How to Make a Veggie Burger

So we just had lunch at the Railyard Brewing Company. Love what they’ve done with the space – it feels open, airy, and much less claustrophobia-inducing than the old Brewpub. We were inspired by an enthusiastic reviewer on MML and a friend who swore the veggie burger was amazing.

First things first, we must respectfully disagree with our friend Jesseca as regards the fries with manchego cheese and truffle oil. We got these as an appetizer and found them, frankly, less than appetizing. Manchego cheese is truly one of the world’s great cheeses. Truffles are nice. French fries are good. All of these things together, with the fries covered in some weird kind of flavor sprinkle, result in a surprisingly cloying mix that seems more like a food experiment than like a food. We picked them over, anxious for the much-heralded house-made veggie burgers.

There were some amazing things about the veggie burger, which is a staggering $9 and served on your choice of brioche or pretzeled bread. One astonishing thing is its near-total lack of cohesion. Upon first bite, it speeds to every direction outside of the bun at the same time. This would encourage you to scoop it back into the bread but for one tiny problem – it is entirely flavorless, inspiring us to make jokes about root-marm. This is not something you want customers to associate with your food. Also it has a disturbing texture that may be the result of a blender setting somewhere between chop and puree. We tried mustard. We tried catsup. We tried their house-made barbecue sauce. We salted it. A lot. Even so, it was barely edible. We reminisced favorably about the various brands of frozen veggie burgers in our freezer.

We don’t mean to hate. The Railyard’s chef Leo Maurelli was named the Alabama Restaurant Association’s Chef of the Year, and we think it’s super that they’ve opened this establishment downtown. We look forward to going for drinks sometime. But will somebody please teach the kitchen how to make a decent veggie burger? It’s not that hard.

There are basically two ways to go. The first way is to try to produce something with a more meaty texture. If you want something like this, you’re probably going to need to have some vital wheat gluten to bind your items together. Wheat gluten is like the protein in flour, and you can get your own out of flour or just buy a big can of the stuff (they also sell it in bulk at Healthwise and other crunchy stores). For added interest, you can mash up and add some other protein, like soy beans, chickpeas, black beans or lentils. These will want a little olive oil to stick together. For flavoring, you can go the soy sauce-thyme-nutritional yeast route to get a more “chickeny” taste, or the tomato paste-paprika-veggie stock route for something a little more “beefy.” I like a little garlic, too. These get kneaded up, divided into patties and baked or pan-fried, depending on your preference. They end up chewy and ready to sauce or top.

The second way to go is with a slightly more fall-apart texture. This is the more “traditional” lentil burger that causes most people to think it is gross to be a vegetarian, but it’s possible to make these well if you pay attention to the flavor profile and the binders. For some binder guidance, think about how a lump crab cake gets made – it wants not just the protein, but some flavor and something to hold it together. Many people use egg to bind, which does a great job of holding things together without adding too much in the way of weird texture or flavor. You might also use mayo (or its vegan equivalent), mashed firm tofu or some mashed potatoes.

One key is to make sure your protein is dry. Wet beans or lentils = fall-apart burgers. To make sure they are good and dry, a few bread crumbs never hurt anyone. Other things that prevent fall-apart: making sure the patty gets a good sear on each side and letting it sit before serving.

When you’re making vegetarian food, it’s also important to remember that vegetables and legumes generally lack a few things that make meat taste good: umami and fat. It’s incumbent on the chef to add these things (plus some salt, how is it that people remember to salt meat properly but somehow fail to salt beans properly?) to make sure vegetarian items have good mouthfeel. The way chefs usually cheat at this is to use a lot of cheese. That’s got salt and fat and savory. Sometimes you’ll see mushrooms used to good effect here – a really good morel or porcini can go a long way toward making vegetarian food taste better. You can also go the seaweed-soy sauce route.

For fats, the kind of oil you use to cook a veggie burger matters a lot more than the kind of oil you might use for beef. Because generally beef does not want oil – it brings its own fats. If your patty has a lot of intrinsic flavor, a neutral oil will be fine. If not, you’re going to want to go with olive oil or even peanut oil (again, depending on your flavor profile) to give the outside some better mouthfeel and snap. Cheese can go inside the patty too for fats, and even if you want to go vegan you can still use Daiya or its equivalent.

