Apple Pie Afternoon

Welcome to the past 2 hours of my day...worth every minute.

Apples, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg (aka, fabulousness!)

Homemade 1/2 wheat flour pie crust (aka, a shitload of work!)

Ready for the oven, with an indiscernable ghost cutout to let steam escape...

Done!  With only minimal damage to my oven in the form of sugary apple juice that spilled into the bottom of it...which will provide a nice cloud of black smoke next time I run the oven.  Guess I needed a bigger ghost.  Ta-Da!

The one in which I am bested by onions.

Stockpiling the freezer today...so in case you were curious as to what a gallon of red onions look like, here you go.  And yes, my eyes and sinuses were on fire for an hour, and my kitchen still reeks of an onion-y hell.

Coffee Cake Sugar-splosion

Holy sweetness.  Finally tried a recipe for one-dish coffee cake last weekend that I've had stashed away for years...it's a yeast cake (and you all know my struggles with the yeasty arts), but super simple (mama likey).
It turned out just fine...just way, way too sweet (and you all know that means it's a buttload of sugar, considering my epic sweet tooth...it was so sweet you couldn't even taste the cake-y part.  Sad.).  If I make it again I would cut the amount of cinnamon-brown sugar topping and powdered-sugar icing down by half and add nuts for some crunch.

That's a whole lot of sugar right there folks.

Finished product = diabetic coma!

Baby Lasagna

Mini lasagnas for the freezer....'cause that's what you do when someone has a baby.  "You just endured hours of excruciating pain and will not sleep again for at least a year...but surely this frozen casserole will make it all better!" 


These are for my friend Erica & my sister Rane, whenever Baby Mason and Baby Margo, respectively, decide to make their appearances.  And the third one goes in my freezer for some weeknight where I just don't have the will to cook/live.  So, you know, like, tomorrow.

Sous Chef

My toddler is obsessed with having "tiny muffins" for breakfast nearly every day...and now she is old enough to "help" me make them...

...and eat them (disregard the crazy hair, it was nearly bedtime and I just don't tend to give a rat's ass about tangled hair at that hour of the day).

Eggcellent

Ok, well, in the my excitement for the big Easter dinner, and due to the fact that I was so hungry I couldn't see straight, I failed yet again to take the appropriate pictures of any of the food.  Ham.  Turkey.  Mashed potatoes.  A plethora of sides provided by my siblings.  All beautiful, all delicious, and all devoured posthaste.  So, here you go...

The table setting:

 

Aisling & I in our adorable bunny aprons from Ant's mom (thanks Ronnie, they are too cute!):

Oh Snap!

Annnnd...after a much-too-long hiatus, I'm back!!  And the heavens rejoiced (or something...)
I'm hosting Easter dinner today so I figured it was the perfect time to get back into my food blog...I'll save the full shebang for tomorrow but here's a quick preview of what I worked on yesterday.

Another epic battle with yeast!  But I'm pretty sure I'm kicking its ass.  I made braided egg bread and kolaches (cherry and apricot...attempting to recreate the delicious ones from my childhood - the amazing cooks used to make homemade kolaches in our school cafeteria every so often, delicious!)  I dropped one pan on the floor after the second rising, luckily there were only 5 casualties otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have thrown a tantrum on the floor like my 2.5 year old does.

Hard at work on kolaches:


And, some before-and-after of the final products:

Easter is delightful.  Life is good :)