apple pie a la mode

....without the boring "pie" part. :)

I just chopped up apples and made the spiced sugary filling out of them, then baked them in a covered dish instead of bothering with a pie crust. It produced a REALLY delicious, syrupy apple-pie-insides kind of thing. I took one taste and realized it has to be dumped over vanilla ice cream for best effect, so I am getting some of that later tonight. :D

a quick catch-up

I did trick almost all the family into going "apple picking" at the farm near us. (Amy couldn't come because her parents in law were up for a visit that weekend.) We ended up picking raspberries and blueberries, and buying apples, peaches and corn from the farm stand because I was a bit too tired to keep going on with the pick-your-own. We also got some ridiculously yummy feta, tomato and basil dip which is just perfect on veggie crackers!

Since starting maternity leave, I have made soda bread, strawberry-peach jam, quiche, beef stew, apple pie, many pancakes, and a bunch of more regular meal stuff. The jam came out especially tasty. A bit thin, since I didn't put a lot of sugar in, but who doesn't want low sugar, seedless strawberry peach jam? I usually share my jams with the rest of the family, but Alex has pretty much forbidden me to do that this time!

check your ingredients list

I was VERY offended to find that some pudding mix that I bought had aspartame in it! This was after I had specifically chosen the "regular" one that was sitting right next to the "sugar-free". WHY would you use artificial sweeteners in the one that's already sweetened with sugar?? (It's probably cheaper, one would assume.)

Anyway, aspartame is one of the items that pregnant ladies are specifically not supposed to eat. Good thing I read pretty much everything that's in front of me, and my eyes wandered over the ingredient list while I was mixing up the pudding!

haven't had much time to cook

A side effect of picking up a new job recently is that I haven't had a lot of time to just be in the kitchen, making good stuff. We've been eating and everything, but I haven't made anything really delightful since the pot roast.

Well, I just made an apple crisp. That always makes me feel better. :)

food today

I had some extra time today so I did some cooking.

YUM, as it turns out. :)

I started with potato soup, since Starbucks had some whole milk that was expiring, so I took it home to cook with. Don't worry, I made sure it hadn't actually spoiled before I threw it in the soup.

Alex and I ate the whole pot of soup in maybe half an hour. :) AND I am thinking about making a whole extra batch tomorrow. I made it from a recipe that was pretty bad, so I wrote in my changes for next time (more potatos, add cayenne pepper, things like that...).

I am really happy because in Oregon you could pull cans of potato soup off ANY grocery shelf, and in New England you just can't find potato soup without YUCK CLAMS. AKA clam chowder, which people around here are crazy about despite the presence of, well.... clams.

And then, I was having such a good time cooking that I made a chocolate cake. But chocolate cake is so much better with fruit sauce! So I made some sauce out of a bunch of mixed berries, and the cake soaked up a bunch of it really nicely. It was deeeelicious.

Just when I was running out of steam and couldn't face cooking for myself, Alex made TWO grilled cheese sandwiches for me in the knick of time. :)

Discovery!

Cool Whip makes the best mousse. You have to not mind the fact that nobody (at least not me) knows what Cool Whip is. But it makes a delicious, fluffy, delicious mousse that lacks some of the bitter chocolatey-ness that my earlier attempt had.

Ultimately I guess it depends on one's mood on the particular day. But I am now resolved that I need to figure out how to get that light flavor out of regular whipping cream and chocolate.

chocolate mousse

I made chocolate mousse the other day and it was damn tasty. Six squares of Baker's Chocolate and 1 1/2 cups of whipping cream is all you need! The recipe is straight out of the Baker's Chocolate cookbook that my sister Alison got me for Christmas. Well, sort of. They said six squares of white Baker's Chocolate and I did three squares of bittersweet milk chocolate and three squares of sweet dark.

So, you melt the six squares in 1/4 cup of whipping cream. Then you whip 1 1/4 cups whipping cream and stir it into the chocolate mixture. And then you're DONE! I'm sure there are other, much harder recipes to make mousse, but I decided to start with the easy way first. It was darned tasty, too, so THERE. Who needs separated egg whites and confectioner's sugar?

The only thing I would change is that it said to refrigerate the mousse for at least two hours and it was actually WAY tastier before it ever got chilled.