But I digress, because the abomination of a veggie burger at the Railyard seems to have used none of these tricks. It leaves you feeling strangely oily and a little sad. It’s no wonder that most people remain convinced that we should inflict suffering on other animals in other to make ourselves happy at lunch if this is the alternative.

The End Times: Brought to You by Publix

For the last several months, we’ve been out of town and out of the country more than we’ve been here in Montgomery. Coming back, we found ourselves lacking in basic foodstuffs and needing to make a serious grocery store trip. So we girded up and went to the Publix on Zelda Road this weekend. No offense to the Carter Hill Winn Dixie, which is easy, affordable, and getting better all the time (though still plays really terrible music and still lacks a good vegetarian selection). We don’t shop at Fresh Market because a) we’re not rich, and b) it’s not really a grocery store. Publix is reliable and carries a surprisingly wide selection of vegetarian and vegan items. They have tempeh and plantains and the good veggie dogs and Daiya – really, it’s a very good grocery store and we feel lucky to live so close to it.

But it’s also a disturbing place. You see a number of products there that make you think simultaneously: “Somebody buys this?” and “Sigh. Somebody buys this.” The difference in inflection, the jump to the declarative that identifies your neighborhood as one where people live who actually buy these things, can drive you insane if you think about it too much. So of course we think about it too much. We took some pictures.

What follows is a sample of the products and trends we found that were horrifying, head-shaking or simply things that make you go hmmm.

1. Shouldn’t that be refrigerated?

Sure, meats and cheeses have been stored without refrigeration for most of human history. And we did just get a lecture from a fractious European cheese seller about the many ways that refrigeration can kill a cheese. But still, it’s kind of shocking how many unrefrigerated and “ready to eat” perishables abounded in the Publix aisles – including a $15 pack of cheese designed to be melted in a fondue kit. These room temp items are a plus for the preppers among us and a minus for those of us suspicious of nitrates or watching our salt intake.

2. Gee, your house smells terrible.

People of Montgomery, your homes must smell just awful. We have discerned this by noticing that Publix devotes approximately 600 square feet of shelf space to household odor correctors/enhancers. These come in all kinds, from weird little dipsticks to plug-in wafters, from old-fashioned incense to Yankee Candle-style assaults on your brain’s cherry vanilla olfactory sensors. I’m not sure what a mangosteen is, exactly, but evidently many people want their house to smell like that. And also pineapple.

The above photo demonstrates the shelf space devoted to this stuff. Everything down to the outstretched arm could be filed under the category of “anti-stink technology.”

A triumph of cross-branding, without any of the sticky residue that clings to your back molars like a bad high school crush. Except whatever caustic films they leave in your lungs after you inhale them.

New look!

So many different ways to improve your home’s odors. Or you could just, you know, clean your house.

3. Of course that’s now a brand name.

This is totally what Kropotkin intended. If you rub this on your body during a shower, the government will totally crumble. And the fact that they’ve jammed 33 percent more of this goop into a bottle not only means that our new social order will be more harmonious, but also that these bottles will fill up the landfill just a little bit quicker.

4. Our planet is doomed.

Click, swish, toss. No time for space colonies! Click, swish, toss. What is wrong with you people who can’t just have a regular toilet brush like the rest of us? Must the River Region dispose of toilet sponges the aggregate size of Cramton Bowl every year just because we cannot figure out how to keep a regular, less than $9.49, cleaning utensil around and vaguely sanitary? Answer: Yes. Re-use of toilet brushes causes Socialist health care.

Also, can we talk about your cat? And how evidently he/she needs more varieties of food than all of the “Asians” and “Hispanics” in Montgomery? Because this is wack, people – appetizers for cats? Get a grip. The economy is collapsing around our ears, but as long as Mr. Whiskers gets his amuse bouche in time for you to settle in and watch The Biggest Loser, everything will be just fine. Meanwhile, the Publix does not stock falafel mix, which is helpful in making one of humanity’s most ancient and delicious foods.

