If you’re a regular reader of Bon Appetit, then you know Andrew Knowlton. I have always enjoyed his “take” on the culinary world. He travels a lot and always has an opinion about things. But this January issue had a list of things he is telling us about – and I just don’t know, Andrew. You’ve maybe gone over the edge. I’ll tell you all about it . . .

The article is titled The Year 2014 in Preview. He predicts the next big ingredients, cuisines and cities that will shape what and how we eat.

1. Pancakes for Dinner. Well, if you read my post about pancakes for dinner for my DH growing up, and waffles for me and my family growing up, this sounds right down the same alley. But no, it’s not. He says they’ll be savory pancakes with fillings like sea urchin, squid, smoked sturgeon. Sounds dreadful to me. But then, blini with caviar has been around for a century or so (but I don’t eat that, either, do you?)

2. New feathery fronds – he says we’ll be seeing bronze fennel as the new garnish. I’ve never heard of it or seen it and we certainly don’t live in a culinary backwater. I found a photo on the web, see right.

3. A Boilermaker. It’s a drink, of sorts. It used to be a tiny shot glass of whiskey down inside a big glass of beer and you drink it together. Andrew says you’ll have the beer and the whiskey alongside each other. Well, okay. I don’t drink beer or shots of whiskey, so he won’t find me bellying up to the bar to order that one.

4. The next big food town: Pittsburgh. The winners in recent years were Houston, Charleston and Nashville.

5. The new “in” cuisine will be Filipino. He cites Smalls in Chicago, Qui in Austin and Maharlika in NYC as places that currently highlight the food of the Philippines.

6. Za’atar – I might agree with him on this one. Za’atar is a spice blend from the Middle East. You can buy it in many countries or make your own. Or buy it at one of the spice purveyors you know. It’s good stuff, but I don’t know if it’s going to be that wildly popular. We’ll see.

7. A new trend in restaurant design with a “living green wall,” a wall of hanging ferns, ivy, even succulents. I haven’t seen such a thing; maybe you have. He’s seen them at 4 restaurants so far (NYC, Miami, DC and Charleston).

8. Cheese that will rival or one-up Burrata – Fossa, Scamorza and Cloumage. I’ll be watching for them.

9. A new fish for the diner’s table – the porgy. It’s upstaging branzino, he says. They’re abundant, inexpensive, mild-tasting and work well for whole-fish serving because they’re small. But every porgy is loaded with small bones. I won’t be ordering that anytime soon.

10. Egg Yolks. Well, not just egg yolks, but dried egg yolks, cured, aged, grated over pasta, and even sugared and sprinkled on top of crème brulee. Really? I’ll be looking for that.

That’s it, folks. What do you think?

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Ever since Christmas my usual high level of cooking interest has waned a bit. I really didn’t over-indulge much over the holidays (a good thing), so I wasn’t scrounging low calorie meals particularly, though I prepared a few new ones, all with dismal results.

I also have been spending an inordinate amount of time sitting with my leg up on an ottoman. Why? Because I had a skin cancer removed from my right lower leg on December 24th and had no idea when I made the appointment that the regimen was rest-rest-rest. (The office forgot to mention that part to me or I’d have waited until after Jan. 2nd.) It’s hard to cook meals from a sitting, semi-reclining position.

Perhaps I mentioned it some days after the 1st of January that after the doctor admonished me severely (she could tell I’d spent too much time on my feet) that I truly did sit with my leg UP. And languish. And get bored. I read. I watched TV, I caught up on some of my magazine reading. The wound itself is much larger than even the doctor thought it would be. It didn’t really hurt except the first couple of days. On the skin surface it looked about the size of a penny, but using a MOHS method of surgery, that sucker had spread out underneath, so the wound was big, slightly larger than a silver dollar. Now, 5 weeks out, it’s maybe slightly larger than a quarter and closing in. But it’s an open wound that must be carefully bandaged every 3 days (my DH does it for me as it’s in a very awkward place to try to do it yourself) with special cream, a sealing bandaging thing, leg wrapped and then I have to wear a compression stocking all day (promotes healing, they say). I can’t get tap water on the wound (for fear of infection) so have to cover my leg in a plastic bag every time I shower. Big nuisance. And no, my dr. did not want to do a skin graft.

