How 'Bout Them Apples! 5 Uses for Homemade Applesauce

It's finally fall in North Carolina.  Granted, the calendar says November 2, but we haven't seen many consecutive cool days until the past week.  And now that the air is crisp and the leaves are so many shades of gold, red and brown it's prime time for apples!

Before a few weeks ago, I never ever had homemade applesauce.  All I ever has was the store bought variety, which I ate and sort of like.  But when I made my own from a bunch of honeycrisp and gala apples, I fell in love and so did Elias. He barely left any for the rest of us! All you do is get a large pot, fill it with your peeled and cored apples, and add enough water to cover.  Add sugar and cinnamon to taste (or maybe brown sugar, or fruit puree...), and cook until the apples reach the desired texture.  If you want some chunky and some a little smoother, remove part of the applesauce when it is chunky and allow the rest to continue to cook down.  I dare even call this a recipe...

Unless you have children, you might think that to make homemade applesauce is more trouble than its worth.  What will you do with such a large quantity? The best part of making things yourself is that you can control the outcome.  You can make your applesauce the texture and level of sweetness you would like, depending on what you will use it for.  I came up with these ways, but I'm sure you can get creative and come up with more of your own.  Comment and let me know what else you came up with!

1.  Yogurt-  Use chunky applesauce as a stir in for plan or vanilla flavored yogurt.  I buy a large container of Stonyfield Farm brand and add the applesauce to sweeten and flavor it.  You save a ton compared to buying the individual cups, especially for organic!

2. Oatmeal-  Add a couple spoonfuls of your chunky applesauce to a pot of oatmeal, or you can even add it to uncooked oats and water to microwave.  Quick, and lots more flavor than those little packets.

3. Fried Pies or apple dumplings-  For a quick fried pie add about 1 tablespoon of filling between two flattened crescent rolls or a rolled out flaky biscuit and fry in hot oil, or use the Pioneer Woman's Recipe for Apple Dumplings using the applesauce instead of sliced apples.  Believe me, you will make these again and again.

4.  Side Dish-  Cooked apples are a great side dish for dinner.  Do you have picky eaters? Sometimes when you can't get them to eat vegetables try a fruit at dinner instead!

5.  Dessert Topping-  Warm up some chunky applesauce with a little caramel and spoon over ice cream or cheesecake.  Then tell yourself it's a serving of dairy and fruit for the day :)

What I'm Eating

Hard boiled egg, whole wheat toast with Smart Balance, banana

I'm up at 6 am on a Saturday folks, aren't I a busy bee? This is all thanks to my wonderful husband who reminded me that hard work doesn't sleep,even on crisp fall mornings when the temperature is just right when you are under the sheet but only halfway under the comforter.  So I got up after morning prayer, Fajr, and picked up where I left off last night on my research on organic and natural foods in restaurants.  (For those of you who don't know, I'm a senior at East Carolina University in the Hospitality Management program.)  I hard boiled two eggs, sprinkled them with cracked black pepper and about 17 grains of kosher salt and added some whole wheat toast with Smart Balance and half a banana.  That was until someone who's name rhymes with Rasheed gave me that "I should have taken her up on that boiled egg offer" look and I ended up forfeiting half of my egg and banana.  Two cups of coffee later and here I am, distracting myself from my research with my blog.  But there's a full day of house cleaning, laundry and baking ahead so I'll come back later with how that all goes.

Muffin Makeover

Yes, my muffins are on a paper plate. Don't judge me.

Remember the other day when I posted a very tasty (what, you didn't try it yet?) blueberry muffin recipe?  Well i fulfilled my promise and did a remix with dried cranberries, and trail mix.  Sounds exciting right? Here's the recipe.

Orange Cranberry Muffins

2 cups all purpose flour
2 ts. baking powder
1/4 ts. salt
1/2 cup Smart Balance Spread - Original
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 ts. orange zest
1/4 c. orange juice
1/4 c. milk ( I used 1%)
1- 1/4 cup dried cranberries or trail mix*

Preheat the oven to 375, and prepare your muffin pan by lightly coating it with Smart Balance.  Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together in a small bowl and set aside.  

Fold carefully, please!

Action shot!

With a hand mixer, or in the bowl of a stand mixer cream the Smart Balance and sugar until it's fluffy, around two minutes.  Add the eggs one at a time, making sure the first is incorporated before you add the second.  If you're using a stand mixer remove the bowl from the stand.  Fold in the first third of the flour, then add the milk.  Fold in the second third of the flour, then the orange juice followed by the last bit of flour.  Make sure that the flour or liquid you're folding in is incorporated before you move on.  Add in the orange zest, then the cranberries or trail
mix.  Use an ice cream scoop or 1/4 cup measure to dip the batter into the pan.  Top with extra cranberries or trail mix if you'd like.  Bake 20 minutes, or until the edges and tops are golden and puffed.

Trail mix with crack like addiction properteis.

Before I proceed I will say this: If you THINK you don't like dried cranberries, you do.  That's it, it's that simple.  If you can eat a raisin, you can eat a dried cranberry!  If you don't like raisins, eat Great Value Indulgent Trail Mix and you'll start eating raisins.  I NEVER ate raisins until I started eating it.  Plus, all this stuff is really good for you, so if for no other reason than that, let's give it a try. What do ya say? Yes? Okay!

