Apples on Etsy

This week has been really uneventful, so instead of any letter describing the week, let me present to you my best apple related finds on Etsy.

1. This reversible tote is so cute! I love the color combination of the strap together with the square patterned fabric and the apple fabric. 

2. I love dresses and this apple patterned dress in happy colors would be a perfect fit for me! Too bad the size isn't the right one. 

3. Who doesn't love cute buttons? There are adorable! I just need to make some baby clothes to put them on. And a baby to make them for. 

4. Packing your lunch and bring to work is a great way to save money. And with these reusable sandwich and snack bags you can also be environmentally friendly at the same time! 

5. A great apron is something everyone needs. This apron in automny colors would be awesome to wear as I welcome my guests to our Thanksgiving dinner. 

6. I myself am an Android and not an Apple girl, but I'm pretty sure this iPad Mini sleeve will work just as well with my Samsung Galaxy 7.0

7. If you love apples so much you want to wear them, this is the dress for you! I think there was even a green version of it if that's more your color. 

8. What about a vintage apple crate label? 

9. There are so many different apple necklaces on Etsy, but this one with a branch and falling apples caught my attention! 

Apple sauce

So what to do when you have a large amount of apples? I guess making apple sauce is one of the obvious answers. Since I've never made apple sauce before, Google was as always the answer to my prayers and I ended up using this recipe as a starting point for my own sauce.



I love how the recipe calls for "4 large cooking apples". What is large? What is cooking apples? So my own adaption of it was:

4 liters of apple chunks (peeled and cored)
300 grams sugar
18 cloves
Juice of 1 lemon
6-7 tbsp water
200 grams butter


Cutting and peeling apples is definitely not my favorite part, especially not when the apples are small and many, but after what felt like peeling a gazillion apples I had finally filled my big pot.

This is what 4 liters of peeled apples look like. 

And then I just threw in the sugar, cloves and water. And squeezed the lemon over it before I put it over medium heat on the stove.

Yep, here it is on the stove. Still looks pretty much like just 4 liters of peeled apples. 

I didn't really know what to expect when cooking the apples. The recipe didn't say much about how much time I should cook them, and then it said that I would have to mash when they had become soft. I discovered quite soon that the apples seemed to be mashing themselves while cooking, so I just left the pot simmering on the stove while occasionally stirring and observing that more and more of the apples disintegrated and became sauce.

Getting saucier and saucier by the minute.

When most of the apple chunks had become mashed, I started fishing out the cloves (this is the point where you are glad you counted the number of cloves you threw in, that way you know when you've found them all). I also took a fork and mashed some of the bigger chunks.

Now it really starts to look like apple sauce.

When the sauce was more or less chunk free (not perfectly so since I didn't run it through a food processor or blender) I added the butter. At this point I had turned the heat down to low, but the sauce was still cooking.

Yes, apple sauce is delicious, but not necessarily a diet product even when
you make it yourself. 

I was surprised at how the butter changed the sauce. I thought it already tasted good and had a nice, saucy consistency, but the butter made both the taste and the consistency so much smoother! If you feel that your apple sauce is too tart, I would recommend you to wait adding more sugar until after you have added the butter. The butter might give the sauce the right amount of sweetness.

5 boxes for us, one box for my nice neighbor who gave us the apples. 

My 4 liters of apples turned into to around 2 liters of apple sauce. We will have some of it with our dinner tonight (pork sirloin) and the rest I will freeze. I'm already thinking about making a second batch of it because it was so easy to make, and it turned out really great!

Apple pie

I have said it before, and I say it again: I'm not much of a baker. However, I guess it is inevitable to make an apple pie when you get such wonderful apples from your neighbor.

Google is my best friend in moments like this, and this recipe sounded wonderful. I read some of the comments about it before starting to make it, so I decided on adding 1tbsp corn flour and some cinnamon. I love how well cinnamon works together with apples.

I made two small to share with my neighbor and one big for my husband and me.
I also chose to buy pie crust this time, since I had so much trouble the last. 

The recipe didn't call for it, but the ones who remember my troubles with the blueberry pie might understand that I chose to pre-bake the pie crust before adding the filling.

I wanted the apples completely covered with the batter, so I mixed them in with it
instead of pouring the batter over them. 

I poured the apples and the batter over the crusts and made some kind of square pattern with the rest of the pie dough. It was a little bit difficult since the pie dough I bough was round while the thing I use as a pie tin is square (and strictly speaking not a tin either).

Yea, I admit it, I have some problems cutting even strips. 

The pies baked for an hour and just started to smell better and better and better. 5 minutes before they were done, I took them out and sprinkled them with a little bit of sugar mixed with cinnamon before I put them back in again for the last 5 minutes.

Since the strips weren't connected to the crust beneath, they now
lie like a too small blanket on top of the pie. 

The batter consisted of butter, sugar, a little bit of water, a little bit of all purpose flour and a little bit of  corn starch. I have no idea how that batter is supposed to become solid, and it absolutely didn't.

It tasted much better than it looked! 

In a way it was the blueberry pie all over again - it looked like a mess, but tasted heavenly! And was perfect together with a glass of saft.

But seriously, has anyone a suggestion for a pie that is so easy to bake that even I can do it perfectly? 

Meatless Monday #5: Roasted vegetables with apples

Today's Meatless Monday is heavily inspired by my favorite blogger, The Glamorous Librarian. It is just simply roasted vegetables with apples, olive oil and some spices.

I have a serious hang up on apples since my neighbor has a garden filled with an excellent variety of them. I know the most usual way of using apples in cooking, is making apple sauce. I will also do that, but this time I just wanted big chunks of warm, tasty apples.

I chopped up good sized chunks of apples, carrots, onions and celery root, threw them in a casserole dish together with some olive oil, salt, pepper and rosemary.

I love the automny colors! 

I would have loved to have grown my own herbs, but I'm not capable of keeping a cactus alive so I'll have to practice a lot before that will be reality. So for now I have to settle with the dried, store bought spices.

I let the veggies bake in the oven for around 45 minutes on 200C (400F) and it turned out great!

Here they are just out of the oven. 

This is another example to show that cooking doesn't have to be complicated in order to be delicious!

I of course made far too much for us, so we had the leftovers as a side later in the week.

Red apples

I have an elderly neighbor with several large apple trees in his garden. I've been looking at the apples and thinking what a shame that they just hang there to rot. So the other day I just went over to him and suggested that I could help him pick the apples in exchange for keeping some of them myself. He just laughed at me and said that he didn't want any of the apples, but that I could pick as many as I wanted for myself.

I picked a bucket full and was so sad that I had to leave the rest, but there is a limit as to how many apples I need and have space to store. The tree was so full of apples I couldn't even see that I had taken many of them.

I have a pair of red rain boots for garden work, my high heeled ones are for
rainy city days. 

My neighbor said he didn't want any apples for himself, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't object to an apple pie made from them, so I made him one and invited myself over for coffee and cake.

There are so many elderly people living in big houses with big gardens filled with fruit and berries. Look around your neighborhood and see if you can help anyone picking them. I am sure that will be of great help for the ones no longer able to pick their fruit and berries themselves, and you get some for yourself that you can do any number of exciting things with!

On Tuesday I showed you how to make saft with redcurrants from my Grandmother's garden, next week will be filled with posts about what I've done with the apples from my neighbor's garden.

Color my September #5

Wonderful, sweet, red apples. 

Color my September #1

Color my September #2

Color my September #3

Color my September #4