Praline Apple Pie

My new favorite apple pie ever~

Double pie crust of your choice
5-6 sliced
4 T flour
2 T lemon juice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
3/4 C sugar
6 T butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

Praline Topping:
1/2 C firmly packed brown sugar
3/4 C chopped pecan
2 T cream

Combine apples with dry ingredients, toss lightly. Put in pie shell and dot with 2 T butter and sprinkle with lemon juice. Top with other half of pie shell and cut a few steam vents. Bake at 400 degrees for 55 minutes. After baking melt remaining butter in sauce pan, stir in cream and brown sugar. Heat to boiling. Remove from heat and stir in pecans. Spread over pie and bake for 5 minutes.

Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream!

Kitchen Help Has Arrived

This is Ally, my beautiful kitchen help. These are pictures from last summer and winter, and believe it or not she is even prettier now.

Here are some pictures of our canning project. Piles of peaches got canned, and barrels and barrels of carrots were this weekends project. We used up another four boxes of peaches, and the few left over were put into the Deep Dish Peach Custard Pie (recipe in the previous post).

All two whole rows of carrots that were planted wound up yielding 36 quarts when it was all said and done. That isn't counting all the ones that got eaten by our help while they were washing and peeling them!

Deep Dish Peach Custard Pie

In the search for recipes to try using all the things we have canned, I stumbled upon this one~ and it is wonderful!

1 Unbaked deep dish pie crust
3 1/2 Cups peaches
1 Can Sweetened Condensed Milk
2 Eggs
1/4 C Butter
2 tsp Lemon Juice
1/2 tsp Cinnamon
Pinch Nutmeg

Topping~
1/3 C Packed Brown Sugar
1/3 C Flour
1/3 C Oatmeal
2 Tbs Butter
(combine till mixture resembles coarse crumbs)


Arrange peaches in pie shell. Combine remaining ingredients in large mixing bowl until smooth. Pour over peaches.

Bake at 425 for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with topping. Reduce heat to 350 and bake for an additional 55-60 minutes.

This is great with homemade peach ice cream!

Yummy Fall Cake

A simple and tasty dessert is always welcome in my home, so I thought I would pass this along.

Zucchini Cake

2 C Sugar
4 Eggs
1/2 C Oil
2 tsp Cinnamon (I like to use some Chai spice too~ its a great addition to most autumn recipe's!)
1 tsp Vanilla
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Salt
2 1/2 C Flour
2 C Grated Zucchini

Beat first eight ingredients together well. Add flour and zucchini slowly.
Bake in 9x13 greased pan at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

I like cream cheese frosting on almost everything, and this is no exception. A very rough guesstimate as to the recipe I use for the frosting goes a bit like this~

8 oz Cream Cheese- softened
3/4 lb Powered Sugar (you can use more or less depending on the consistency you like)
1/4 C Butter
1-2 Tbs Milk

Mix well, and don't follow the rule about letting your cake cool before you frost it~ this one is delicious when the frosting melts a bit on it!
Another option is to add about 2/3 Cup Cocoa powder, and/or chocolate chips/walnuts.

I've made a slightly healthier version of this quite often too, and it is very yummy as well. Rather than white flour I use whole wheat, so long as you can find a fine grind(it gets a very gritty texture if it is coarse) and splenda rather than sugar. Grape seed oil is a good substitute for vegetable oil too, although a bit more expensive. So far I haven't found a decent substitute for the eggs, but if anyone has suggestions as to how to alter this I would be more than happy to try it and let you know how it turned out!

One of the best smells of the year, apple pie. Or apple butter, apple sauce, apple crisp, apple cider, apple anything really. Thanks to the wonderful folks who bring their apples up from Colorado, we have apple EVERYTHING canned! I think the whole neighborhood has been smelling them. When you can enough of anything for it to be enough for two families, one of which has five kids, it takes a lot of food. And when there is that much to be done, even the BBQ gets used to cook apples. This results in random neighbors stopping in to check out where that smell is coming from and see if there are leftovers. At least we aren't having people call the fire department...

Credit for such flattering photos needs to be given to DezerRey's husband Kent, who seems to have a knack for catching us at our best..... 

You Just Canned Beet Good Help

As promised, here are the beets! We had lots of help picking, and prepping them! It was a learning experience, to say the least. If you ask me what the most important rule is, 1-above all, DO NOT wear clothes you like when canning beets!!!! They WILL wind up pink.