Simply Delicious and Fuss-Free Applesauce

I am embarrassed to report that I only first made applesauce two years ago, when Bean was eating pureed food as an infant. I am not sure how it is that I waited so long to make such a tasty homemade treat.

That first time that I made applesauce, I used a standard recipe from my trusty old cookbook that my mother bought for me when I moved out. It turned out delicious and I even canned a few jars of it.

Step 2.

Unfortunately, what I remember most about the experience of making the applesauce was the straining of the sauce once it had been cooked. You see, the recipe called for the skin to be left on the apples to add texture and colour to the sauce, but once it was cooked, it was to be strained so as not to negatively affect the texture with large pieces of apple skin. It took a long time to mash the cooked apple mush through a metal mesh sieve using a wooden spoon. Sadly, I also burned that first batch a little, as it was cooked on the stove as per the recipe's instructions.

However, I was over at a friend's place a couple of weeks ago and she was telling me about how she was making applesauce in the slow cooker for the first time. GENIUS!!

Step 6.

I haven't had a chance to go to the farmer's market lately, and I think most of the apple growers have stopped coming (they've run out of apples because of the poor growing season this past summer), so I had to buy my apples from the grocery store. I bought a bag of Cortland apples and last Friday I made applesauce history in our home!

After doing a bit of searching for slow cooker applesauce recipes online, I decided to do the following 10 incredibly simple steps to yumminess:

Step 10.

1. Wash apples.
2. Cut into quarters and cut out core.
3. Cut quarters in half (now we're dealing with eighths).
4. Place apple pieces in slow cooker.
5. Add 1/2 cup (125 ml) water.
6. Add 2 cinnamon sticks.
7. Cook on high in slow cooker for ~4 hours.
8. Stir and check on the sauce a couple times during those 4 hours.
9. When ready, remove cinnamon sticks.
10. Scoop apple mixture into a food mill and mill it.

THE END.

Step 10 continued.

And the result? Homemade applesauce that is blushed and tastes amazingly like apple pie. My husband, Bean, (5-month old) Pea-Pod, and I cannot get enough of it! Go make some - it's easy.

Asian-Inspired Grainy Salad

Inevitably, when I discuss meals and healthy eating with clients, at least a handful of them ask me what I eat. The same is true when I meet new people in my personal life. People always ask, "do you always eat healthy?", or on the flip side, "do you ever eat chocolate or junk food??".

The truth is that I don't even know anymore. I think I eat " normally," but my husband tells me I eat healthfully all the time (or most of the time). Irregardless, I am happy with how I eat, my health is good, and so are my energy levels. Best you can ask for, wouldn't you say?

So what do I eat? Well, maybe it's time I get back to sharing some of our favorite recipes (and some new ones we've been trying).

This Asian-inspired salad is based on a recipe from this cookbook, but tweaked to the point of being quite different. It's a great grainy salad, perfect for lunches and packs a satisfying load of protein and fibre. It's got some crunch to it with a soy-ginger flavour scheme and hints of sweetness from dried cranberries. Oh - and it looks way better than it does in this photo.

Ingredients
1.5 cups cooked rice, bulgur, quinoa, or any combination of cooked grains
Raw sugar snap peas
1 sweet green bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup lightly toasted raw, unsalted peanuts
1/4 cup dried cranberries
1 can rinsed chickpeas
1 small can sliced water chestnuts
1 lb extra firm tofu
3 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Dash hot pepper flakes
Fresh parsley (optional)
Fresh cilantro (optional)

How to:
1. Open and drain tofu. Chop into cubes (roughly the size of dice). Place in dish and combine with 1 tbsp of the soya sauce as well as all of the garlic and ginger. Cover and refrigerate while the remainder of the salad is assembled.

2. In a large bowl, combine cooked grain with chickpeas, pepper, water chestnuts, and cranberries.

3. Toast peanuts in dry non-stick frying pan on stovetop over medium heat. Toast until just fragrant. Add to salad.

4. Wash sugars snap peas and peel strings (as best you can without spending too much time on it). Add to salad.

5. Add marinated tofu to salad and toss to combine.

6. In small dish or jar, combine remaining 2 tbsp soya sauce with honey, cider vinegar and pepper flakes. Drizzle over salad and toss to combine. Garnish with freshly chopped cilantro and or parsley. A

Great served on a bed of baby spinach leaves.

Makes about 8 servings.

A Snack Fit for a Toddler

.... Or anyone else who likes to play with their food!

This is one of Bean's favorite snacks: fruity kabobs.

Inspired by the cover of this cookbook, these kabobs are a hit around our house and they're even kinda fun to make.

Plus, if you want to get all educational here, I suppose you can teach patterns with these kabobs.

All you need is a stick - Popsicle sticks work. I used these weird wooden stir sticks that we've had since our Jack & Jill five years ago. They're skinnier than a Popsicle stick, but the ends are blunt, which makes them seem safer than a bamboo kabob skewer. Plus they can be easily snipped with scissors so that I can shorten them to pack them in Bean's lunch (I don't have containers that fit the full-size version well).

