I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

To paraphrase an old saw - when life gives you apples, make ... something with apples. Fine, it's not as clever as the original with all its lemon jokes, but the principle holds true.

I walked into the King's Manor, where my Inter-Department is headquartered to find a note from the head of the Centre next to a bucket of apples. The note said something like, 'cooking apples from my garden, take some.' So I did. Then I was faced with a problem. I had no cider press, so what should I do with them?

I'd been thinking for a while that I ought to mess around some more with a 17th Century recipe for Jumbles, from Robert May's "The Accomplisht Cook." There are no apples in the recipe, and no reason to think they would be an appropriate addition. I cast those concerns to the wind, however, and forged ahead.

It wasn't until later, when the dish was complete, that I realized I'd come up with something similar to a clafoutis - and that's OK. It's a little more cakey and little less eggy, and pre-cooking the apples was probably not needed.

On the other hand, if you don't precook the apples, and it wasn't less eggy, it would be a clafoutis. And this isn't. It's a Thingie.

• 4 apples
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1 egg
• 3 or 4 Tbs butter
• 1/2 Tbs or so sherry
• 1/2 Tbs or so cream

Cream the sugar and butter together. Add the egg and mix well. Add the flour and mix it up, adding the sherry and cream as you go. You want a fairly stiff batter, so go easy on the liquids at first.

Fold the apples into the batter and pour into a baking dish. Bake 150C/350F for 30-40 minutes, until it tests clean.

Let it cool for just a bit to make sure it sets up. Then devour alone or with something on top. Whatever you like. I'm eating mine au naturel.