Homemade Crockpot Applesauce

Lance just got his wisdom teeth out, finally.  This means that our fridge is stocked full of mush right now – jello, pudding, ice cream, etc. 

I had just bought a giant bag of apples before his surgery, not thinking about the fact that I’d have to eat them all on my own.  I decided to try making homemade applesauce so he could enjoy them too. 

After this, I won’t ever get store-bought applesauce again.  It’s made in the crockpot so it’s super simple and cooking the apples for such a long time gives them a much richer flavor – the Motts stuff seems so bland compared to this. 

It’s amazing just on its own, but I’ve been enjoying it added to oatmeal or on top of vanilla ice cream (like I said, our fridge is all soft foods right now…)  This recipe made 2 large mason jars worth, but next time I plan to double it since we went through them so quick. 

Crockpot Applesauce (adapted from Pip and Ebby)

  

Ingredients:

• 10 medium apples (I used Gala)
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 T cinnamon
• Juice from ½ a lemon

Directions:

1.    Peel and core the apples (you can leave the skin on if you’d like the texture, but I wanted it to be as easy to eat as possible so Lance could enjoy it…)

2.    Dump everything into a crock pot and cook for 8 hours.

3.    Use a potato masher or large fork to break up the apples.  Enjoy!  

Cinnamon Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Hunahpu's Imperial Stout

 

Yesterday, I saw on The Revolution Ice Cream Company’s facebook page that they had created a new ice cream flavor – Cinnamon Brown Sugar Ice Cream with Cigar City’s Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout. 

Just in case you don’t know about this beer, it is Cigar City’s most sought after beer.  They brew it just one day a year, and release it the second Saturday in March at the brewery.  The Hunahpu’s Day event has become so popular that they had to start charging $200 per ticket to keep the crowds under control.  The beer made this list of The 10 Most Traveled For Beers in America and it has a perfect 100 score on Ratebeer. 

It gets its name from the legendary Hun Hunahpu of Mayan mythology.  Hunahpu was slain Dark Lords of the underworld, and his sacrificed body morphed into a cocoa tree, with a cocoa pod as his head.  One of the Dark Lord’s daughters, Xquic, picked a fruit from the tree and it spat on her, impregnating her with twin sons.  The twins grew up and defeated the Dark Lords to avenge their father, then transformed into the sun and the moon. 

The stout is aged on cocoa nibs, ancho and pasilla chiles, cinnamon, and Madagascar vanilla beans.  Unfortunately with it being so rare and the event being so expensive, I’ve never had the chance to taste it, but it sounds incredible. 

 

The line at the ice cream parlor was longer than I’ve ever seen it.  It seems that the word spread about their one batch of the cinnamon flavor – although it wasn’t marked on the board with the rest of them.  Lance and I each got a scoop of it – plus I had a scoop of their Mocha Mint (coffee ice cream with Thin Mint cookies), and Lance had a scoop of the What’s Up Nutter Fudger? (chocolate peanut butter ice cream with chunks of nutter bars). 

 

All our flavors were delicious.  I’m glad we were able to try the special flavor because the stout made the cinnamon ice cream even richer.  I still wish I could try a sip of the beer on its own, but the ice cream was great. 

If you want to read more about The Revolution Ice Cream, check out this post from last September.  They constantly have events and come up with new flavors, so like their facebook page if you want to stay updated.  Coming up on Sunday, April 12^th from 1 – 7pm, they will have food trucks, live music, a bounce house, and BOGO ice cream all to benefit the Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (CARD) at USF, so if you’re free that day, go eat some ice cream for a good cause. 

The Revolution Ice Cream Company is located at 220 W Brandon Blvd #104, Brandon, FL 33511 and is open 12pm – 10pm Monday through Saturday and 1pm – 9pm on Sunday.

Thanksgiving 2014 – Cinnamon Roll Turkeys

 

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite day of the year – it’s an excuse for me to try tons of exciting new recipes!  I especially love any dish that lets me get creative with decorating. 

I saw these Thanksgiving cinnamon rolls on Pinterest and knew I wanted to try them out.  It only makes 5 (since they are Pillsbury Grands and not the normal smaller rolls), but that was perfect since it was just my parents, brother, Lance & myself at breakfast yesterday morning. 

The original recipe used candy corn for the beak – since it’s a month past Halloween, we couldn’t find any, but I liked the almond better anyways.  Candy corn just tastes like wax to me.  I also substituted the small red M&M candy for a Craisin instead – the dried cranberry looked more like the gobbler thing that hangs from a turkeys beak, and the flavor seemed more appropriate for the holiday. 

Cinnamon Roll Turkeys (adapted from Pillsbury)

Ingredients:

• 1 can Pillsbury Grands cinnamon rolls with icing
• 10 slices of bacon, sliced in half and cooked very crispy.
• 5 almonds
• 5 Craisins
• 10 candy eyeballs
• 15 mini pretzel sticks

 

 

Directions:

1.  Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

2. Set icing aside.  Separate the dough into 5 rolls and place them about 3 inches apart on the cookie sheet.  Unroll each roll about an inch and tuck the dough slightly to create the turkey heads.

3. Bake 15 – 20 minutes, or until light golden brown. Remove from cookie sheet and put on serving plate.

 

4. While still warm, tuck the bacon halves into the back of each cinnamon roll to create tail feathers. 

5. Drizzle the tops of the rolls with icing.  Add the candy eyeballs, almonds, and craisins to create the faces, then add the pretzels to create the feet.  

In addition to Thanksgiving, it was ALSO my dad's birthday yesterday!  He was pretty excited about his breakfast...

Madeira Beach Mid-Week Market

Most fresh markets seem to happen on the weekends – and since Lance & I either have Tuesdays or Wednesdays off together, that means we can’t normally go to them.  But we found out about Madeira Beach’s Mid-Week Morning Market and decided to check it out.  It goes 9am – 2pm on Wednesdays on Madeira Way between Gulf Blvd and Tom Stuart Causeway. 

We read online that the market had about 80 vendors each week (in reality it seemed like 40 at most).  It was a mix of food, crafts, and fresh produce.  For breakfast we tried a guava-cream cheese empanada from Authentic Empanadas.  It was filled pretty generously with a guava jam inside. 

After that, we took a walk around to check out the other vendors and nearby shops.  We were still a bit hungry, so we visited the Hahn’s Kettle Corn stand.  They had a nice variety of flavors to sample – we ended up getting a medium bag of the cinnamon caramel kettle corn (which really should be called an extra- large…we only made it through a few handfuls and still have ¾ the bag leftover). 

I still like the Hyde Park and Downtown Tampa markets better – they seem to have a bit more selection.  Some of the booths were a bit too pushy trying to sell us things that we didn’t really need (one woman kept trying to convince us to stay at a hotel in St. Pete beach…we explained to her that living in Tampa, we’d probably just sleep at home if we visited St. Pete for the day…)

It was still fun to check out – although maybe better in the fall or winter when it isn’t so darn hot outside.