The food is the fun part! Melon works really well, as do grapes and strawberries. The cover photo features kiwi slices and pineapple chunks, too. Actually the cookbook calls for a drizzle of melted chocolate to dress up the fruit. However, we haven't taken that step for a couple reasons: 1. It makes the whole task of making them a little more cumbersome. 2. I'm pretty sure Bean would lick the chocolate off and then demand more.

In place of the chocolate drizzle, we've been using mini marshmallows between some of the fruit pieces. They get a little gooey from the fruit, but Bean seems to enjoy peeling them off, and they're a nice change as she eats her way through the kabob.

What will you be skewering on your next fruit kabob?

"Lunch-able" at Home

Around our place, we call "snacky" lunches "lunchables." They're quick to prepare, Bean loves them, and so do we! (I call that a win-win-win!)

Lunch-ables don't have to be pricey boxes of highly-processed food - they can be anything you want them to be!

Red, yellow & orange bell peppers, English cucumber, celery, Cortland apple, canteloupe, Stonemill cranberry pumpkin seed multigrain baguette, cheesey bread sticks, marble low fat mild cheddar cheese, unsalted raw peanuts, raw California almonds.

Our lunchables at home are inspired by the 4 food groups. Here's some basic instructions to get you on the right track:

1) Start with veggies and fruit, and place them on a large plate (or in a large container if you need it to-go).

2) Shoot for the rainbow! Try to incorporate as many colours as possible. More colours = more nutrients and more visual appeal.

3) Dietary restrictions aside, try to hit all 4 food groups ( veg & fruit, grains, milk & alternatives, meat & alternatives).

4) Avoid high-fat and overly sweet or salty snack foods. Try to keep it fresh (mostly) and be generous. That way, you probably won't crave any sweet desserts after (and if you do, you can make it small since your hunger is mostly satisfied).

5) When it comes time to eat your lunchable, try to eat some of each food rather than focusing on one food group, then moving to the next. This will make sure you EAT the variety of food that you prepared. For example, we prepare Bean's plate in front of her, giving her one of each food to give her a little sampler. If she wants more afterward, she can have more of her choosing (in Bean's case, it's always more veg). For us, we start with two of each thing and go from there.

Happy Lunching!

Mini Quiche!

Mmmmmm ... quiche! Who doesn't like quiche?

Growing up, it wasn't something we had very often, probably because of the inconvenience of making the pastry for the crust. However, in our home, quiche is a fairly regular dish, showing up roughly once a month or so. I usually make an oil pastry that is super easy and quick to whip up as well as heart healthy. (To prepare it, just mix 1 cup of all purpose flour - I use whole wheat - with 1/4 cup mild vegetable oil - such as canola - that has had 2.5 tbsp of cold water added to it. Use a fork to mix them and then roll out the pastry with a rolling pin between two sheets of waxed paper.) My quiche is very simple, consisting of five beaten eggs with some milk added to them, as well as peppers, green onion, ham, shredded cheddar and parmesan cheeses. Then just bake at 350 F for 35 mins or so.

However, recently, I thought it might be fun to try make mini quiches, especially for Bean! I had envisioned using phyllo pastry; however, I couldn't find any at the grocery store that day, so I picked up wontons. The wontons made for some very crunchy little crusts, but they were still tasty.

Here's what I did:
1) Place two wontons, staggered (ie. not perfectly aligned) in each cup of a mini muffin tin, gently pushing them in to create a bowl shape. Fill a 12-cup mini muffin tin this way.
2) Beat two eggs and add a tablespoon or so of milk (you can use water, but it makes for a tougher quiche). Combine these.
3) Chop up peppers, green onion, ham, or any other fillings you're hoping to use into very small pieces and put a few of each in each tiny wonton cup. Ladle the egg mixture on top of the these in the wonton cups.
4) Shred cheddar and parmesan cheeses over the wonton quiche cups, then bake in 350 F oven for 12 minutes or until quiche is set.
5) Let cool enough to handle, remove from muffin tin and ENJOY!!

Looking forward to trying this with phyllo pastry :)

Good Friends & Granola

When you move to a new city it can be difficult to make friends (especially lasting ones with common interests). When you're a kid, it's easy to make friends in school, but as you become an adult, it becomes harder to seek out those good pals.

We've discovered that playing sports is our best outlet for finding friends with common interests. In fact, just this morning we had some friends over that we met while playing Ultimate Frisbee during our first summer in the city. Sadly, these guys have since moved away; however, we still enjoy catching up with them every few months. It's fun to learn about what's been going on in one another's lives over the past while and how much has changed!

We usually like to make some yummy food when company comes knocking, and since they were arriving around 10 am, granola seemed to fit the bill. After a great chat with the girls and a long run for the boys we sat down to some delicious homemade granola with fresh fruit and vanilla yogurt. YUM!

The granola recipe is one from Martha Stewart. This morning I didn't have enough dried cherries, so I subbed in dried cranberries. Oh, and I only use about half the brown sugar and instead drop some maple syrup in the mix. Doesn't take long to make, so go ahead and make some for tomorrow morning :)

French Onion Soup ..... Mmmmmm so gouda!

http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Soup/Cheese/recipe.html?dishid=4183

Write in your cookbooks!

