Weekend Cooking is a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads, linking up food-related posts. Click here for links to other bloggers’ Weekend Cooking posts at Beth Fish Reads.
I don’t care what Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Whole Foods, or anyone else says, it’s apple season in New England right now, and pumpkin season doesn’t start until October. Around here, apple season means taking a naturally sweet, fairly healthful fruit…
and turning it into this:
Or this…
I hope it’s not cheating, but I want to count the apple crisp my husband made yesterday (pictured above) towards Trish’s Cook It Up! challenge. She has challenged book bloggers to either use or lose older cookbooks that gather dust while we try shiny new recipes from the Internet or hanker after just-released cookbooks.
The apple crisp recipe was from Made in Vermont: Recipes from Vermont’s Favorite Inns, edited by Coleen O’Shea, which has recipes for Apple Crisp, Apple Crisp with Maple Syrup and Sarah’s Apple Crisp. (Also Apple-Nut Bread, Baked Apple Dandy and nine others with apples as the main ingredient. We were given this cookbook as a gift many years ago (I think when we still lived in Vermont.) so it has sentimental value even though we don’t use it that often, but when we’re looking for New England-y apple or pumpkin recipes, it’s a good place to start.
It’s not great for gluten-free and/or low-carb dieters, but Made in Vermont has enough regional flavor to make it a keeper. The recipes are divided by season, which I like. There are no photos of the food – just little black and white photos of the inns the recipes came from on each page. There is plenty of white space if you like to pencil in notes about the recipes.
Since we don’t run an inn here, many of the entree recipes are too fussy or fancy for me to ever try (e.g. Escargots with Wild Mushrooms and Herbed Butter, p. 124, or Steamed Scallops with Saffron Beurre Blanc and American Sturgeon Caviar, p. 42) but the dessert, side dishes, and soup recipes are more enticing to a home cook. I think I’ll try the Corn, Red Pepper and Tomato Bisque from the Four Columns Inn in Newfane, Vermont soon, and then there’s all the pumpkin and squash recipes to try: Pumpkin Bisque, Maple Pumpkin Bisque, Butternut Squash and Pear Gratin, etc. The recipe for Maple Pumpkin Bisque from the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont is online here.
Happy Weekend Cooking!
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