Apple Sauce, Appelmoes

I love learning new, richer ways of doing familiar things- especially when that knowledge comes through friendships. These funny little organic cooking apples turned up at Cornucopia recently aned with a name like "Tydeman's Late Orange" (raised in East Maling in 1930) it would have been remiss of me not to try them. But even better my dear Dutch friend Margaret gave me a little pot of Appelmoes a month or so ago- made by cooking whole apples, sweetening just a little, working through a mouli (yay I found a little one last week in the hospice shop) and then adding a touch of vanilla. I'm never going back to the old ways now. I just know that this applesauce is good for the microbome, not to mention delicious.  

Equally delicious are these wee wild apples we found in June near the railway line in Dannevirke. 

Later I added some Mexican hawthorn fruit we found in Frimley park. 

The Mexican haws are very high in pectin so great for setting jams and jellies. They have hard little stones in them which don't go through the mouli quite so easily.

We're eating our appelmoes as we go but it can be popped in to a preserving jar for later too.

Nicola Galloway of Homegrown Kitchen writes so nicely about this process here- search Homemade Apple Sauce 15th May 2023

Katie X

Cherry Guava Ice Cream

It's a strange time of the year to be eating ice cream I know, but it seems that all the best ice cream fruits are in abundance in late autumn. Here in Hawke's Bay we have such a fabulous lineup: figs feijoas, cherry guavas, medlars, sweet persimmons, cape gooseberries, white sapote, kiwifruit, mandarins and so much more. One of the easiest fruit trees to grow in a home garden is the cherry guava (Psidium cattleyanum). An evergreen and elegant small tree that never fails to bear fruit, year after year.

I have written about making guava jelly and paste just here.

Every year I make at least one or two jars of ruby red guava jelly. Guava has the best flavour of all the jellies, I reckon.

My Nan used to make guava jelly, but you know I never saw her do anything else with the leftover pulp. A few years ago I decided to press the cooked berries through a sieve and of course you then ditch all those hard seeds. There is so much goodness in guavas- just what we need heading in to the winter months, 

This year as I was making paste with the pulp I remembered the guava ice cream recipe that my lovely dutch friend Margaret shared with me. She even gave me a little to try. The flavour is truly exquisite and the texture sublimely creamy, however, I can't quite justify the extreme sweetness of all the sugar and condensed milk that was in the recipe. So I made up my own version which I think will be happily flexible. I really don't think you can go wrong with it by adding a bit more of this and not so much of that. Next time I might try honey instead of condensed milk for instance.

This recipe is great for using up the half a jarful of jelly or paste that you often end up with when you're making preserves. Since there is only two of us I was happy to make a small batch so here's the general idea:

After I have strained the cooked fruit and used the liquid to make the jelly, I push the rest through a sieve. I then return the pulp to the saucepan and add perhaps a cupful of sugar. This mixture is then simmered to reduce (stirring often) for 10 minutes or so. If you want to make paste/cheese there's a whole lot more cooking to do so before you get to that stage take out 1 cupful of pulp, set it aside and leave it to cool completely.

Beat 125 mls of cream, add a 1/4-1/3 cup of condensed milk and then fold in the cooled pulp and a tablespoonful of jelly. Lastly add a splash of rosewater. Taste to see if it's how you want it. That's it. Freeze. This batch stayed soft and very creamy once frozen.

Katie X