5. Nostalgia is toxic. And evidently sweet.

Need a popcorn popper? Cake pop maker? Snack on a stick maker? Mini pancake maker? Nostalgia Electrics has got you covered. And evidently Publix thinks so highly of their products that Nostalgia Products, LLC gets about the same shelf space as peanut butter. Okay, a little less, but the price per ounce is a money-maker. Perhaps Publix is just betting that your ideas are similar to notorious mini-pancake lover Lou Reed, who famously said: “I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” For the record, the “cake pop” trend is an atrocity and should be ended as soon as possible.

6. Flavor sauce is everywhere.

Don’t be shocked, but it turns out that panko-blonde Guy Fieri is a symptom rather than a cause. You may have read the recent and scathing review of The Next Food Network Star’s restaurant in New York. In case not, enjoy. We’ll wait. As you see, much of Fieri’s bro-appeal is a matter of flavor sauces, one piled upon another, as things are madly stuffed inside of other things and deep-fried. This “flavor sauce” thing has legs. It’s basically the whole Applebee’s menu. And now Publix is in the grips too – all the things that used to be called SALAD DRESSING are now called ANYTHING DRESSING. Because salad, that’s for ladies, right? And also, who wants to sell a product just for salad when you can slather it on your muffincandywafflemini-pancakeAxedeodorantinANARCHY™?

7. People don’t know how to cook.

Look, obviously you have no idea how to cook. Otherwise this would not appeal to you. That, or you just like to sample stuff in tiny plastic cups, in which case you are a) making penguins extinct, and b) stupid for not going to Costco, where there are way more and better plastic cups of crap you will never actually cook. Publix understands your flailing. They give you the recipe and then stick all the stuff in the same refrigerated case so that you don’t have to actually go around the store and collect the ingredients. You just follow the instructions on the card, eat the food, chew joylessly and head into the bathroom. Repeat. Die.

You know that song by Arcade Fire called “We Used To Wait?” No? Too impatient to look it up on YouTube? Perfect. These QuickCook Blackeye Peas are just the thing for you. We used to wait. Now, you steam peas in the bag with the other veggies in the freezer aisle and think yourself damn healthy as you sink into another season of Downton Abbey. Shovel peas into your mouth in ten minutes. Hell, why wait that long? Just rip open the cellophane and turn the peas into mouth mush without waiting the eternity that the package demands.

You should be ashamed of yourself for buying this. Deeply ashamed. And if you bought it for your child, even more so. Shake AND pour? Two steps? What is this? The Gulag?

8. The Reading Aisle

Literacy! You could do an entire entertaining blog for months and months tracking the contents of a grocery store’s reading material. The novels represent an even lower denominator than the airport bookstore. We’re open to being tarred as literary elitists — and sure, we do read the high-brow stuff. But the bleak quality of the grocery store book section is not just an antidote to populism, but is enough to make someone relish the oncoming post-literate age altogether. Skip this section entirely, download some mind-rotting apps onto your tablet computer, and move on.

The magazine section is also fun to examine for the narrow demographic nets being cast, along with the gloomy darkness of depression from which emerge the kind of lonely thoughts that would cause someone to seek something from these shelves. If only they’d make a single magazine about ineptly-rapping brides using guns and hot rods to decorate their country cottages, they could just reproduce the same thing every month. Now with recipes and crossword puzzles!

9. Heat and stir

Spam is gross. All canned meats are gross. Given the amount of food and water and space and energy needed to raise an animal and kill it, meat should be expensive. Meat should cost more than vegetables. Canned meat like Spam should not be in plastic trays to be put into microwaves. If a “Compleat” is what you are having for dinner tonight, well, maybe you’re doing the best you can and we shouldn’t judge you.

And an entire treatise could be written on how macaroni and cheese has morphed from a single food item into an entire line of products, with cheese in silver foil packets (in both powdered and goo form) being ingested by millions of people every year. Pasta is one of humanity’s great inventions, but retain some galaxy-sized awe for the immensity and sheer amount of shelf space devoted to this bewildering array of one narrow and processed vision of a noodle drenched in cheese (or cheese-like simulation).

