homecoming!

Dave and I flew back to North Carolina for my 5 year homecoming at Wake Forest University this weekend. WE HAD A BLAST!!!! Oh my gosh - so fun. I am so lucky to have such a great group of friends from college, and whenever we get together it's always awesome. Here are some pics from the great game against UVA - we won!! Go deacs!

Woohoo!

Weekend with friends - Happy Birthday Dave!

We had a bunch of great friends and family come into town this weekend to celebrate Dave's birthday, go out for Halloween and an annual bar crawl and go to the Colts/Pats game. Today we've hung low around the house with our friends watching football and enjoying the gorgeous fall weather...so I decided to make the boys some treats. I figured it was the perfect time to try out a recipe that I'd had my eye on for a while. Easy to prepare, ridiculously unhealthy, and guy tested/approved.

Apple Dumplings by The Pioneer Woman:




Then I had 1 pie shell, 1 egg, no room temp butter and limited motivation to go to a store, so I only had a few baking options. I decided to go with a basic apple pie with a crumble top instead of a regular pie shell/lattice top. Turned out pretty tasty!

Apple Crumble Pie:




Happy 29th Birthday Dave!! I love you!

more baking fun

spent some more time in the kitchen baking up a bunch of goodies. Made some mini carmel apple pies for Dave to take into school, cinnamon applesauce for us, and pumpkin pie for me. Everything made from scratch - except the pie shells which are the gluten free kind from whole foods. I have nothing against gluten...in fact I really dont know what gluten free means (no wheat?) but they were the only shells available so this is what we had to work with. Everything tasted amazing...but I think my favorite was the applesauce. Ammmmmmmazingly good.

Applesauce
Recipe adapted from allrecipes.com applesauce . I cut down on the sugar, increased the cinnamon and doubled the recipe:



Mini carmel apple pies
I used the carmel apple pie filling recipe from an earlier post in my blog:
Apple Pie Recipe and then just used muffin tins to create mini pies. They held up great and were surprisingly easy to pop out of the tins. I think these will be easy to eat on the go at school and it's nice not having to deal with utensils and plates and stuff.



Pumpkin Pie
Straight off the back of the Libby's Pumpkin Pie can. Except I used homemade roasted pumpkin puree instead of the canned stuff so I had to find the recipe online: Pumpkin Pie.
I typically will use canned pumpkin, as I think it's a pretty good substitute...but I will say that I love love love pumpkin pie and have convinced myself it's healthy and good for me since it includes a vegetable...so I love it all. Dave doesn't really like pumpkin pie but took one bite of this and made a strange sound which I guess means he liked it. So yeah...trying it with the fresh pumpkin was a hit.

Sweet Lilly

We had some good friends come into town this weekend and it was so great to hang out with them again! Their beautiful daughter Lilly is about 8 weeks old and stayed pretty relaxed for our mini session today. No surprise there though - her first modeling experience for me was during her parent's maternity session a few months ago - check it out here !

Here are a few sneak peeks!









Is that a half smile I see?





uh oh...get that camera out of my face already!

correction - it was over 80 pounds of apples...

I believe. Amazingly...between Sam's mom, Sam and myself we ended up bringing home over 80 pounds of apples. I said below it was 15....that was just one of my bags. Hmmm.

So I'm now attempting to find recipes that include apples and finding people to eat them. In addition I brought home 5 (yes - 5) pumpkins. I've made apple pie, apple crisp, pumpkin butter, pumpkin puree and pumpkin seeds so far...and I have a stack full of new recipes (bars, muffins, breads) to try when I eat my way through what I have. Not necessarily a good thing...

Here are some of my results..and you'll note that they progressively get less 'whole':

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Recipe:
scoop out seeds from pumpkin, rinse, spread on baking sheet and let dry for several hours(or overnight). Toss on baking sheet with a spalsh of olive oil and lots of salt. Roast in 300 degree oven for 20 minutes or until lightly toasted, being careful not to burn. I typically shake the baking sheet slightly 1/2 way through to mix up the seeds. Mmm....




Carmel Apple Pie

Recipe courtesy of
www.allrecipes.com

INGREDIENTS:
1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch
double crust pie
1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
8 Granny Smith apples -
peeled, cored and sliced

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Melt the butter in a saucepan. Stir in flour to form a paste. Add water, white sugar and brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature and let simmer.
2. Place the bottom crust in your pan. Fill with apples, mounded slightly. Cover with a lattice work of crust. Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the crust. Pour slowly so that it does not run off.
3. Bake 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Reduce the temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Continue baking for 35 to 45 minutes, until apples are soft.



Apple Crisp

Basically for this I had extra apple pie filling from above but no more crust...so I put the leftover apple pie filling in a dish and topped with the crisp topping. For the topping I threw in a Cuisinart: 1/4 cup pecans, 3 tablespoons cold butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 1/4 cup brown sugar, pinch of salt, and then a splash of nutmeg and cinnamon. Baked at 375 degrees for 40 minutes, then increase temp to 400 and bake for another 5 minutes. Serve warm with ice cream.

Sorry Dave really liked this one.... I'm making another one of these on Thursday so hopefully I can grab a shot before it is devoured.

good friends and fall

This weekend I spent time with lots of good friends - some I havnt seen in a while, others I see all the time. All have been so supportive and kind to our family and I am so grateful to have them as friends.

Sam and Brett are two of those special people that have such big warm hearts. They also have an adorable son who graces several posts on my blog and usually lets us hold him without crying. :) We spent a great morning at the apple orchard picking over 10 pounds of apples (I think it's 10...hoping it wasnt more than 15...geez) and lots of pie pumpkins. They have a great family and it was really good to see them all and spend some time outside.

Here are some sneak peeks from the day!


















He is really excited about his lobster halloween costume. :)