Knowing we all are influenced by our activities and associations, I went looking for apple recipes this week. Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting an area apple orchard with Family during one of the rain free breaks we’ve experienced this October. It was apple everything, worth the trip and worth the apples. Here are a couple of totally different apple based recipes, with the
red hot candies adding a bit of a twist to the baked apples, the yogurt adding a bit of tang to the soup. I picked the red hot candies one because as a chef I worked for always making a holiday salad that contained them. Just one other note. In the soup recipe, I’d cut back on the onions, maybe to half. Butternut squash flavor is already so mild that my concern would be the onions being the overpowering flavor.

In a soup pot, heat oil. Add onions and curry and sauté 3 to 4 minutes. Add squash, apple and chicken broth; bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer soup 25 to 30 minutes.
Puree soup and season with cinnamon, salt and pepper, if needed. Whisk in yogurt. Serve sprinkled with sunflower seeds.  

Football season is here, and you may be thinking of new recipes to pack for tailgating or planning easy menus to serve before the game. Whichever option you choose, you want your food to be delicious and to be served safely. Keeping food safe requires keeping hot foods hot and cold foods cold. This may sound easy, but failure to follow this simple rule often is a factor in food-borne illness. Bacteria that cause food-borne illness multiply and grow at temperatures between 41°F and 140°F, which is known as the danger zone. Temperatures between 70 and 120 degrees allow microorganisms to grow especially fast.

Perishable food should be thrown away if it has been kept between 40 and 140 degrees for more than two hours. This is known as the
time/temperature danger zone. Pack perishables, including hot dogs, fried chicken, cold sandwich meats and salads, in a well-insulated cooler with plenty of ice. Remember to pack leftovers back in the cooler for after-game snacks.

If you’re planning to take the grill and cook in the parking lot, select foods that can be stored in the cooler until time to cook. Be sure uncooked food doesn’t come in contact with food that’s already prepared or will be served raw. For example, place the raw hamburger meat in a container so it will not drain on the cheese.

For quick meals at home before the game, start planning and preparing early in the week. Select recipes that can be prepared the night before and stored in the refrigerator. You can prepare salads and serve cold meats for sandwiches. As the weather gets cooler, consider preparing a one dish dinner the night before and warming it up before the game. Spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup or chili served with a salad can be a fast meal with easy clean-up before or after the game.

My recipe for tailgate Taco Soup

Brown hamburger meat and onions together, drain fat and put in pot. Add all other ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Continue stirring to preventscorching.

From fondue pots to frozen yogurt, all trends run in cycles - culinary or otherwise.  And while it may seem as outdated as Tupperware parties, home canning is making a comeback.

Cookbooks and websites devoted to canning are suddenly everywhere.  The New York Times and The Washington Post have all recently devoted lengthy articles to the trend.  The Times reports that sales of home canning equipment have expoloded, growing by fiftly percent in the last year alone.  Why canning, why now?  The word tends to conjure up images of early American or being in the country where housewives slaving over boiling pots with their mason jars, preserving the harvest for the months to come in a time before the supermarket. 

In a number of ways canning is perfect for today’s world.  The current economic situation has people more than ever attempting to make once purchased staples at home.  Those who want to buy locally and in season from farmers markets can make the most of a fresh produce haul.  And those interested in recycling, cutting back on extraneous shipping and packaging can reuse those glass jars a million times over.

Fruit crumbles are the lazy man’s pie:  Nothing more than fruit baked with a crunchy, buttery topping of sugar, flour, butter, and ground almonds.  They offer many of pie’s satisfactions with much less work.  They work just about any time of year with any fruit that happens to be great.

In late summer and September I make them using the last peaches, plums, figs, and raspberries of the season.  In the winter I turn to local apples, pears, or cranberries with plenty of sugar to balance their tartness.  In deep spring into early summer strawberry-rhubarb crumbles connects me to the season.  High summer brings endless combinations of berries- blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, apricots, nectarines, and peaches.

The basic method for making a crumble is simple.  Toss 5 or 6 cups of sliced fruit peel ed or unpeeled with sugar and lemon juice according to its sweetness and bake under the topping. 

For juicy fruits such as peaches and berries add 2 tablespoons of flour or cornstartch.

Once you know the gist, you can start to improvise your own, unique combinations of fruit, nuts, and flavorings.  Flavor the fruit filling with vanilla extract, rum, cognac, rosewater, or orange flower water, pinches of herbs for unusual contrast, and, of course, spices like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and orange or lemon zest.  Or replace the almonds in the topping with sliced hazelnuts, pecans, or walnuts.  You can prepare the topping several days ahead and keep it in a jar in the fridge to use at a moments notice.

Serve warm in a bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a dollop of creme fraiche or whipped cream and a big spoon.

The name derives from the old German word “bacho” meaning buttock. The USDA defines it as “the cured belly of a swine carcass” (other reason not to let the government craft your menu descriptions). “It” is, of course, bacon. Once consigned to nestle next to breakfast eggs (when bacon is served, eggs are present 71% of the time), sit crumbled atop baked potatoes and be the “B” in BLT’s, today bacon is literally and figuratively everywhere in the food universe:

• U.S. consumption of bacon increased from 16.8 pounds per person in 1998 to 17.9 pounds per person in 2007.
• 62% of restaurants have bacon on the menu.
• 53% of all household report that they always have bacon in stock at home.
• When eaten at home, 75% of the time bacon is eaten “as is”.
• At home, bacon is consumed an average of 18 times per person per year.

Source: National Pork Board

Source: Technomic Menu Monitor

Ignoring for the moment the plethora of bacon influenced non-edibles in the world such as watches, band-aids, tuxedo’s, dental floss, IPod Apps, and rolling papers, the use of bacon as ingredient has literally gone hog wild. Consider if you will, the following:

Bacon Martini	Bacon Maple Bar	Bacon Vodka
Bacon Ice Cream	Chicken Fried Bacon	Bacon Chocolate Bar

Of course no discussion of the influence of bacon in foodservice would be complete without the mention of bacon tattoos: 

all of these fact are compliments of the world of sweet bacon , a chef resource for everything bacon or dealing with cured pork products .  

Tim JonesExecutive Chef