10. That should not come in a can.

11. Positioned at handy child level!

Tooth rotting cereal meets tooth rotting cupcake in a bar. Lubricated by a few too many brand execs from General Mills (which owns both Better Crocker and the cereal brands featured here), the two go home together and make babies, which are boxed and sent to supermarkets around the world. Dentists rejoice.

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For other leading-edge Lost in Montgomery coverage of Montgomery grocery stores, check here and here.

Montgomery’s Best Red Curry

Depending on where you are in the world, people mean different things when they say “curry.” The word “curry” is from Tamil, basically meaning “sauce.” Indian “curries” may or may not actually have much in the way of sauce, but often use a blend of spices that is sometimes called curry powder that may or may not contain some combination of coriander, cumin and tumeric. Usually spicy bits like fresh or dried peppers are added separately. In Japan, the stuff they call curry is largely a disgusting brown goo draped over meats on rice. It is related to Indian curry in the same way that Corey Feldman and Sir Alec Guiness are both actors.

And then there’s Thai curry, the subject of this particular post. In a Thai restaurant, when you order a curry you can usually expect to receive some combination of ingredients with a savory sauce. The sauce is made from a curry paste and liquids that might include coconut milk, stock, fish sauce, soy sauce and assorted other goodies. There are a few staples, including yellow curry, green curry, red curry, Massaman curry and Panang curry. Their difference is less about the things that get “curried” (although Massaman usually has sweet potatoes or some kind of starch) and more about what’s in the paste. We like all these kinds, but we are partial to red curry. It’s usually more spicy than the others (with the exception of Panang) and tastes richer to me somehow. So we wanted to see where Montgomery’s best red curry might be. And we went on a lunch adventure.

Lek's. The worst of the three.

First stop: Lek’s Railroad Thai. It’s a nice spot, for sure – used to be the main place we’d go for vegetarian food here in Montgomery before we lived here. The decor is nice, the train station is pretty awesome, and it’s easily walkable from downtown. Plus they are really fast at serving what can be a very substantial lunch crowd (even though they may be the only restaurant in town without an obvious system to distinguish between the sweet and unsweet tea and tea pitchers). The lunch specials include a spring roll (pretty good), some soup (didn’t eat it, full of chicken), and your choice of a few items. The red curry costs a few dollars extra for tofu, which is pretty wack – it’s not like you’re getting shrimp or something, but it comes out fast. But it’s just not very good. You get a generous set of tofu pieces, cooked to a medium consistency, topped with a smattering of bell peppers, with a scoop of rice and a fan of cucumber slices. Over the tofu, the curry tastes cloying yet thin, like some canned coconut milk that heard a rumor of curry nearby but only got a passing whiff. It’s lacking all of the depth and flavor of Thai food, coming closer to the overly sweet Americanized “Chinese” food that they serve at horrible places like Ming’s Garden.

Next stop: Ala Thai (Midtown). There are two Ala Thais, but we only really go to this one because it’s closer to our house and reachable for a work lunch. Like Lek’s they can rock a slammed restaurant for lunch. We’ve rolled in with huge parties and gotten out with fabulous food and good service in shockingly good time. There’s lots of good stuff on the menu, and they’ll make it as hot as you want. This particular day, though, we were only interested in the red curry. Which did not cost extra for tofu but which came with either noodles or rice. We chose the rice. When the curry arrived you could have smelled it all the way over in the Shoe Circus, or whatever other awful stores they have in that mega-complex. It was spicy and sweet and deeply flavored, generously soaking in a lot of sauce that ended up merging perfectly with rice progressively ladled into the bowl. There were a number of vegetables, but not so much that it detracted from the perfectly cooked tofu.

Green Papaya. Decidedly meh.

