Mapping Food

The Edible Geography blog covered it much better than we can, on their post United States of Food, but you absolutely must check out the USDA's Food Environment Atlas. For food nerds like us, you can spend hours clicking around plotting demographic data on food in the U.S., like this one on adult obesity.

Oh, and on a mapping note, you have to see this video about how obesity is interconnected in social networks.

School Lunch Blogs Two Ways

We ran across both of these school lunch blogs recently. Mrs. Q blogs school lunch in the American Midwest on Fed Up With Lunch. Mr. Ferguson teaches English to kindergarteners in Fukuyama, Japan and blogs at Mr. Ferguson's Classroom. The differences, as illustrated by the above photos, couldn't be more pronounced. We'll let you guess which meal is from where.

Crock Pot Apple Butter

Quick! While there are still apples coming out of cold storage and now that they're starting to go a bit soft and mealy, cook up a batch of apple butter. Here's the recipe.

Crock Pot Apple Butter

Yield: 1 dozen half-pints of apple butter, plus a couple bowls of applesauce to sample while cooking.

Ingredients:

18 lbs. “cosmetically challenged” apples of various varieties, preferably organic, from the farmer’s market, U-pick, backyard trees, or your own orchard

A few lemons (to make acidulated water to prevent apples from browning)

3 cups apple cider or water

2-5 cups of sugar (Depending on how sweet you want the apple butter. I like about 2.5 cups)

3 tablespoons fresh ground cinnamon

Instructions:

This project is best for a long weekend at home while the weather is still crummy.

Give the apples a dunk in a sink of water to wash. Peel, core, and quarter apples and drop in a LARGE container of acidulated water.

To one or more large pots (you may need more than one), add the apples and cider or water and cook over medium heat until tender, occasionally stirring and mashing with a wooden spoon or potato masher. This will produce chunky applesauce.

To continue making apple butter, blend the applesauce until smooth in a blender, or better yet, use a stick blender. Transfer the smooth applesauce to a crock pot set on low and cover. All the applesauce may not fit and you may need to add the rest after the applesauce in the crock pot has reduced in volume by a quarter. Stir the applesauce occasionally, scarping the bottom and sides of the crock pot. When the applesauce has reduced in volume and begun to darken, add the sugar and cinnamon. The added sugar along with the apples’ natural sugars slowly carmelize with the gentle heat of the crock pot, yielding apple butter’s characteristic color. Continue to heat in the crock pot and stir until the applesauce has reduced to approximately half its original volume attained a thick and silky consistency. This process may take several days, depending on if you need to turn off the crock pot to leave the house, but it’s better than keeping a fire going under a big copper kettle like they did in the old days.

Check the acidity of the apple butter, adding lemon juice or ascorbic acid if necessary to bring pH below 4.6. Can your apple butter in sterilized half-pint jars following the instructions that came with the jars and canner. Published processing times vary between 10 and 20 minutes.