Do it. Do it now. Do it often. Dirty up those cookbooks. Scribble in them. Doodle in them. Document in them.

If you are a food lover, someone that loves cooking, or even someone who just opens a cookbook occasionally, WRITE IN YOUR COOKBOOKS.

Maybe this seems like an obvious notion to you, but it was anything but obvious to me. It wasn't until my sister-in-law told me about how much she loved reading an old annotated cookbook that I even considered scarring up my cookbooks with my chicken scratch. It's as though it were some blasphemous act to write a note in a cookbook that is your very own. The thought of writing in pen, let alone pencil, in any sort of book other than a notebook seemed like a cardinal sin. But why?

For no good reason - that's for sure!

So now I write in my cookbooks. I write in all of them. I write in them every time I make something new, and even sometimes when I make something for a second, third, or fourth time.

I always write the date - that's a good start. It's fun to look back at when you made it for the first time. I write about who I served it to and whether or not they liked it (and if I liked it). I write about any substitutions, additions, or omissions. Best of all, I write about what was going on when I made it.

They say that we have strong associations between smells and memories. Well, now I also have strong associations between foods and memories.

We had a chicken dish the night we got Mowgli. I made lemon poppyseed pound cake, oatmeal energy bars, and borscht the day before JC was born.

What do I do when it's an electronic recipe? I blog about it I guess!

the meal he requested

As I mentioned in a previous post (Yum!), I have been experimenting with some recipes from McCormick spices. This week my husband requested the Honey-Rosemary Stuffed Pork Chops accompanied by the Pear and Field Green Salad with Pomegranate Vinaigrette.

And so I made them.


For the pork chops, I used butterfly cut pork chops. I would have liked to purchase them from Teal's (a local pork producer), but I haven't been able to make it out to the farmer's market recently, so I made do with some seemingly trustworthy cuts from the grocery store. For the apples I used Empire because that's what I had in the fridge (in place of Granny Smith). I am sad to report that I used store-bought chicken bouillon instead of homemade (tsk tsk), but it still turned out well. The only complication was the stuffing part of things. I used ~6 toothpicks on each chop to try to keep 'em closed, but without luck. The stuffing fell out and so I pulled the toothpicks and decided not to fight the losing battle. It turned out delicious though, and because the pork didn't end up being "stuffed," I didn't feel guilty about cutting each chop in half so that we each had a REASONABLE serving of meat. (The recipe calls for 4 thick cut chops, but I used 2 butterfly-cut chops - roughly half of what they called for.) My favourite part of this recipe was toasting the almonds. They smelled DELICIOUS!!



For the salad I used red leaf lettuce because that's what I had in the fridge. I skipped toasting the walnuts because I was in a rush. I butcher the dressing because I forgot that I didn't have pomegranate juice and that we were out of ground cinnamon. It ended up being a bit of olive oil, a juice box (leftover from camping last summer!) of apple juice, a splash of sparkling wine, some busted up cinnamon sticks, some ground ginger, a bit of sugar, and a bit of salt. It was ok, but some tartness or zing would have been nice. Oh well. It did the trick. The blue cheese was delightful! It's not something we usually buy, so we savoured it and enjoyed every tasty little crumble.

Yum!

I wanted to take a photo of a yummy dish we made this week, but it didn't last long enough!

I was rummaging through my basement trying to purge a bit on Monday and came across a McCormick spices recipe booklet that I picked up at a nutrition conference this year. I knew I kept it for a reason! They have some really yummy looking recipes! And lucky for you, they post them on their website, too!

Anyhow, so I was flipping through and came across this recipe for Moroccan Bean & Pepper Stew and decided to make it because I had almost all of the ingredients already in my kitchen.

We were missing the squash, so my husband was sent to get some. Sadly, there were no butternut squash available at the grocery store he went to, so we substituted acorn squash (and it was yummy!). We used a combo of green, red, orange and yellow peppers that we had left over from a quiche I made that morning (hurray for a productive morning!) We also added sweet potato because I have a hard time eating Moroccan-inspired food without those yummy orange yammies, and I tossed double the tomatoes in because I didn't bother reading that it called for 14 oz rather than the whole 28 oz can I used. OH - and on that note, make sure you buy the diced tomatoes with NO SALT ADDED. It's the same price where I shop. Also exciting: the tomatoes I bought were from Canada :) We also didn't have any fresh mint for a garnish, but I did have some dried, so I tossed it on there and it was DELICIOUS! Our version made 8 servings instead of 6, so for the last two servings we had to make more couscous.

From a nutrition standpoint this recipe is pretty good. It has 10 g of fibre per serving, which is a fair chunk (considering 21-38 grams of fibre are recommended for healthy adults). What could you do to improve it? Drop the sodium level down (as they recommend on the site). You could do this by using low sodium broth, using the NO SALT ADDED tomatoes that I suggested, and by omitting, or cutting down on the salt added. Rinsing the canned beans (garbanzo and kidney) would also help, though using dried beans would be the best solution. In fact, if you happen to make your own vegetable stock, you're really in business! See tomorrow's post for a bit on vegetable stock.