Sister Sunday Supper - Halloween 2010

Sister Sunday Supper landed on Halloween this week.  We didn't want to switch to Saturday (because I was going to the Rally to Restore Sanity) - so I skipped Halloween festivities and just went to my sisters.

My sister has been getting tons of apples in her crop share (it is apple season), so we've been doing a lot of baking with apples.  Before I headed out to her place - she called and asked if I could bring my rolling pin.  When I asked why - she told me that we were making apple cobbler with buttermilk biscuits and we needed the roller to roll out the biscuits. 

My sister got the recipe for the cobbler from Fresh Everyday: More Recipes From Foster's Market by Sara Foster.  Foster's Market is this great little Southern gourmet market/cafe that is a staple in Durham, NC.  Sara Foster has two cookbooks based off of recipes of Foster's Market and both my mom and sister have them.  We have not found a bad recipe yet - and on top of that - most of the recipes have been super simple. 

Anyways - so we both started out working on the cobbler.  I peeled the apples (a task I didn't want to do at first - but got into once I started challenging myself to try to peel them in one strip) while she chopped.  After that - you melt half a stick of butter in a pan and melt it.  When its melted (but not browned), you add in apples, lemon zest, lemon juice, apple cider (my sister actually used pear cider because it's what she has - she buys it from her crop share people and its super delicious and refreshing), sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  Once everything is mixed and apples are tender - you mix up the biscuit dough.

I must not have been feeling well - because I just skimmed the biscuit recipe and didn't really pay attention to the note that said it called for 1 cup of self-rising flour OR 1 cup regular flour plus 1 TBsp of baking powder.  I just read it as flour.  It wasn't until the timer went off and we checked the cobbler's status in the oven that my sister realized that the biscuits were very flat and not normal.  My sister and I joked that my flat biscuits showed that I went to college up north because any true Southerner (she counts herself as one) would know how to make a biscuit right.  Dispite it's flatness, the biscuit tasted pretty good - or as I said, "This tastes like apple upside down pie".

For the actual main meal - we decided to take the easy way out and made hamburger casserole.  Hamburger casserole is a staple of the Midwest table.  My sister told me a story that last year she brought hamburger casserole to a party and all the people from Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, etc. commented that it tasted like home - whereas the people from the West Coast and the South kept wondering how my sister thought of this deconstructed lasagna and where do she find the recipe. 

Here is how you make hamburger casserole - cook up a big pot of pasta (penne, bowties, shells, macaroni shapped), brown about pound of hamburger, after meat is brown - you can add some onions and/or mushrooms to brown.  When they are ready, drain pasta and pour into casserole dish.  Pour meat mixture on top of that.  Pour over that 1 jar of ready made spaghetti sauce and 2 cups cheese.  Mix it all together.  Then sprinkle another 2 cups of cheese.  Pop in oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.  Then serve.  Totally easy peasy.

We added a green salad to the casserole and that was dinner.  Thinking back, it's actually something that my mom would have made on Halloween night when we were young so that we could eat quick and then go trick or treating.