For some people, October rhymes with leaf litter and melancholy, however, I am not one of them. Above all, October announces the time for apples! What a wonderful fruit. Thanks to my lovely house in Normandy, I have the opportunity to harvest kilograms of fruits every year. Therefore I can do one of the things that I like the most (after painting of course): cooking. Because what is more tempting that a fruit fallen from a tree?
A great thing about apples is that you can cook them in a sweet or in a salty dish: apple crumble, black pudding with apples, endive salad with blue cheese, nuts and apples… And it’s always tasty.
Applesauce, pies, baked apples
When I find the time to put down my paint brushes, between two canvas paintings or two painting classes, I try to deal with the kilograms of apples that I picked up in my garden. And I have to do it quickly, before they turn bad! I always put some of them aside to draw them later. But the others will be cooked!
Do you want to know my favorite recipes?
First of all, there is the traditional applesauce. I bake the apples over low heat for twenty minutes so that the apples soften and naturally mash up. But don’t get me wrong, I do not put them into a blender, I prefer it with fruit chunks.
My second guilty pleasure is the baked apple. This one is really easy to do, you only need a small baking pan with a little water and then you put all of this in the oven.
And last but not least, the well-known tarte tatin, to eat with a spoonful of Norman heavy cream, of course!
The tarte tatin, quite a story
Here in France, the tarte tatin is a traditional dessert. You can find it in every brasseries. And you’d better give it a try, it’s actually a reversed pie, since the apples are covered by the pie crust.
Do you know that there are several stories about the creation of this dessert?
For some people, the pie would have been put upside down by mistake and baked like this.
Another version says that the apples were baked for too long, and pie crust was added on top of them, to hide these overcooked apples. We will never know the true story, but everyone agrees about the two main creators: Stéphanie and Caroline, the ”Tatin” sisters, famous inkeepers at Lamotte-Beuvron in Sologne around 1898. They would be the creators of this dessert, named after them, and its popularization.
What about you? What is your favorite recipe for apples?