Apple Cake in an Iron Skillet – Tasty Kitchen (The Pioneer Woman)

For tonight's culinary adventure, the Midden decided to rid the fridge of a few apples – and hey, what goes better with apples than two or three sticks of butter?

That's about how much this apple cake recipe called for. I'll end the suspense: it was, of course, delicious.

While the Midden melted the first 1 3/4 sticks of butter in a large skillet and chopped apples, I mixed a third stick with sugar, vanilla, flour, eggs, and cinnamon. Once the butter in the skillet was melted, the Midden added more sugar, then pressed in slices of apple to simmer.


After a few minutes, I added spoonfuls of batter to the skillet.


(I can't help but think of Homer Simpson when I look at that one..."My arteries are clogged with yellow gold!")

We transferred the whole skillet to the oven, where it baked for 25 minutes.


Here's it is, right out of the oven:


And here it is flipped onto a plate.


The slices of apple were almost caramelized in sugary butter. The recipe called for it to be served warm with vanilla ice cream, but we were out, so the Midden whipped up homeade cream instead...which, in the end, lost us a cuppa. (But we agree it was a five!)

We'll give this one another go soon with ice cream for the win!

Pancetta, Onion, and Parsley Pasta – Marcella Cucina (Marcella Hazan, p. 170)

Tonight's adventure was courtesy of Mrs. Hazan. We decided to try our hand at homemade pasta to go with a sauce found in Marcella Cucina. This turned out to be a rather epic saga, as it was my first time trying noodles out of the box, and the Midden has only tried it once or twice.

A basic pasta recipe calls for one cup of flour to two eggs. The instructions called for scrambling the eggs inside a flour "bowl", which was precarious from the start and quickly turned into a flour volcano leaking yolky lava.


The dough was extremely sticky – we blame the 90˚ weather here (on Oct. 6th, nonetheless) – so we probably added at least another cup of flour trying to get it dry enough. The Midden separated the dough into six parts while I worked the hand-crank pasta machine.

We initially wanted to go for spaghetti, but the first batch through was sticky and clumpy. Time for more flour. The Scotsman mentioned going out for Wendy's.

A little more flour, and the dough came through the fettuccini press decently. After that, we were on a roll.

The "sauce" wasn't so much a sauce, but tasty nonetheless. I can't say we followed Mrs. Hazan's recipe too closely either – we used prosciutto instead of pancetta and added garlic to the onions and parsley. We also added a pat of butter because...well, why not?


We tossed it all together. The Scotsman glanced into the skillet.

"This looks...interesting."

Sorry, Marcella.

However, we were again surprised. The recipe called for a lot of onion – four, to be exact – and they gave the pasta a lot of sweetness that was really good, especially when tossed with pecorino romano and served with a side of roasted asparagus. All around, we agreed this recipe (or our variation thereof) was a keeper.