How are you enjoying autumn? Are you getting your fill of all the wonderful fall produce? I hope you’re not sick of it, because we’ll have to wait until spring to really change our diets again… winter pumpkins/squash, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions are here to stay.

We’ve had a wonderful fall here in Montreal. Last year and the year before that we’d already had a few serious snowfalls by this time–luckily, we’ve only had one or two little flurries so far this season! I don’t expect it to continue, but I’m certainly enjoying our mild autumn. In respect to the quickly approaching cold season, I’ve given in and started eating lots of hearty food. After all, I want to stay nice and warm during the winter months.

I made a batch of apple butter this week, and it is soothing and delicious. It’s not overly sweet, and warms with its subtle spices and…

that’s right, whiskey! What better to keep us warm on a cool late-autumn day? Or night, for that matter. I didn’t make the whiskey taste too strong, it is more of a ‘hidden taste’, but it gives a subtle woodiness that I particularly enjoy. This is a zippy, tasty apple butter that is not cloyingly sweet.

The best part is that it doesn’t even require any particular skills or even much effort–just a little time. A few free hours of your day is all it takes, and you’ll have the perfect fall topping to endless loaves of bread, or batches of oatcakes. It’s also great stirred into yogurt or on top of oatmeal. If you’re skeptical about the whiskey addition, don’t be. I don’t even like whiskey, but it’s great in this recipe. If you’d rather not use it, vanilla also works well, or you could just leave it out and let the apples shine.

Simple (whiskied) Apple Butter
10 apples
2Tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
3Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1-2 Tbsp whiskey (or vanilla if you’re not a whiskey person)

Start with 10 of your favorite apples. Peel them, core them, remove any bad or bruised spots, and cut them into chunks. Put them in a pot with a lid, over medium heat. Stir often, making sure nothing sticks to the bottom. The apples will release water and begin to cook down. Remove the lid, add the 3T of cider vinegar, and keep cooking. After a while, you will have tangy applesauce. You aren’t done yet. Remove the lid, and stir this sauce well, and continue cooking until no apple pieces are left and the sauce looks smooth. Keep the heat high enough that the liquid is steadily reducing, but that you don’t have to stir it constantly. I found that a bit less than medium heat worked well. It will take awhile to reduce, at least an hour, more if your apples were very watery. Stir it often, don’t let it burn to the bottom! I did reduce the heat to low several times so that I could walk away from the pot and read, surf the web, and make oatcakes.
When it has reduced to the desired ‘buttery’ texture, add the other ingredients: spices, sugar, salt, and whiskey. I used Glenfiddich 12 year single malt, because it was in the cupboard. Taste the butter after adding everything, and adjust any flavours that taste unbalanced to you. Of course you would do this, you are the cook.
Turn off the heat, and let the butter cool a bit before transferring it to the food processor, and blending it to a smooth, creamy consistency. This takes only a minute or two. Then, I put it back in the pot and heated it up one more time, mainly to make sure to kill any germs that might’ve gotten in. I didn’t properly ‘can’ my apple butter, but I did sterilize the jar with boiling water. If you plan to keep this for awhile or out of the fridge, you should use a proper canning technique.
That’s it! This recipe yields one jar of apple butter. You could easily double or triple the recipe if you wanted to gift some of it. I like to eat it on oatcakes or toast, alone or especially with cheddar cheese.

oatcake, apple butter, cheddar.

Oatcake recipe/story to follow.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans celebrating this coming weekend!

Enjoy!

love,
meg

Tags: autumn, fruit

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under Preserves, Treats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.