This growing old stuff is for the birds! My back had fits from so much forced sitting, so I did make a few trips to the chiropractor. Then my left knee acted up – a pulled tendon or muscle – I think (from what, I don’t know), and after about 5 visits to the chiropractor for that one, it’s back to nearly normal now.

In between times I was up some, down a lot. After about a week of this forced rest stuff, at one of the follow-up visits to the dermatologist I asked the nurse if I could be “up” to fix dinner. She said oh, of course you can. You can lead a normal life, but just spend a few hours a day with your leg up. Ah-ha! I was back in the kitchen and my DH was a very happy camper I can tell you for sure!

I defrosted some chicken one night and made a chicken and artichoke heart sauce to go over rice. It was awful, I thought. But I had way too much left over to throw out, so I re-engineered it and made a casserole with pasta and cheese, hoping the cheese would enhance the flavor. No. After 3 meals of it (4 chicken breasts to start with) we threw out the remaining. I was glad to see it go. I made a new salad dressing and didn’t like it at all, but hated to throw it out, so we ate it, not liking it one bit.

Then we discovered that our freezer part of our refrigerator/freezer in the garage – that holds most of our frozen meat, including the Berkshire pig meat, steaks, roasts, chicken, fish, etc. that I keep on hand all the time – was on the fritz. Oh dear. I tinkered with it for a few days, finally bought a freezer thermometer and was aghast when I discovered the temp was only 28°F in the freezer. No wonder the salmon I took out was almost bend-able. Finally we unloaded most of it (with the fish, I had to throw away all but one piece of sole as it had defrosted) into thermal coolers with dry ice, bought a new upright freezer at Best Buy, on sale, and waited until it was delivered 2 days later. I shopped for plastic boxes, just the right size, to store things in, that would fit on the shelves. Then I catalogued all the meat in there and re-positioned everything so I now can go to the pork box and pull out what I want. And I bought a white board so I will know (I hope) what’s IN the freezer all the time.

We also bought a small refrigerator freezer for the garage too. It was on sale as well. It’s quite small, but has enough room to hold a turkey in November and has room for the myriad of plastic boxes that contain all kinds of jarred stuff that I don’t have room for in the kitchen refrigerator. Do you have stuff like that too? Like a jar of harissa with just a tiny bit I’ve used, some preserved lemon, walnut oil, specialty mustards, lots of different nuts that I don’t use much, 2 huge jars of maraschino cherries that I use in December when I bake Bishop’s Bread. A reader (thank you) sent me a link to a farm in Washington State, near Yakima, that sells maraschino cherries that don’t have that wicked red dye in them. I ordered a jar (Tillen Farms) and it will sit there unopened until next December. I hate to throw away the other 2 jars, though. You can see that new jar sitting on the middle shelf. Sometime soon I’m going to make a list of everything in those plastic boxes in the refrigerator (I have another white board to go on that door too) so I’ll know at a glance what’s there. And I won’t have to open the refrigerator since I’ll have the list on the whiteboard on the front. That extra package of hot paprika that Janet gave me for Christmas. Check. The hazelnuts. Check. Asian plum sauce. Check. Hoisin Sauce. Check. Hazelnut oil. Check. Ah, 2 jars of preserved lemon. Check. Mint sauce from England. Check. Garlic jam to serve on cream cheese. Check. And on and on it goes. Getting organized is hard work!

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Why is it called Fifty-Year Apple Cake, you wonder? Because it’s a very old-old apple recipe. Not, as I thought, that it has something to do with heirloom apples. And the photo above doesn’t exactly show you that this cake is mostly apples, cloaked in a small amount of batter that merely binds the apples together. Well, there’s the crumb topping added on top, too. But still, it’s mostly apples.

