Lemon Pudding, and More Salad Musings

I wanted to make a salad to go with tonight's pizza, but my vegetable bin looked very sad.

I did have apples and celery, so I made a Waldorf Salad which contained apples, finely sliced celery, a green onion, chopped pecans, lemon zest and juice, and mayonnaise. It was fresh and good, a sort of anti-lettuce affair.

But, I promised Grandma's Lemon Pudding recipe, and here it is:

1/4 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup lemon juice
Grated rind of 1 lemon
2 egg yoks, well beaten
1 cup milk
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Blend flour, sugar, salt in mixing bowl. Stir in lemon rind and juice, egg yolks, and milk. Fold in egg whites. Pour into 1-quart baking dish and bake for about 50 minutes.

Apple Tart

This weekend I experimented with tarts for a piece I am writing for the Free Times Entertaining section. It's more complicated than what I want to put in the article, but I muddled my way into a really good bourbon-apple tart with vanilla pastry cream.

I wanted to make an apple tart. I didn't want to use cinnamon, because I wanted to get away from the classic apple pie flavor. And when I asked Lawson whether he wanted apple tart with or without a bottom layer of pastry cream, his response was emphatic: more, yes, all of it, please.

I used the simplest tart crust recipe -- the one you posted under Blueberry Tart, actually -- and let it cool. I filled it a vanilla pastry cream using whole milk and 4 egg yolks, though honestly I think a simple cornstarch-based vanilla pudding would have been even better. I chilled that while I sliced up three Golden Delicious apples, two of them peeled, and sauteed them in 3 tablespoons of butter and half a cup of sugar until they were gooey and translucent. I arranged the slices on top of the pudding, then added some bourbon to the pan and reduced all that a little bit before glazing the tart with it. It was so good. I only wish there were someone besides the two of us to eat it.

In other food news, last week I was treated to a fried bologna sandwich from the local Exxon station, unlikely source of pork-based home-cooked local country foods. It tasted, surprisingly, like a good grilled hot dog.

Another Breakfast

Because I am actually hungry in the mornings since I quit smoking four months ago, I am now obsessed with breakfast. This is homemade apple cinnamon oatmeal. The apples are raw, which I much prefer to the sticky sweet mushiness of cooked apples. The cinnamon is minimal -- it's SO easy to overpower a dish with cinnamon. And the oats are toasted oats, maybe steel-cut, definitely slow-cooking, from that local mill I ramble on about all the time. (Can I mention for the eightieth time that my friend works there? My friend works there.)