Fall

There are plenty of reasons to enjoy apples this season. For me it's because they make the best desserts. With apples so plentiful at farmers' markets and supermarkets this time of year, I love to make tarts. There's just something special about an apple tart particularly apple tarte Tatin, one of the most classic of the French tarts. It's a dessert that can be called both comforting and elegant. Supposedly, as the story goes, the Tatin sisters invented the dessert by accident while attempting to make an apple tart to serve their hotel guests. The dish became so popular that its fame spread throughout the Sologne region. It's now known throughout the world. It seems that the best things are almost always invented accidentally.

Traditionally tarte Tatin starts out by melting butter in a skillet and adding sugar to make a caramel. Then apple quarters are added and cooked until tender. A round of pastry dough tops the apples and the whole skillet is placed in the oven. In my adaptation, I use brown sugar for its fullness of flavor, and add a pinch of cinnamon and a dash of brandy for that extra bit of goodness. Instead of cooking the apples in the caramel, which either tends to overcook them or burn the caramel, I just place the apples in the pan, cover with pastry, and bake. Serve a slice warm with a dollop of crème fraîche or a scoop of vanilla ice cream and it's the perfect dessert after a cozy dinner or any time when the caving hits.

From the Huffington Post

While summer cocktails conjure up a specific image -- usually of tiny umbrellas and slices of watermelon -- autumn brings about libations that are, shall we say, less photogenic. The dearth of the fresh ingredients that make summer drinks such colorful beachside accompaniments force harvest season cocktails into a comparatively substandard role. But this seems wrong considering the other pleasures we gleefully anticipate with first nip in the air. People salivate on line at Starbucks eagerly awaiting their pumpkin spice lattes and delight in slipping on lightweight jackets to compliment the blushing foliage. Why too shouldn't lifting the year's first glass of Apple Brandy be part of the tradition?

The beauty of it is, cocktails that evoke the changing of the seasons don't have to be entirely new drinks. They can follow the same basic template classics cocktails do, just with seasonal substitutions. Here are a few suggestions.

The best place to start is swapping out the sweetener in a drink, it's the simplest and most effective way alter a cocktail. Take for instance a whiskey sour which we know is generally two parts whiskey -- bourbon, rye, Tennessee, your choice -- one part simple syrup, and one part fresh lemon juice depending on taste. Instead of simple syrup make it with maple syrup and bam(!), the autumn whiskey sour.

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One of my favorite things about Fall is apples…and trips to the apple orchard. This year, without a trip to one of my favorite apple orchards in the Twin Cities area marked on the calendar, I was beginning to think it would be the first time in many, many years that I didn’t get to an apple orchard. The sign along Highway 10 that made me turn my car down a winding country road in search of my favorite fall fruit, turned into a wild goose chase. But then, an angel appeared and offered me all the apples I could possibly want or need.

With the big bag of apples I brought home, I made an apple tapioca sauce with a handful of the fruit. I could have moved on to the apple crisp that has been a family-favorite for years. But, I decided to pull a church cookbook off my shelf. I have a bunch of them that I’ve collected over the years. I randomly pulled a book from the tightly-packed row lined up on the shelf. I paged through the one that wound up in my hands: The Centennial Cookbook (1887-1987) from St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Devils Lake, North Dakota. I stopped at Swiss Apple Pie Cake that was submitted by Berdelle Nelson.

An excerpt from the latest Simon Hopkinson book "Second Helpings of Roast Chicken" published by Hyperion.

One of the most astute observations on the contrary pear was noted exactly by the great Eddie Izzard during one of his wonderful shows. Izzard's gripe and frustration are well grounded. You buy a couple of pounds of slightly under-ripe, clean, and unblemished pears, with the innocent intention of allowing them to ripen up over a few days at home. "Hmmm, yes, I will arrange them in that bowl I think, put them on the sideboard, and enjoy them with some Roquefort on Friday when Michael and Gloria are coming for supper." Then, as if by magic, that very afternoon they will suddenly decide to blotch and bloat, their insides turning to a fluffy mass of woolly flesh, bereft of both taste and texture.

In fact, so frustrating is the fresh pear that when wishing to use some to fashion a hot pear desset, such as the one that follows, I will often find myself reaching for a can of Del Monte. ("This cook he need a perfect pudding? He say yeah!") But then – and I know I'm not alone here – I have always enjoyed a can of fruit, so long as it has been stored in the fridge for a few hours to become really cold. Similarly, its perfect partner, a welter of Carnation Milk, should also be well chilled for maximum enjoyment.