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It's applesauce time and this recipe cooks up fast and with only four ingredients! RECIPE: FOUR INGREDIENT APPLESAUCE  6 Fuji apples, peeled, cored and cubed.  1/2 cup sugar 1 tbsp cinnamon  1/2 cup orange juice  Put all of the ingredients together in a medium sized Dut ch oven.  Cook on high until the orange juice begins to bubble.  Turn now the heat to medium, cover, and let cook for 30 minutes or until the apples are soft.   Take off the heat.   Blend with an immersion blender until creamy.   Makes approximately four cups.  

Making your own Christmas wreath.  It is definitely a tradition on the Pacific Northwest island where I live and surprisingly easy to do because the local nursery allows people to use their wreath making machines.  They even let you bring your own greens from home.  Just as long as you purchase their wire wreath forms.  For my family and I, making a wreath is a two-day process.  Day 1 involves a hike into the woods near our home to find pine branches that have fallen to the ground.  Considering how many wind storms we have by December, there is always plenty to glean from the forest floor.  We quickly fill up our blue IKEA bags and head home.  Day 2 involves a trip to the wreath making machine.  My son and I use clippers to fashion small little bouquets of varied greens, including pine and cedar and sometimes berries and rose hips.  This year, we had some eucalyptus to add a Southern Hemisphere touch to our holidays.   Each bouquet gets placed carefully between the two p

Happy Thanksgiving!  I am no Day 3 of my attempt to make sure that none of this wacky fruit goes to waste.  It is a Buddha's Hand Citron, a citrus fruit with finger-like tentacles, no juice, and lots of rind to zest.  It also smells amazing! My son and I cut it crosswise so that some of the layers would be shaped like flowers and we blanched them to take out some of the bitterness.  We tried to candy layers but that didn't work as well as we wanted it to because we couldn't seem to get the layers dry enough.  I would try using a food dehydrator next time. So I've been attempting to come up with creative ways to fully use this rare fruit. Yesterday, I hit upon dicing the fruit and adding it to cupcakes.  We frosted and decorated them and they looked and tasted gorgeous. It was then that I started to realize that they would also taste amazing as a morning breakfast muffin with a lemon glaze and a slide of Buddha's Hand on the top.  See the recipe below!

This cupcake is hiding a hidden flavor! Last Monday, my son and I ventured to the grocery store in search of fruit that was new to us.  This is something that his teacher suggested as a part of Thanksgiving.  Five bucks later, we came away with one that I even I hadn't seen before. The Buddha's Hand Citron.  A yellow citrus fruit that doesn't grow as a sphere but as a bunch of finger-like tentacles.  These fruits can either have their fingers closed as if they are praying or splayed open.   We had to figure out what to do with it once we got it home and soon discovered that it has uses as a flavoring in salads and desserts.  When we cut into it, we also learned that it had the most amazing lemony fragrance.    I have been challenging myself to find uses for it, because a fruit this beautiful (and pricey!) should not go to waste.  Today's challenge was to see how they worked in a cupcake recipe.   RECIPE: Buddha's Hand Citron Cupcakes

My son's fourth grade teacher sent him on a mission... to the local produce section.  She had explained to the class that grocery stores will often stock up on different and interesting fruit during the days before Thanksgiving and that the best day to shop would definitely be Monday.   So, in spite of the fact that I really don't have much of a voice, we just had to get going!  This is what we took home with us.  Yellow tentacles reaching in all different directions, small and bumpy.  But with a really pleasing lemony smell.  It looked innocent enough. This was my introduction to the Buddha's Hand, a special kind of citrus fruit that is valued not only for its appearance but also for its sweet and flavorful rind.   Of course we didn't bother to Google what we could do with it until we actually had it home and were busy observing it on the counter.   We learned that our Buddha's Hand version was considered to be the open type, with fingers splayed in

I am not trying to sound posh when I say that my family and I use cloth napkins for our everyday meals.  Personally, I was raised to pull a few pieces off of the paper towel roll, fold them in half and call it good.  But now that we've gotten into this habit of using cloth napkins nightly, I don't think that we are going to go back.  It definitely elevates family dinner just a bit. Everyday dinner napkins. Admittedly, it adds to the laundry pile at the end of the day and we have worn out several sets of napkins by this time. Which means that I get the chance to make more.  Especially when I have some remnant fabric lying around. Everyday cloth napkins are really easy to make, especially if you don't plan on stressing too much about the hems and the corners.  Here is a step-step guide for how to make my "No Stress" Everyday Cloth Napkins. This method allows you to keep sewing as you turn the corners of your fabric, making this one of the quickest met