Cooking In Boone ... Staunton: Virginia makes food too!

So, I realized last week that while Aaron has been a culinary king, exploring exotic butters and jams, I haven’t made any blog worthy food since we moved to Staunton.

My solution was to spend one evening making home-made apple sauce and pumpkin pie. The inspiration for the pie was my mom who recently lured Aaron and I to Lexington just with the promise of the first pumpkin pie of the season. The inspiration for the apple sauce was Leah Sirkus who has been buying bushels of apples literally every time I see her.

First the pie. The only pumpkin pie that I really love is my mom’s and it’s ridiculously easy and almost impossible to mess up. Side note, this isn’t the real recipe, I’ve tweaked the amounts to make extra filling. All you do is mix:

1 can pumpkin (use Libby’s DO NOT use pumpkin pie mix)
three eggs
1/2 sugar
almost all of a small can of evaporated milk (PET - the can that's about the size of my fist)
3/4 cup dark corn syrup plus a few extra squirts for good luck
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

And pour that into a pie pan. Because I always use the whole can of pumpkin, it usually makes too much to fit in the pan. So just pour the extra into a pyrex baking dish and you have pumpkin soufle'!

It’s so easy we didn’t even take pictures of that part. Here’s what the delicious pie looks like though.

That pumpkin was freaking out because he knows he’s next in line… But seriously, if I do make a pie out of a real pumpkin (with no help from Libby’s) I’ll be sure to document it on the blog.

Now for the apple sauce, which is also ridiculously easy. The hardest part is chopping up all the apples. I decided to go with the chopped, chunkier apple sauce because I was afraid grating it would be too messy and juicy, but next time I think I’ll try grating them.

I peeled mine first to avoid the texture of the skin, but you don’t have to.

Then the chopping began.

Oh the chopping!

Once my apples were chopped. They went into the sauce pot.

Then I added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, although next time I would use less. Maybe start with 1/2 teaspoon.

I added about 3 tablespoons of water and 2 tablespoons of cider as the apples cooked down. Basically every time the consistency got really thick and started sticking to the bottom of the pan. I cooked the apples about 20 mins. until soft. Then added brown sugar to taste.