Third stop: Green Papaya. We have been meaning to go here for the three years we’ve lived in Montgomery. Now we’ve gone, we’re not sure when or if we’ll be back. The red curry is basically a bunch of deep fried tofu mixed with what seems like pre-bagged veggie stir fry  mix (you know, little slivers of red pepper, tiny broccoli florettes, flat and vaguely scalloped carrot wedges). It is not especially savory or unique, making up for flavor by using a full-fat coconut milk. At least the “medium” is spicy (at Lek’s, “medium” seems to mean “insipid), and the the “hot” is sweat-inducingly hot. But it’s generic, and boring, and, well…you could do much better on your own.

Speaking of on your own, I want to say how easy it is to make your own red curry at home. You don’t need to make your own red curry paste from scratch (though I have, and it isn’t hard) – the Taste of Thai stuff they have in the little jars in the “Asian” section at Publix will do perfectly well. I do mine in a wok, but you could just use a big saucepan. With tofu, you press it first, slice it thin, and brown it in a little oil (I like peanut). Take it out and keep reserved. Then a little more peanut oil, and fry several teaspoons of the red curry paste till you can really smell it. Add in onions and whatever veggies you’re going to use. Then coconut milk (I like the light stuff) and some stock, depending on how soupy you want it to be. Add in equal parts brown sugar, fish sauce (there’s some vegan options for this, or you can just omit) and soy sauce. You may want more soy sauce after. Cook it down. The end. Good with some lime juice squeezed at the table and maybe some toasted peanuts to top.

Earth Fare

Regular readers of this blog know that we express our opinions with a reasonably ruthless honesty. If we like something, we are more than happy to sing its praises. But if something unfashionably crosses our critical gaze, we’ll also tear into it with great relish.

I think we’re always fair, but we do have opinions, something at odds with the “say something nice or don’t say anything at all” crowd. We try to back up said opinions with facts — and articulate them in a way that you can relate to. And while we know that we come from a set of particular perspectives that perhaps most people in our city don’t share, we also do our best to go into situations with an open mind.

All of which is a sort of meaningless preface to our review of Montgomery’s new grocery store. It feels necessary because we went there expecting to hate it. And we loved it.

Why would we expect to hate a grocery store? Well, for starters, it is in a part of town that we have dubbed “The Hellscape.” This is the part of town that you might call “the east side.” It is comprised entirely of sprawl, driven by environmental disregard for beautiful country farmland that once surrounded Montgomery, fueled by racism and a fear of city life. It is a land of McMansions and facially race-neutral explanations involving school districts and land values, a realm of soul-crushing big box stores and mono-cultural consumerism, big churches and people clinging to their gas-guzzling SUVs as if they were lifelines. You know the place, even if you’ve never been there. It’s evil.

And yet, as health-conscious vegetarians, quasi-foodies who shun the label, we couldn’t resist the allure of a new grocery store devoted to things we revere: locally grown grown produce, organic foods, fresh bread, succulent fake meats. We figured we’d go, take some pics, and then come home and rip the place for being over-priced and full of yoga-pants-wearing bourgeois soccer moms beaming self-satisfaction and stocking up on quacky new age medical cures.

But even if there are a handful of walking stereotypes in the new Earth Fare, the bottom line is that this store is amazing. The only negative thoughts (other than the ad hom cheap shots added for humor value) we really could muster was a sort of profound sadness that this grocery store is so far away from our house.

We just posted a lament about how downtown re-development has been hindered by a lack of a grocery store. And there’s an entire blog’s worth of posts to be written about the starvation and malnutrition being inflicted on the parts of Montgomery that qualify as “food deserts.” (see also here for a look at another major Alabama urban center dealing with this disgraceful phenomenon).

So perhaps we can be forgiven for celebrating the arrival of a health-themed grocery store in a state that has some of the least-healthy children in the nation.

But really, it’s not about how this amazing grocery store serves the greater needs of a state that seems allergic to being healthy. Nope. Our sense of consumer desire, our urges grounded in food-buying lust … that’s selfish. And we’re at least somewhat OK with that.

We follow the organic food industry with all of the righteous zeal of modern crusaders consumers . We try to buy from corporations that behave in ways we approve of. And we track the boardroom political debates as best we can. Check out this blast from the Organic Consumers Association regarding the reprehensible Monsanto — and then check this (also persuasive) reply from Stonyfield Farms.

