"autumn" news and stories

There are very few nights when I sit down to a homecooked meal that does not include a salad that reflects the season. Even if I put little effort into the main dish, I always have fun creating new dressings and salad combinations. While there are hundreds of salad dressings on supermarket shelves, I encourage you to make your own. Not only are they better for you, homemade dressings are simple to prepare and have a delicious, clean flavor.

Fall is full of some of my favorite ingredients, and the colors and textures of all the seasonal fruits and vegetables create amazing salads. Grilling pears and apples adds a smoky flavor, and a good quality cheese and simple dressing brings the dish together. You can top salads with toasted nuts, pomegranate seeds or even pumpkin seeds. Grilled portobello mushrooms also lend a nice, earthy flavor during the cooler months.

Get creative with seasonal ingredients, buy local and use fall nights to create delicious grilled dinners for your family and friends.

Mmm, seasonal punch, fall cider, apple-related-alcohol, whatever you want to call it, it's good. Warm or cold, alcoholic or non, even spicy or streudelly, there are a number of ways to enjoy a good autumnal apple drink. Here are links to eight delicious recipes!

1. A solid booze-free basic
2. Classic brandy with cider
3. Heat up some apple juice and put rum and a cinnamon stick in it. No link required!
4. A whiskey version
5. Cider with tequila!
6. An ultimate indulgence with hibiscus and cayenne
7. Decadent cider streudel (streudelly)
8. Chilled and sparkling!

Click here for more things you can do with apple cider.

• Fall is here and with it have come a wave of new cookbooks. The Baltimore Sun food section staff take a look at the new crop and narrow it down to the pick of the harvest.
• This week the Recipe Finder tracks down instructions on how to make Tomato Jelly.
• After some trial and error, Rob Kasper succeeds in baking up a batch of homemade pretzels for his own personal Oktoberfest celebration.
• Kate Shatzkin uses a recipe from the new cookbook Two Dudes, One Pan to prepare a weeknight dinner for under $12.
• Elizabeth Large highlights her top 10 local restaurants that just happen to be located in strip malls.

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Cranberries are the perfect fall fruit, at least as far as baked goods go. It is true that pumpkin and apple pies are wonderful, but the vibrant color of cranberries makes them look incredibly festive, not to mention that they add a lot of flavor to desserts, as well. Camille, the French food blogger from Cakes in the City, baked these perfect-looking cranberry upside down cakes. Getting a shot like this is quite a feat because, as most food blogger/photographers will tell you, red foods are usually the most difficult to photograph. To get back to the cake, the reason that this is called an upside down cake is that the berries are placed at the bottom of the pan and topped with the cake batter. Once it has baked, the cake is turned upside down to showcase the gorgeous cranberry layer. Camille added some gingerbread spices to the berries, as well as sugar and butter. The cake base is a light and tender buttermilk cake, which adds a mellow flavor that highlights and tempers the tartness of the berries.

If you can't read her recipe in French, you can try a slightly different variation found here or here.

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If you are fortunate enough to have access to an apple tree (or several), you probably have had the pleasure of having fresh, homemade apple cider. Cider, in this case, is not the alcoholic beverage, but a minimally processed apple juice made by pressing as much juice as possible from the whole fruit. Often, cider apples are used to make commercial ciders, but if you want to try making cider at home, you will probably have good results with most types of apples, using a mixture of whatever fresh ones are available. A farmer's market is the best place to get apples if you can't get access to an orchard.

Once you have the apples and they are scrubbed clean, they are pulverized and the juice is strained out. For big batches, a cider mill and press is the easiest tool to have, but if you are willing to put a bit more muscle into yours, the food processor and a jelly bag (a very fine cheesecloth bag) can be used. Apples should be quartered and pureed, then the juice can be extracted by carefully pressing it out through the bag with pressure from a rolling pin.

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