Italian apple cake can make the most of backyard garden bounty

Expensive Helen: In a latest dialogue with a good friend about our gardens’ apples, and apples in common, she recalled an Italian apple cake recipe in 1 of your columns. She did clip the recipe, which has due to the fact disappeared. It is a extended shot, but do you nevertheless have it?

L.E.

I have retained that recipe. I like its simplicity. In summertime the slices can be garnished with fruit and berries from the yard. Toasted nuts and coconut flakes, and apple slices, are excellent wintertime garnishes.

Italian Apple Cake

1/2 cup ricotta cheese

1/2 cup butter at place temperature

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup flour

1/4 cup cornmeal

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2 1/2 cups grated apple

1 Tbsp lemon juice

Garnishes

Product butter, ricotta and sugar right up until mild. Conquer in egg. Whisk collectively dry ingredients, then insert the ricotta combination and stir right until just put together. Blend grated apple with lemon juice and fold into the batter. Bake in a buttered 25-cm round pan at 350 F for 40 minutes or until eventually golden brown and examined for accomplished in the centre. This cake does not increase much.

Dear Helen: For the previous two years I’ve tried using to expand the fennel with the swollen, bulb-like stem bases. I have failed. The crops kind only tall, skinny stalks with no bulbs at the base. All the on-line articles or blog posts I have identified say that fennel is simple to increase. Any hints?

D.H.

I’m pondering which variety of fennel the content had been about. Typical fennel (sweet fennel, Foeniculum vulgare) is a perennial with masses of ferny, anise-scented foliage and yellow flowers. It is so straightforward to mature that it is classed as an intense spreader. I’ve uncovered it most lately on a B.C. govt checklist of “Invasive Terrestrial Plants” beneath “sweet fennel.”

Florence fennel (finocchio, bulb fennel) is not at all straightforward to improve. It is an once-a-year plant, shorter than common fennel. I have not developed it in latest years but I do try to remember that achievement in bulb development depended to a sizeable diploma on the variety. The past time I grew Florence fennel, Zefa Fino was my most prosperous variety. I cannot discover Zefa Fino stated with any of the seed sources I now use, but West Coastline Seeds lists Selma Fino, explained as a range “that will bulb reliably.”

Spring sowing is suggested in areas with awesome summers. This applied to use to us, but of course situations have been altering in recent many years. Florence Fennel grows most effective in awesome, moist problems, in a prosperous, properly drained soil that is not way too light-weight-textured, which means it really should have some “heft.”

In genuinely fantastic growing conditions, which includes a sunny web-site, spring sowing could nonetheless operate, even if we have another pronounced warmth wave, if the soil is saved amply and continually moist and heat-deflecting, soil-cooling mulches are employed around the crops throughout very hot temperature. Chopped straw is great for this goal.

Florence fennel is sensitive to root disturbance. For that reason some gardeners elect to sow directly into a well prepared soil in a backyard plot. If you pick out to start off the seeds indoors, transplant with treatment to disturb the seedling roots as very little as possible. As the leaf bases begin to swell, pull soil up close to them and organization the soil down nicely.

Expensive Helen: I have shed the directions you have provided in past columns for ripening kiwis. Mine are stored in a cold place, where they are being really hard.

G.F.

Keep kiwis in the fridge or in fridge temperatures. Provide out the ones you want to ripen and location them in a plastic bag with a ripe apple. Retain at home temperature. I set them on the kitchen counter, where by they serve as a reminder to open the bag at times to confess refreshing air. This is to stay clear of a buildup of the ethylene gas specified off by the apple.

I start off peeling and tasting kiwis as soon as they no more time sense rock-tough when pressed with a thumb. I like them however a little bit on the tough aspect, the flesh thoroughly opaque. When it has turned translucent, they are previous taking in high-quality in my impression.

For attractive inexperienced slices of kiwi, minimize off the base (blossom conclusion) of the fruit, then peel the pores and skin away from the foundation toward the stem conclusion. Then slice the peeled kiwi.

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