couldn't decide whether I was making apple sauce, apple butter, or fruit leather. Apple butter took the least effort so I just went with it.

Result?!?!


It looks like canned pumpkin pie gloop but honestly, it's just apples. Apparently one huge green bucket of apples equals two pies and one midsized Best Foods mayonnaise jar filled with apple butter. MATH!