Apple Pear Crisp

Chopped apples and pears from earlier in Dec and frozen.

Cooked it down til it was soft and mushy. Turns out, pears are not so great at being frozen, then cooked, as it gets really mushed. At least apples still hold their shape... Added sugar, butter, and other good stuff... Check out the apple crisp recipe here.

Made the crisp part with grape nut cereal, oats, sugar, n butter.

Wasn't too shabby considering the pear disintegrated. It turned out to be apples in pear sauce sort of crisp, so still tasty! :)

Apple Crisp

Time for an apple crisp! I made it similarly to the Persimmon Apple Crisp and Pear Crisp. So easy!

I used 5 apples. 2 reds, 2 greens and 1 yellow.

The apples are all chopped and added to a pan with a 1/4 cup of butter.

Added a bunch of sugar and spice. More specifically, 2 tbs sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp cloves, and a generous pinch of salt.

Here, the apples are almost done. In a small bowl, I mixed about a 1 tsp of cornstarch with 1/4 cup water and poured it into the liquids and stirred it all up.

For the crisp part on top, I totally cheated. Buahahaha. :o) I had hubby squash 3 of the oats n honey bars. See, it's easy!

Apples are all cooked and deliciously soft. Note, you should taste test your apples every now and then. I didn't want my apple crisp overly sweet so the 2 tbs were just fine for me.

Place the cooked apples in a pie dish. Add the crumbled oats bar on top. Baked in preheated oven of 375 F for 10 minutes just to brown the top.

Ta-da! 

PS: pics were taken from my phone so not the usual quality...

Apple Butter

I finally made apple butter! Sadly, no pictures. :(  But it's awfully similar to the persimmon butter method via slow cooker. Easy peasy. Here's what I used:

5 red apples
4 yellow apples
3 granny smiths
1/4 cup water
1 tbs vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbs cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pumpkin spice
1/2 tsp ground gloves
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Peel, core, quarter and chop all the apples. Place in slow cooker. Add water and vanilla extract. Add in the remaining ingredients. Mix it as best as you can. Cook on high for 4 hours uncovered, stirring at least every hour to ensure it doesn't burn. Once the apples are soft, I used a hand blender and pureed it. Afterwards, it cooked on low heat, uncovered, stirring occasionally. Once thickened, the sauce was canned. Yummy! :D

Persimmon-Apple-Raspberry Crisp

This super yummy dish was made by hubby! I merely assisted him. :o) Hubby watched a Chef John's apple crisp via youtube and then went on to make his persimmon apple and raspberry version.

The above is 6 persimmons, 2 apples and 1/4 cup unsalted butter cooking in a non-stick pan on low to medium heat. Just don't burn the fruits!

The above is made with 1/2 cup melted butter, 1/2 cup flour, 1/4 cup rolled oats, 1/4 cup some kind of granola cereal that included oats, 1/2 cup grapenuts cereal, 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup granulated sugar (PS: you can cut out the granola cereal and simply add more rolled oats.)

Back on the stove, we added 1/3 cup brown sugar, a little bit of water, a pinch of salt and as much cinnamon as my heart desired, which was a lot (our cinnamon powder is pretty old) and let the fruits simmer until softened. I think I also added 1/2 tsp of pumpkin spice too. [We skimped out on the lemon (that's where the raspberries come in) and white sugar because we had no lemons on our tree as it was seriously trimmed back and the fruits were pretty sweet already, respectively].

Here is where I would mix in a handful of raspberries.

Topped with the crisp topping.

Twas baked in a preheated oven of 375°F for 25-30 minutes or until topping is nicely browned.

Super yummy! You definitely need something acidic to cut into the sweetness. Adding the tart raspberries with this crisp made it so much more amazing instead of overly sweet. Mm-mmmm good!!

What to make with Apples??

We spent the weekend with a couple of awesome friends down in SD to check out a few breweries, then check out the apple festival and try out apple picking! But, we still needed dinner and decided to do some homecookin'. We stayed in Saturday night and made pork chops with some kind of apple sauce, baked an apple crisp and pear-apple cobbler and made a swan! :D Needless to say, we had too much fun!

pork chops

husband can cook!

some kind of pork chop sauce made with apples

pork chops and salad

yep, that's an apple swan as our centerpiece.

Homemade apple crisp 

Homemade pear-apple cobbler

We also bought a pumpkin apple pie from a Julian Cafe Bakery and it was unanimous that the homemade stuff were much more delicious.  I thought I took a picture of that pie, but couldn't find it. Oh wells, not missing much...

Here are close ups of the swan (not made by me)

Takes skills man!