And Earth Fare has got what we need.

There’s an entire post to be written about the awful Fresh Market, which is out on the Boulevard. But whatever acid-tipped daggers we had for that overpriced joke of a grocery store were rendered wholly unnecessary by the opening of Earth Fare, which ought to drive Fresh Market out of business within a year.

In the words of one of the total strangers emerging smiling from Earth Fare last week, “Now, tell me again why we’d ever go to Fresh Market again?”

So … what makes it so great? (“Finally,” you grumble to yourself, “the review part of the review …”

It’s not the fruits and vegetables. Sure, there are good deals to be had there (niche items like Meyer lemons and the only organic oranges and lemons in town — besides the ones at sinking ship Fresh Market), but in general you’re going to get a better overall value and selection at the Winn-Dixie or Publix. We might be shrugging it off more than most because we already get local and organic produce from  our magnificent CSA share (spring shares may be available, get yourself to the Red Root Farm Facebook page).

The bulk food section is good. It’s better than Healthwise (though theirs is good too, this one has more stuff and also has bulk spices). It’s a little spendy, of course. We got organic tri-color quinoa ($5.99/lb) and organic pinto beans ($2.49/lb). The beans have a date with the New Mexico green chile we peeled and brought home in freezer bags this summer. (Note to Montgomery grocery purveyors: whoever starts stocking Hatch in the freezer case will win my eternal patronage.) There’s an unbelievable amount of bulk and pre-bagged coffee. It smelled amazing. It was expensive, but it smelled amazing. Next time. The coffee and bulk foods are next to a kind of specialty imported foods rack with the ultimate Stuff White People Like rows of specialty salts and delicious looking imported anchovies that we did not buy but wanted to melt into a pasta sauce.

There is a really big personal care products section with all the quasi-obscure soaps and lotions you might care to purchase. Some of this stuff is hard to get around here – I noted the selection for future trips, thinking it might end up saving me shipping on inevitable online orders. Also there are rows and rows and rows of vitamins and “herbal treatments.” Seemed like Healthwise had that part of the market all locked up, but I’d be surprised if the vitamin-and-cleanse crowd decided to shift its loyalties just because organic olives can now be purchased at the same time as flaxseed oil and protein powder.

The fake meat divisions were a big hit with us. We don’t need you getting all preachy with us about the need to get away from meat substitutes, or talking about dioxin, or just trying to convince us that there’s nothing wrong with inflicting suffering on sentient beings so you can consume their flesh with a light dusting of truffle powder. When you don’t eat meat, you (may) miss its texture. This doesn’t mean you want to eat Tofurkey (really, nobody should). But it does mean that sometimes you just want to buy packaged seitan rather than always making your own, that veggie dogs can be delicious, and that Publix doesn’t have to have the tempeh market cornered. Earth Fare had all that and also a bunch of weird stuff in the freezer case. We’re gonna keep making our own seitan, but it’s nice to know we can get packaged foods like the rest of the bourgoise.

There’s an olive bar, of course. The thing about olive bars is that you can’t tell until you’ve tasted the stuff. The one item we got was really good, but we’ve only tried that. More sampling required.

The cheese selection was lavish, what you’d expect, really, and is by far the most exotic and well-curated in town. We’re merely amateur turophiles, but we felt confident that their vast (and expensive) collection of cheese contained many gems.

The deli looked great. One of us was sort of overcome by all the vegetarian food in the deli, and wanted to try/buy it all. Fortunately, she was prevented from emptying our bank account into various kale-soy concoctions by the hordes of dimwitted idiots mobbing the understaffed counter. These are the people who have tons of time to study the menu and look in the case and still get to the counter with a “hmm, let’s see. I think I might like to have…” So we opted out. We couldn’t escape the desserts, of course we couldn’t, with our well-documented sweet tooths – the kindly man pushing apple pie samples ended up selling us single serve treats instead (good, not great). We also got bagels. Needed salt. And onions. For “everything” bagels they were curiously nihilistic. But still, they had bagels! Can’t get fresh baked bagels at Publix or Winn-Dixie. At least not in our neighborhood. Depressing.

