Apple Crisp!

Guys! I made apple crisp for the first time the other night! and I remembered to take pictures of the process, which I'm pretty proud of myself for. As mentioned before in one of my posts, I don't really follow recipes, but it tasted really good!

Start with apples! These were from our apple picking trip a couple of weeks ago.

Peel your apples! If you have a small pan, just peel a few, but keep in mind they they will get smaller when cooking, so make sure you have enough apples to pile your pan high.

Core your apples! Careful not to accidentally cut yourself like I did (stabbed myself actually, right in the palm ouch!)

Slice those apples up!

Now I didn't take a picture of a couple of the steps sorry! Basically what you do is toss your sliced apples with some flour, sugar, and apple pie spice and put them in your pan. Then make a mixture of oats, melted butter, a little flour, sugar, and apple pie spice, and cover the apples with it. 

Then cook your crisp at 350 degrees for an hour or so. Then let it cool a little, top it off with vanilla ice cream if you're into that sort of thing, and dig in!

After this first attempt of mine was successful, and I realized how easy apple crisp is, I experimented and made another for my cousin's baby shower. I did it without sugar (honey instead) and added cranberries to the crumble mixture. One thing that I didn't do this second time around that I should have, was cover it with foil at the beginning to let the apples cook, then take it off to let the top crisp. I'm not sure why this one was different than the first one, probably something to do with not using sugar, or something like that. Anyways just a little tip. Besides being pretty crispy on the top everyone at the shower really liked it and that made me really happy.

After the baby shower, my mom and I went to an apple cider pressing party at one of her co-worker's houses, and it was such a blast! What a better way to get all the man power needed to make cider than to invite all your friends over for a pot luck? I can definitely see myself owning a press in the future and having awesome autumn parties like the one I attended. The cider tasted great too.

I feel like this will definitely become one of my go to dishes for a simple and healthy(ish) dessert. Have a wonderful week!

Naomi Odlin

Cooking.

Cooking.

Hiding under some very large leaves in our garden were some very large zucchinis, I mean like as long as my arm and as big as my calf. They were huge! And as everyone knows, or should know, the only thing to do with giant zucchini is to shred and bake with them! So last night I made some chocolate chip zucchini bread. I found this super easy and delicious recipe off Pinterest. Now I meant to document my whole baking process, but I was too excited and forgot so this is what I came up with as an alternative!

Giant zucchini...

Shredded...

Plus chocolate chips...

Equals some scrumptious bread!

I tweaked the recipe a tiny bit more to my liking, like I used a little less sugar, and I used two eggs and some applesauce (a great egg substitute and it makes your baked goods more moist). And of course a bunch of extra chocolate chips, because there is no such thing as too much chocolate in my book. I enjoyed this bread thoroughly for dessert last night, after a meal of daal and quinoa which I made as well and thought was super good, and for breakfast this morning. We still have two big zucchini, and more to come from the garden, so I think I'll make this recipe again soon, and maybe some carrot, zucchini, blueberry muffins, and probably some baked parmesan breaded zucchini fries. Do you have any other zucchini recipes that you enjoy, that you think I should attempt to make?

Thanks for reading!

Naomi Odlin