When we were having a big group at our house one recent evening, I wanted a delicious mid-winter kind of dessert. We are in a Bible study group that’s ongoing, reading the whole Bible in a year (our whole church), but synopsized in a book called The Story, NIV: The Bible as One Continuing Story of God and His People. We get into the most interesting discussions in this group. There are 12 of us if everyone makes it, and we’ve been meeting weekly since late September with a break for Christmas. We enjoy each other. We’re all members of our church, but some of us didn’t know one another. It’s been a very pleasant bonding experience. And I’ve enjoyed having an excuse to bake since I don’t want lots of left overs hanging around for me to snack on.

Anyway, we’ve been hosting it at our house up until now and I’ve served dessert each time. A couple of times someone else helped out. Last week I scanned through my to-try recipes and decided on this one. I will tell you that I erred in the making of this recipe, but it actually didn’t make any difference. It was only now, days later as I’m writing this – and beginning this post that I went online and tried to learn more about the original recipe. That’s when I learned who Emily Luchetti is (a pastry chef in San Francisco). That’s when I realized that the recipe I had put into my MasterCook file was Cheryl Sternman Rule’s riff on the cake. If I’d gone back to her blog post and read it again before I started, I’d have realized it, but I was in a hurry and didn’t. Anyway, I got a little confused about the crumb topping. In actuality, the original recipe didn’t HAVE a crumb topping. That was Cheryl’s addition, among other things. She also took out the walnuts and raisins, switched out some brown sugar for white, and added a whole lot more apples. All of those things are good, and it made for a delicious cake nevertheless. One I’d make again, no question! But I’d be wary of the mistake I made – adding some of the topping to the dry ingredients, which didn’t have any negative effects; it just isn’t necessary, that’s all.

At left is a photo of the apple/cake batter before it’s spread out in the pan.

What I did find online is a video of Emily Luchetti making the original of this cake – if you’re interested  – you do have to sign up (free, but you know at some point they’re going to start charging for viewing the videos). The video of Emily will start playing, then it will stop and you have to sign up in order to see the rest of it. If they begin bugging me via email, I’ll just unsubscribe. I don’t know about you, but I get about 30 or more advertising emails a day – all websites I’ve signed up for for some reason and they send me something every day or two, 365 days a year. Some I like to get, but they send things way too often. Annoying.

Emily’s cake didn’t have any brown sugar in it, and half as much apples, so it was a bit more cakey, I’d say, than the recipe you’ll find below. I kind of liked this version, though it’s not true to the original. You’ll find many recipes for a Fifty-Year Apple Cake online (from some heirloom cookbooks, for instance). Even Emily says it’s probably more like 75 or 100 years old since it’s been around so long. She suggests you use a juicy apple (not a Pippin or Granny Smith, which she reserves only for pies). Cheryl used Fuji because it’s what she had. You can also use Gala or Braeburn or Pink Lady. Cheryl didn’t peel the apples at all, just cored and chopped. I mostly peeled mine. The addition (or substitution) of brown sugar gives the cake a much more caramely flavor. One that I liked.

At left is the batter all spread out in the pan. In making it, the apples are chopped and you make the cake batter using vegetable oil as the fat in it, add the topping and bake it in a 9×13 parchment lined baking pan. Once cooled, you cut it into squares and serve with powdered sugar, crème fraiche (Emily’s recommendation because she thinks the cake needs something a little tart on it rather than something sweet), sweetened whipped cream or ice cream.

There below right you can see the cake with the topping on it – ready to bake.

What’s GOOD: a great showcase for good, juicy apples. The cake is dark from the brown sugar and cinnamon (the only spice). It’s a moist and tender cake, worth making. The crumb topping gives it some crunch. Really delicious in every way. Yes, I’d definitely make it again.

What’s NOT: can’t think of anything I didn’t like.

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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click on link to open in MC)

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Pretty much, I’ve had a love affair with sourdough my whole life. But for the last 20 years or so I didn’t have a sourdough starter going. I first bought one back in the 1960s, and I baked bread regularly and often made pancakes and waffles, and had a great recipe for a dinner roll too. But then I got out of the habit and finally I’d let the starter go too long between feedings and the batter had expired, so to speak. I kept it in one of those cute little crockery spring lock containers and it just sat in the back of the refrigerator. But with it and other living organisms, eventually it ran out of fuel or food and if you don’t keep it going by feeding it flour and water every so often and allowing it to bloom, brighten, develop its yeasty presences, it will die of old age. This was years ago, of course, but when I’d opened the crock and sniffed the contents I knew it was a goner.

