What's Cooking?

I am so excited to be staying home starting next week. Besides being able to take care of Rex all day and spend my time with him, I am looking forward to being able to keep a clean house, always have clean laundry, have time to get all the errands done, bills paid on time (the one item on this list I have made time for), and most of all, cooking and baking. I really enjoy both and have gotten the bug already so I've been cooking up some stuff in the kitchen over the last week. Or it may be the weather change and fall starting to set in that is inspiring me- I made two recipes with apples and the third was a casserole. It has cooled down a lot here in Iowa and the leaves are starting to change on the trees. I love this time of year!

Last weekend, I made an apple pie (from my trusty Good Housekeeping Cookbook)- crusts, filling, all of it from scratch. I have determined I need a pastry blender and will have to pick one up soon. Having to cut in the shortening with the flour using two knives is not a lot of fun. I think there are better recipes for pie crust out there so I will try a different one next time. The filling was excellent though and it looked pretty good too.




I tried a recipe for zucchini and beef casserole out of my new Dream Dinners cookbook. I really liked it but they had you cook it for way too long- thankfully I realized it wouldn't need so long to cook so I shortenend up the time. I will cook it even less next time. And put in less oregano. I used to love going to Dream Dinners and making up meals but they don't have a store near me now. Having the cookbook is probably a much cheaper way to do it anyhow!

I made applesauce cookies from a recipe found in the Parade magazine in the paper this weekend. I couldn't find the recipe on their website but I found one on Allrecipes.com that is almost the same. The only difference was that the one I made called for a cinnamon/sugar mixture to be sprinkled on top before baking. I don't like walnuts so I didn't put those in and I didn't have raisins so I didn't add those. They still turned out really good but I think they would be better with raisins in them.

Nanette just had a post about mini-bundt cakes (they looked delicious) and I'm already feeling the urge to make something else now. Need to go through my cookbooks tonight and find something else to try...