A Weekend's Worth of Good Eats

This past weekend I spent some quality time in the kitchen messing around with a couple of recipes that I had really been wanting to try out. I am a faithful reader of the blog Food Loves Writing. As is usually the case, I haven't the foggiest idea how I found Shannalee's blog but I love it. I love how she ties her everyday musings into the food that she prepares. Her writing is creative & it never fails to draw me in.
Shannalee gives restaurant reviews & she does a lot of cooking that is organic, natural, has weird ingredients, is frequently gluten free, & always interesting.
Am I starting to sound like a commercial or a cheerleader?
Anyway, I like to read her stuff & I like to fantasize about making some of her recipes. This past weekend I knocked out two of them!

First of all, let me mention that October 11th was my dad's 60th birthday. We had a backyard hot dog roast to celebrate on Saturday night. I was kind of in a bit of a hurry to get my kitchen experimenting done before the party. Note To Self: NEVER cook in a hurry. Bad things happen. Interesting things happen. I am simply not very good at multitasking in a hurry. Thankfully I did not destroy anything I was making but I did make us way late to the party when I put the macaroni in the oven to bake & then turned the oven off. I know, I'm brilliant.
The first recipe I tried was actually another one of my brilliant moments. I read Shannalee's post about Coconut Flour Cookies & while I was skimming over the post I kept thinking, I want to make these for Dad! My dad loves coconut. He especially loves coconut baked goods. In fact, my mom was going to make him a coconut cake for his party. I personally think that coconut feels like sawdust in your mouth & tastes like suntan lotion, but my opinion is unimportant. I decided to make these cookies for Dad.

Until I started combining the ingredients I was completely unaware that while these cookies have coconut flour & coconut oil in them, they do not in fact have coconut in them. Oops. The bag of coconut that I bought went to live in my parent's pantry.
Here is the finished product. They look burnt to a crisp but they are really just coated in cinnamon & sugar. They were a little different in texture but had a mild kind of nutty flavor. I liked them; they weren't super sweet. They were especially good with coffee.

My second culinary endeavor was to make some homemade Chunky Applesauce. I've wanted to try making applesauce for quite a while but I have hesitated because I didn't want to make a huge batch. All the recipes I had seen required a lot of apples & a canning process. I just felt like that was a little too much for me to attempt. So Shannalee's recipe for applesauce that only required 5 apples was just what I was looking for!

It took a little longer than I thought it would to cook them down. I had to resist my usual impatience that causes me to cook things on heat that is too high which usually results in things burning or boiling over or even melting random things onto my stove top. Impatience is BAD!
First I chunked the cooked apples up with a potato masher. I couldn't get the consistency quite smooth enough so I got out the blender. I was a little worried because I didn't want to liquefy the stuff. Looking at the buttons on my blender do you think that maybe sometimes we just have too many options?? It's just confusing...

The end result was one super yummy bowl of apple saucy goodness. I've been nibbling on it all week. I get a little dish full & then stick it in the microwave until it is all warm. Then I pretend it's apple pie. Without the crust. Which is sometimes just as amazing as the apple filling. But you know, you can't have it all, all of the time. Unless it's Christmas...or your birthday...or Friday because Friday is the beginning of the weekend & therefore very special...