Then a couple of weeks ago you’ll remember I wrote up a post about my DH’s father Charles’ buttermilk pancakes. That got me to thinking, longingly, about my favorite sourdough and its wonderful tasty benefits. I enjoyed Dave’s dad’s buttermilk pancakes, but not nearly as much as I love the flavor and even the spongy texture of sourdough. So, when I saw a package of sourdough starter I jumped at it and bought one. As I’m writing this, the starter is still in its infancy of development. At its first mixing, once it sits for 4 hours, you mix more bread flour and water into it for 7 straight days and you need to keep it at about 90°F day and night, feeding it once a day. Then, and only then, will the sour part of it have progressed so it’s taste-able. Each evening I scoop out a cup of the bubbly fermenting batter and throw it out, and add in another mixture of flour and warm water. I stir it all around until they are no lumps and cover again with plastic wrap and let it get a nice warm glow for another 24 hours. Finding a place in my kitchen with a consistent 90° temperature was a little difficult – the warming drawer doesn’t go that low. The oven obviously doesn’t. I finally settled on putting it on top of my toaster oven, just 3-4 inches below the fluorescent under-cupboard lights in my little butler’s pantry. We’ve just had to leave those lights on day and night for the last several days. That drives my DH crazy – he’s a stickler about turning off lights – and I do forget now and then to turn off a light somewhere in the house. We both do.

Once I’ve finished the 7-day feeding schedule I’ll be able to store a few cups of starter in the refrigerator and hopefully it will keep for a week without getting into trouble. I suppose I could set up an alarm on my iPhone to remind me once a week to feed the starter, couldn’t I? Like maybe every Saturday morning, perhaps.

You can buy a sourdough starter package mix as I did. You can also make your own – there’s a good tutorial over at King Arthur Flour, if you’re interested: sourdough starter. At the cookware store I purchased the package you see at right. Buying the package makes it quite simple. As I recall, it was about $5.00. The sourdough starter I bought years ago was from Alaska and I certainly had many conjured thoughts over the years about the old “sourdoughs,” they called them, the solitary gold miners with their trusty pack horses, and the stories about how they would mix up the batter the night before and store it inside their sleeping bags next to their bodies, or on the horse, next to the horse’s hide, where it would keep warm. Because warmth is key here. This new starter I bought claims to be a San Francisco style. Now I don’t exactly know what that means – but San Franciscans do believe their sourdoughs are better than anybody else’s. The bread certainly is – there’s just nothing quite like the real thing – that musty, fusty sour smell from freshly baked sourdough bread that is ubiquitous on restaurant tables in SFO. We can buy sourdough bread here in Southern California, as you can in most places here in the U.S., but it ISN’T like the loaves from there.

Because I was anxious to try some sourdough pancakes, instead of throwing out the 1-cup of batter the other day (day 3 of its 7-day growing period), I used that one cup to make a small batch of sourdough pancakes. Perhaps they weren’t quite as powerfully sour as they’ll be after I continue getting the dough more sour as the days go by, but they were awfully darned good.

This batter I’m brewing is all made with bread flour – because the starter package is aimed at baking bread, not making anything else. So, I mixed in a little bit of all-purpose flour (because the batter was just slightly too thin, if you can believe that) and the other ingredients before pouring little dollops into a hot nonstick pan. I didn’t even grease the pan. It didn’t need it because I’d added just a little jot of canola oil to the batter. You don’t even need to butter the pancakes, either. Thin little sourdough pancakes somehow don’t need butter – but syrup yes. But they’re even good plain because they’re very moist.

What’s GOOD: Well, I loved it – loved that spongy chew to every bite. As pancakes go,I love thin ones, so these ticked all my sourdough hot buttons. And it was even sour, which I liked and I’ll like it even better once the dough is finished it’s 7 days of fermenting.
What’s NOT: if you don’t want to hassle with a sourdough starter, the feeding, mixing and nurturing you have to do with it, you may not like it. But the flavor of those finished goods. Oh, yes! Worth it, I hope.

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