Fried Apples & Smoked Sausage

Sliced Melrose apples cooking over medium high heat with a tiny bit of Canola oil and butter.

My mom used to make us fried apples, or I should say, sauteed apples as a side dish.  She used Jonathan apples usually, for their red skins and good apple flavor. She cooked them over medium high heat in a large well seasoned cast iron skillet.  Jonathon's  hold up well to cooking.  As soon as the apples were cooked through and beginning to brown, she added a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar and a pat of butter and tossed and cooked the apples a minute or so until the sugar melted and formed a syrup. Sometimes she added a little cinnamon as well.

I've turned the apples and added slices of smoked sausage.

The other evening I started to saute an apple to have along side some smoked sausage.  I hate getting two pans dirty so I decided to combine the sausage and the apples.  I had turned the apples once before I added the sausage which was good because since the sausage is pre-cooked it browns very quickly.

Adding brown sugar/dry mustard mixture. The apples could have browned more before adding the sausage.
 

Next I mixed a teaspoon of brown sugar with a pinch of dry mustard. As soon as the sausage and apples were nicely cooked through  I took them off the heat and sprinkled the sugar mixture over all. Then I tossed the apples and sausage together.  The hot food melted the brown sugar mixture and formed a syrup.

Sausage and apples glistening with the brown sugar syrup.

This is half a large Melrose apple with about three inches of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage, a green salad of oak leaf lettuce still good from my garden, walnuts, raisins, Parmesan cheese and homemade lime/honey vinaigrette. You could substitute other types of sausage such as a country style sausage patty with sage. That would be very good as well. 

Green salad and apples with sausage makes a nice lunch.

Change this up for breakfast. Add some maple syrup on top and serve over pancakes or waffles. With a big glass of orange juice, that's a big yum!

Cows Put on Heavy Fur Coats

Here's Thor in his winter coat.

I was looking back through some of the pictures I took last summer of my cattle. They all looked so sleak and healthy.   I took a bunch of pictures of them this afternoon so I could update the website. Gone are the sleak short haired coats, replaced by thick, fluffy ones.  It seems to me that they are wearing particularly heavy winter coats this year.

BTAP Juliette, very pregnant and fluffy.

Considering all the crazy weather we've had around the country lately I think it is safe to predict a cold and snow filled winter.  We used to try to predict the weather by watching the woolly worms' fall color, but you know, I've not seen a woolly worm in years!  Woolly worms and big Black Racer snakes used to be all around our house when I was a kid  We'd pick up the worms and  run a finger gently down their furry backs. They'd curl up in our hands.  And black snakes were everywhere. We'd find them hanging in the pear tree on the east side of the house, hanging from the rafters in the barn on hot summer days, and once we found one draped around the backdoor of the house. When I spotted a big Black Racer under the oak leaf hydrangea bush this summer it was quite an event! I hadn't seen one that big in a good twenty years!

The lack of woolly worms and black snakes makes no sense to me. A good 500 acres of the land around us is organic, so pesticides aren't the problem.  Maybe the increase in crows and hawks and coyotes have something to do with it.  If any body knows, leave a comment.

Here's little and very pregnant Bramble.  She is wearing one of the fluffiest coats of all.

Wild Black Walnuts

Photo by Amy Cowell of Edible Austin, TX

Black walnuts seem to be plentiful in this part of the country.  I have two trees in my yard and there are at least other 25 throughout the farm.  I think black walnuts are an acquired taste. Their flavor is strong and bittersweet - a nice counter point to something sugary sweet. I certainly wouldn't recommend eating them out of hand.

When we were kids my grandfather collected the walnuts on our farm and took them back to his city home to parcel out to his neighborhood squirrels  through the winter. He and my grandmother lived in a little California Bungalow style house in Dayton. The house had a wrap around porch with a porch railing made of brick posts and wide cement railings.  When we went to visit we laid the walnuts out on the railings, then scurried into the house to watch the squirrels through the window. We never seemed to have squirrels in our yard at home on the farm and to this day I associate squirrels with cities.

My grandfather cured a few walnuts for us each year and my mother cracked them for making walnut brittle or a walnut cake.  The bitter flavor is a good counterpoint to the sweet brittle and cake.To make the brittle  Mom took one of her cask iron skillets, melted granulated sugar in it over medium heat, add the walnut meats, stirred and poured the mixture out onto a buttered rimmed baking sheet to cool. Then we could crack it into pieces and eat it like peanut brittle.  The cake was simply a rich white cake with walnut meats added into the batter.  The frosting was either a white butter cream or a carmel butter cream.  This makes a very sweet cake and again, the bitter walnuts were just the right touch.  We also like this cake made with hickory nuts - when we can wrestle them away from the squirrels. 

Apparently, black walnuts have become a foodie thing. Like their English walnut cousins, they are very nutritious. If you Google the words wild black walnuts you will find a plethora of people selling black walnut meats at about $12 a pound, which to my way of thinking is cheap considering how much work it is to harvest them. You can also find plenty of instructions for harvesting your own black walnuts - most of the instructions include a car, wire brushes and rubber gloves.