Apple Fritters

So, Jon and I are both currently not eating much in the way of carbohydrates or added sugar - just some dietary changes we've decided to try out for the next month or so, since we've been feeling sluggish. Of course, when you have recipe boxes full of cakes and other sugary, carb-y, delicious things, sometimes you have to compromise.

Since these fritters are at least 50% apple each, I decided that it would be OK to make them, and perhaps to snack on one or two (okay, it was three, but let's keep that our little secret).

I was just looking at photos of other apple fritters online, and I definitely sliced mine incorrectly. I cut my apples in to 8ths, but it seems that most people choose to cut the apples in to rounds. Oops. Either way, mine tasted good, the apples still had a little crunch on the inside, and the only thing I would do differently is perhaps add some vanilla to the batter.

You can slice your apples however you choose.

Corn Souffle

The Souffle. If you whisper the word too loudly while one is in the oven, it will fall... Right? Making this souffle worried me; up till now, I had never attempted one before, and no one likes a failed recipe.

I bought the ingredients for this a few weeks ago, truth be told, but I've been steadily coming up with excuses to not bake it. These have ranged from "I had corn yesterday!" and "It's too hot to bake something for so long." to "The puppy is bouncing around too much today, the vibrations will surely make the souffle fall."

Finally, I started to feel guilty about avoiding the recipe, and decided to toughen up and go for it.

So did it rise?

Tillie's Pie Crust

People always seem to think that I will make them pie. I don't know where anyone got this idea from, since I pretty much bake everything but pie on a regular basis. Cookies? Sure, just tell me what type. Brownies? Okay. Cakes? Muffins? Cobblers? Lasagna? Just ask.

Pie? Oh god, are you sure I can't interest you in a nice cobbler instead? Honestly, before this pie, I hadn't even tried to make one in at least 5 years; that's how much of a disaster the previous pie was. Some friends and I decided to make the pie and the crust from scratch- we made a huge mess of the dough, and the filling - ugh, the filling. I know we wanted to make a strawberry rhubarb filling, the type with tapioca balls in it, but rhubarb wasn't in season. Hmm, what to use instead... Oh, I don't know, let's go with... bananas. Strawberry-banana tastes pretty good in smoothies and drinks, so we figured it would be a reasonable pie filling.

It was not delicious. Everything boiled out of the edges of the crust, the sugar burned to the bottom of the oven, somehow the crust was still unbaked, the tapioca was still in little balls, and the whole thing was a disaster. So I don't really like to make pie.

A couple of weeks ago, all of that changed. My boyfriend showed up with a box of strawberries and a few stalks of rhubarb- part of his weekly haul from a local CSA share. A pie was requested. Great.

Luckily for me, I had recently found Tillie's pie crust recipe. I figured that if there was ever a pie crust recipe I could follow, it would be one used by my namesake, my great grandmother. The recipe looked easy enough that even I couldn't mess it up too badly, so I agreed to make the pie.

I found went online to find a recipe for the filling, since I hadn't come across a strawberry rhubarb pie recipe in the boxes, and came across this one. As luck would have it, it didn't involve the dreaded tapioca balls, so I got started right away. It was a good pairing of recipes, and I was rewarded with a flaky golden crust and delicious moist filling.