Of course by the time we got to the register we’d already spent way too much money. An avocado here and a salad dressing there meant it was pretty easy to rationalize the seasonal sixer of Sierra Nevada at the register. Sigh. A trip to observe and sample ended up as a triple digit expense. Ouch.

Still, we’re glad the store is there. It exploded our expectations and we’ll likely be back. Yet, all of the above commentary about sprawl and the abandonment of Montgomery remains spot on. We’re glad Montgomery has a top notch store in Earth Fare. But when Trader Joe’s comes to town, can they please find some way to build it on the Boulevard?

The front of the store

Kids aren’t kids at Earth Fare. They’re consumers “in training.”

Nice item inventory of local stuff

The store has a “food philosophy”

Scoop your own salad and shrooms

Pour your own wheatgrass

Bulk foods

What is more absurd that multiple kinds of luxury salt? It’s all NaCl to me, man.

Scoop it yourself

Prepared food

It looks like every other freezer case section … but the food inside is tasty.

The store philosophy is on the bag

Cinnamon Apple Butter

For months we had been looking forward to visiting our friend’s house to make his grandmother’s cherished apple butter recipe. It was a bright, warm Saturday in Cloverdale. A football game in a distant snowstorm murmured from the television. We had balloons, and a soccer ball, and two charming children to chase around outside. Even the near-constant onslaught of church bells from across the street couldn’t dampen our mood. Apple butter!

We might have been novices at making apple butter, especially top-secret West Virginia recipes, but we aren’t novices at eating it. We usually like ours thick and brown, more apples than sugar (but not stinting on the sugar), maybe with a little cinnamon or nutmeg, close enough to pie filling that there’s a strong family resemblance but not so close that you feel guilty piling the stuff onto biscuit after flaky biscuit. Our friend is even more of a fan. His fridge is like a museum of apple butters, each jar from the Publix brand to the heirloom Ellijay brand found wanting somehow and consigned to the bottom shelf of the refrigerator door – one step above oblivion in most households.

We knew we had ourselves a real connoisseur. After his voluble son introduced us to a marginally comprehensible pirate narrative inspired by the Disney movie inspired by the Disney ride, we were ready to get cooking. The ingredients were unveiled.

That’s right. Red hots. We know. We were also a little surprised. We’d rather pictured the whole enterprise as some kind of super-rustic quilting bee-inspired Old Fashioned Apple Buttering. We soldiered on. Our friend is a trustworthy and decent fellow. Surely he wouldn’t lead us astray? The recipe card, in his grandmother’s handwriting, spelled out the game plan:

Quick Apple Butter

9 cups Apple Sauce
5 cups Sugar
1/2 cup Vinegar
Cook this 15 minutes
then add 1/2 cup cinnamon candy
Cook 5 minutes
Put in pint jars, place new can seals on and tighten. Make sure they are sealed before you put them away.

Cinnamon candy! We were intrigued. As our young friends decamped to play soccer in the courtyard, we began. First, both jars of applesauce went into the big pan – slightly more than the recipe required, so we added a bit more sugar and apple cider vinegar to compensate. This smelled super delicious as it cooked – like fall, somehow, and sweet-tart.

After fifteen minutes, it was cinnamon candy time. This was truly intriguing. They disappeared immediately into the sugary brew, the steam preventing effective picture taking. Our host explained that these candies were a little larger than he usually used, so we let them cook for ten minutes, until they were nice and dissolved. And then, improbably, we were done. Apple butter! In under 30 minutes! and bright red! We put into jars.

Since there was plenty of football left to watch, and children to chase around in the unseasonable warmth, we decided to eat some. We weren’t sure what to expect. But on toast, it was delicious. Really, really, really delicious. It didn’t taste like anything we’d ever described as “apple butter” before, but sometimes the words you have outlive their usefulness, and we are fine with that.

After several pieces of toast slathered with the good red stuff, we were ready to brave winter. The coalition of apple butter makers divvied up the jars and soldiered on into the cold.