Cooking as therapy

The apartment is filled with the scent of apple crisp, and I can tell you it is absolutely intoxicating.

The smell of the apple sauce bubbling away in the slow cooker is pretty nice as well, but there is something special about a crisp.

Sometime tomorrow I'm going to whip up another batch of meatloaf, maybe with apples in it. And later in the week I was thinking of some sort of old fashioned-y apple desert from one of my old cookbooks.

The apple orchard was perfect today, warm and breezy and dry. The apples were cheap and delicious and I picked some for the first time.

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For the potluck party last night I made two things and took one. The first was a bean salad. Really easy and flexible and fun to make. One can Goya pink beans, one can Goya Cannelli (or is that Cannellini?) beans, half cup diced red onion, a carrot diced small, a bit of garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar to taste. Let it sit in the fridge, covered, for at least a couple of hours. Mix well before serving. It's good with fresh corn or a bell pepper diced in it.

The second thing I made was a date cake. I've had a can of date filling for a while and decided to use it. When I opened it up and had a taste, I was disappointed. It was more corn syrup than date in flavour, so I decided to make it into a cake.

I have a basic recipe for both pancakes and muffins/quick breads which I modified from Bakin' without Eggs, which is a good cookbook. I substituted some of the milk with the date mix, and didn't add any sugar. The batter was not quite sweet enough and didn't have much fat, so I mixed melted butter with honey and drizzled it over the top. That gave it a nice buttery taste and sweetened it up as well. That ended up being noshed on by bf and the 8 year old and myself, so we left it home.

The oven timer has just gone off, time to check on my crisp.