Keep Your Bites Small

I don't know if this is really a necessary post, but at least it's something new.  And, of course it mentions apples.  Sure it's in a rather odd and unpleasant way, but freedom of the press and all that ...

I'm not familiar with author James Nesbo (I don't know if anybody is -- I can barely find any mention of him online), but in this article discussing his new book he mentions how apples influenced part of the story:

The torture device, known as Leopold's Apple, is a figment of Nesbo’s imagination ... also based on a childhood summer holiday he and his brother spent at their grandmother’s.

He says: “She had a big garden with apple trees and we were not allowed to pick the apples, but she didn’t say anything about eating them.

"So we would climb the trees and eat the apples without picking them. One day my brother challenged me on who could take the widest bite out of the biggest apple. I put a big apple into my mouth without picking it and then I couldn’t get the apple out again.

“I started thinking, the apple is still growing. What would happen if I stayed here for three weeks? Would my head eventually explode?”

Luckily, we can pick apples without trouble from grandma or better yet just buy them in the store.  Although clearly we are all paying the price of not having the apple experiences to make us authors. Anyway, to be on the safe side, please be careful with your bites.

Lunchtime Tuna

I don't know if you really need a step-by-step instructions to make this, but it's here and I stumbled upon it, so why not share the wealth?

Apple Tuna Melts

And I centered that.  It gives it a bit more pizzazz, no?

and it don't snow in Minneapolis...

I've pretty much been eating all Granny Smiths this whole time. I like them. They're both sweet and tart. They're firm enough to make good sauce and pie. I'm coming to the conclusion that they really are the best apple. So I found myself in the store the other day (don't all my stories involve me being in the store) picking out more apples while humming this song. And so I thought I should share.



I forgot I knew this song. I also forgot how great it was. Enjoy.

Apple Saucy

I need to play catch up, so I made apple sauce and ate it all in one sitting. Took the first recipe I found on google...not bad.

Apple Sauce Recipe

Before cooking:

After cooking and mashing. I think I could have mashed a little more:

I've been getting my apples from Nature's Bin lately, thanks to the recommendation from Kate. I like that store a lot. It's like a poor man's Trader Joe's. The apples are cheap and plentiful.

The one thing I don't like is that they put an extra sticker on each apple. It's like a price tag sticker that you'd find on canned soup or something. So there's the usual sticker, plus this other sticker. And it's usually very sticky and harder to take off. But it's okay. Small price to pay.

It does, however, remind me of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and the episode where Charlie eats a pear for the first time. Every time I eat an apple, I think, I eat stickers all the time, dude!

And it makes me laugh. So, I guess it's okay.

That's all. You can (should) view that clip here.

I've got some apples

More Apples In Sausage

While I don't want to turn this into a sausage challenge, I took some of the leftover sausage from my stuffed apples I made on Wednesday and reworked an apple/sausage pairing into breakfast today:

Half a Granny Smith per patty

No post-cooking photos because I was hungry, but when combined with pancakes and a poached egg, it was quite delicious.

300

300 days to go. Seems like the perfect time for a movie. A remake of 300 seems fitting. An apple-y remake of 300* seems even more fitting:



*better than the original I think

Sausage That Apple

I took a day off from work today. Afterall, I deserve it.

It was fairly unproductive. But unproductive equals relaxing so that's good. One semi-motivated thing I did was try out an apple recipe from the good ol' Joy of Cooking. "Baked Apples Filled With Sausage Meat" was the entry. Joy of Cooking isn't big on witty names I guess. Just call it what it is.

The whole coring/hollowing out of the apples was a hassle, however each apple was easier than the one before it. After that it was all easy. And pretty tasty. Certainly nice to mix it up from just eating apples cold and plain.

Here's the routine:

Get yourself some apples (large unless you want to make yourself crazy). Cut off the top and then cut out the core.  Get rid of that. Then hollow it out a bit (the recipe says to leave the shell 3/4 of an inch thick but I went a bit thinner). Save those apple pieces you hacked out.

Knife choice was difficult for me. I got a spoon involved too.

Get yourself some sausage. The recipe said to go with well-seasoned sausage but I went with some "country sausage" because that's what I saw first at the store. I sort of assumed that all sausage came from the country as I don't run across a lot of pig farms in urban environments but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway, the country sausage wasn't really what I would call "well-seasoned" but I guess tasting like the the country was seasoned enough for my liking.

Country sausage

Take your sausage and mix it with the apple pieces you have from the hollowing out process. Then sprinkle the inside of the apples with some brown sugar and put the sausage/apple mixture into the apples. Apples into a baking dish and baking dish into a 375 degree oven for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes.

Ready for the oven

Done and done. Joy of Cooking said to serve with rice or noodles so I did just that. 

Stand by, stomach here comes delicious.

Applerific! Or perhaps more accurately Applesausagerific!