These muffins were a great success, especially considering the substitutions.  Smart Balance has much fewer calories than the butter in the original recipe, as well as the 1% milk.  I used Simply Orange juice, but if you use a sweetened orange juice you may want to cut back on the sugar in the recipe. And now for my asterisk regarding the trail mix...I used Sam's Choice brand Indulgent Trail Mix, which has golden raisins, cranberries, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, almonds and cashews.  If I were you, I'd remove the whole nuts from the trail mix when adding it to the batter.  If you're a fan of huge nuts in your muffins, be my guest.  Otherwise I would chop them or leave them out all together.   

This recipe is modified from the Food Network recipe found here.

Brown Sugar Apple Crisp

We pretty much annihialated this upon removal from the oven, so there is no pic with the topping!

My husband has a large family, 5 siblings who are all married, making fourteen of us in all not counting the little ones.  So when we have a family dinner, it is cooking for a crowd.  One dessert that is always a crowd-pleaser is apple crisp.  It turns out that in addition to being a crowd pleaser it is also quite easy to make, a total plus for you and I.  The twist on my recipe is that I use both brown sugar and white sugar to give it a dark, caramelized flavor.  Mind you, this recipe is for a crowd, so be sure to scale it down to size as needed.  And as always, this is more of a method than a recipe, so feel free to add, subtract or divide as you like!

Brown Sugar Apple Crisp
5 lbs. apples (I usually use Fuji or Gala)

1/2 stick butter

1 1/2cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tb. cinnamon

1/2 ts. salt

Topping 

1 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 c. brown sugar

1/2 c. white sugar

1 stick of butter, cold and cubed

pinch of salt
  1 ts. cinnamon

Peel, core and slice apples in 1/8th inch slices.  In a large pot, add all of the other ingredients and heat until the butter is melted through.  Add the apples and cook over medium-low heat until the apples are tender but not completely soft, about 25 minutes.  While the apples are cooking, mix together the topping ingredients by cutting the butter into the dry mixture like you would for biscuits .  After the apples have reached the desired texture, transfer them to a buttered or sprayed baking dish and crumble the topping over it.  Bake on 350 for another 20 minutes, or until the topping is brown and golden.  Then get a bowl, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and make sure you have enough company over to eat the rest.

For someone who is enjoying being able to say the words "I lost 65 pounds!" this sure seems like a whole lotta butter and sugar, no? Yes, but think of it this way:  12 tablespoons of butter among around 20 people is a little over a half a tablespoon each, and three cups of sugar divided into the group is.....like, a really small number.  :)  Also, depending on your apples, you may need to add more sugar so taste as you go.  Different batches of apples will have different sweetness.  But as long as you follow the last step of the recipe and share the wealth, you can have apple crisp and your health. (<----you just got rhymed on.)

Printable version

Canning.....yes, I said canning!

One of the best ways to preserve some of the goodness of summer (so I've heard) is through canning.  While making plans for what I will do tomorrow, I thought to myself

"Hey, why don't you get a bunch of tomatoes, strawberries and peaches and do some canning tomorrow? It can't be that hard, right? Yeah, come on, let's do it."

And thus ended the mental conversation I had with myself.  Is that crazy? (The canning part, not the conversation with self part).  I want to know if anybody out there has any experience with canning.  I've done your standard Internet research, but I just don't know if it's more trouble than it's worth. I know it's not something that many people still do, but I'm an old-fashioned kind of gal.  Any opinions out there Bloggers? Hmm?  I'll sleep on it, and let's see if this whole canning thing comes to fruition. 

Sahoor Blueberry Muffins

Now THOSE are some muffins, right?!

Hi guys, it's been a while! I apologize for my extended hiatus.  My original intention was to take some time off of Facebook during Ramadan, which turned into a hiatus from the Internet all together.  But I'm back, and I have some product reviews and recipes from my time away.  Let's start with some GREAT blueberry muffins I made at the beginning of Ramadan to eat at sahoor, the morning meal Muslims eat before we begin our fast for the day.

Any Muslim with a few Ramadans under their belt can tell you that there is no amount of food or beverage that you can scarf down in the morning that will make up from abstaining from eating and drinking all day.  On the flip side, as soon as it is time to break the fast our eyes tell us to pile up plates with delicacies of all kinds...but alas, our tummies nearly explode after half the plate.  With all this said, I made these blueberry muffins from a recipe I found on FoodNetwork.com that you can get here.

The muffins turned out very well.  They looked beautiful, were moist and tender, and the recipe called for just the right amount of blueberries so that each bite had a piece of berry in it.  They had soft of a cake-like texture, and I loved the cracked effect on top.  I used a standard ice cream scoop like this one and it made twelve perfectly sized muffins.  It's a good recipe for those who don't consider themselves "bakers" since it doesn't require a lot of equipment and the method is pretty straightforward.  They make a great breakfast with some fruit, or a good snack.  I'll be tweaking this recipe with my new favorite snack dried cranberries soon, so look out for that but for now try out this tasty version.