Delicious or Disaster?

Well my apartment didn't smell quite like the apple-y-goodness I was expecting... It smelled almost like I forgot to turn the crockpot on and left the apples sitting out. This is what it looks like after I mashed it up with my potato masher.

I can't figure out if it is brown because the apples turned brown or if it is because I got a little cinnamon happy. Depending on which I'm thinking when I take a bite it tastes really good or really bad. I found a few light colored chunks of apples which makes me think that I just had way too much cinnamon. I guess the only way to really find out is to make it again without any cinnamon.  

Cooking Adventure: Mmm Mmm Applesauce!!!

When I was a little rugrat, we often went to my grandma's house just one state over and ate the most delicious home-cooked foods around. One of my particular favorites is applesauce and there is nothing quite like Grandma's applesauce warm off the stove and into the middle of a fresh baked roll. As a result, I'm pretty picky when it comes to the applesauce I eat. Mussleman's is pretty good but I learned this holiday season that the generic in a can is a definite no-go in the book of Lori. 


Fortunately my Mom-in-Law got me this cookbook for Christmas. 1400 Crockpot Recipes. Hole-E-Bovine.


Fortunately we got a Crockpot for our Wedding and it has been safely in storage for the past year.


So now I'm trying my hand at a favorite dish and seeing if it comes out edible. Hopefully it will be delicious and worth the hassle. Since I love looking at all the pictures Pioneer Woman puts on her blog when she cooks, I decided to do the same. 

Crockpot lids are handy for holding cookbooks open!

8 apples, 1/2 cup of water, Cinnamon, and 1/2 to 1 cup of sugar depending on how you roll.

Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer $20 at Bed Bath & Beyond. Definitely a life saver for times like these.

Toaster not needed.

I mixed together the water, sugar & cinnamon first so that way the apples could be getting covered with some juiciness instead of turning brown.

The art of lining up the apple core perfectly. Makes the rest of the process super fast!

Just spin, spin, spin away. When the core starts going through is when it might start acting up, but then it gets back on track.

Presto chango - All the peel on the plate, the core still on the thing-a-muh-jig and a sliced apple ready to become...

A chopped apple!

In to the pot to keep them pretty.

Stir em up with a spatula so as not to scrape the stoneware,

set on low and go on with the rest of your day/night.

For me it was about 8PM when I started getting everything ready and 8:50PM when I took the last picture. Tomorrow I'll get to wake up to a house smelling like apple-y-goodness which will hopefully lead to a good day back at work :-)

Good Things List

I forget how I found it or who wrote it... 
Wait! I remember now... 
It was my cousin's sister-in-law and somehow it showed up in my feed on facebook... 


Anyways - she wrote a list of 52 things. From what I can guess, each week she wrote something she was really thankful for or was the highlight of the week. "Thank You Lord for Your Provision" is what it's called and I think I'm gonna try it. 


So should you - even if you're not religious. Because at the end of the year when you're stressed out from all the Holiday madness and just want to pack up and run home as fast as you safely can - it'd be nice to realize all the awesomeness that has happened. 


And if she ever happens to read this and get offended that I stole her idea without knowing her.... I'm sorry?

Feedback?

I don't know how many or who reads it - but what do you think of this new setup for my blog? Will you be totally bored if I start blogging about nothing like I am now? If so - come back sometime after January 2. I braved Black Friday at Wal-Mart this year and got a KitchenAid stand mixer. Husband and self are compiling a mental list of all the things to make.

Current length of list: 1 mile

SO EXCITED!!!!!

Looks like this and the best thing is that it is assembled by hand in America. Go Team.

Our Squirrel

 Yes. I know that the title says "Squirrel" and the pictures say "Hamster"

I quit posting because we're back in our apartment and the only wildlife we have is our hamster (which I'm really quite happy about) and the wild cats that live in the vacant lot next door. We got Ted (aka Ted the Squirrel) for Valentines day last year from my mom-in-law. The guy at Petco was really cool and let us each hold one while we figured out which kind to get. He was even nice enough to flick the different kinds to see if they would bite. From this we learned that Dwarf Hamsters are the best. 

However, this was not a good time to learn that Ted apparently is a kamikaze. He waited for me to quit looking for half a second and dove out of my hands and landed on the floor a good 4+ feet below. I felt so bad that we decided to make it up to him by giving him his own little house. 

He sleeps all day... Likes to kick the bedding out of the cage... He runs on his squeaky wheel once all the lights have been turned out and he's convinced we won't be turning them on soon... And he occasionally smells funny... But he's cute and soft, so we clean his cage and give him food and water. And when we're gone for a few days - we make sure we put the thermostat on so he doesn't freeze. (This is a big deal because I'm pretty much anti-heater which lets our apartment get pretty chilly some days.)


I forget how the squirrel got in his name. I'm guessing because I kept randomly calling him a squirrel or chipmunk more than a hamster. 


I had to take a ton of pictures to get this many that were not blurry and actually had his face in it. Those were the pre-Canon Rebel Awesomeness days. 


I need a new title for this blog. We don't have naturally occurring animals and it's too cold to do extensive adventuring outside so the whole NatGeo thing is gonna have to go :( But that's fine. I'll get rid of a blog title if it means that snakes and tarantulas aren't a regular part of my life. 

Back in the city...

I guess if I'm going to keep blogging, I need to come up with a new name. If you have a suggestion - please toss it my way :-)


I just had a mini epiphany, and since I just had it, it's going to be rough and quite possibly make no sense at all. The end thought was something along the lines of "Wow, I finally used something I learned in College!" And it's something along the lines that all B's are better than A's & C's. While your GPA comes out the same - B's look prettier (in my opinion) on the transcript. While "C's (do in fact) get degrees!", they stick out and always manage to come up in an interview. Maybe it's just an Accounting thing...


Anyways, after moving back to our little apartment that had gone uncared for for a full 3 months, the cleaning adventure had potential for being compared to Dante's Inferno. While I never read the book, it doesn't sound happy. After working in the bedroom for a good hour or so, I decided my work was about B quality. I could put in another hour and get an A, but currently, the spare bedroom is about a D. Minus. From a really nice teacher. 


So therein lies my epiphany - instead of nit picking and getting an A+ room, I'll do what I did in school. Get each project up to about B quality, then rotate around and slowly get them all up to par! I know it's lame for me to be writing about cleaning - but maybe it will help you next time you have a super messy house and don't know what to do. And if you think that's bad...


Highlight of my day: Finding my favorite sheets after looking for about 3 hours. They were in a plastic bag I saw earlier in the back of my closet but was too lazy to look in because I assumed it was full of old clothes...

Squirrel Family Robinson

For some reason I've had the phrase "Swiss Family Robinson" stuck in my head for a couple days even though I had no idea what it refers to. Thank you Google once again for not only transcribing my voice mails and texting them to me, but letting me know that its a 1960s movie about a family that is actually Swiss. Maybe it is my subconscious telling me to add it to my Netflix cue....


Enough about the movie.... Look at this little Squirrel family we found this weekend as we were driving in! We call our land a "Nature Preserve" so we get to see lots of squirrels, birds, butterflies, lizards, toads, cotton tails, and jack rabbits. We think there are about 3 in this clan. I'll be ticked if a stupid snake comes along and eats the babies like I saw on some NatGeo videos on YouTube....

Awwww.....  Don't you just wanna go find them some nuts or something to eat?