Archive for October, 2010

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these are a few of our favorite things

October 24, 2010

Time to bake for the shelter again.  I was trying to focus on maple, but my brain kept getting distracted by the pile of pumpkins that was slowly growing on the dining room table, waiting to be put up for the winter.  Maple.  Pumpkin.  Maple.  Pumpkin.  Hmm.  Determined to ignore the gourds, I pulled out the maple syrup cookbook.  Yes, she has one.  We’ve discussed her addiction before.   Anyway.

We first spotted the Maple Syrup Cookbook by Ken Haedrich last year while we were poking around a bookstore in Vermont.  It contains many delightful recipes for everything from maple butter to maple coffee cake to crispy maple spare ribs.  Yum.  Not wanting to make yet another impulse cookbook purchase, mrslovey took a picture of it and kept browsing.  We figured we’d put it on a wish list when we got home, and decide at a later date if we really wanted it.  Fast forward a year or so, and we’re in a different bookstore, different town, in Vermont.  Suddenly from halfway across the store I hear “This is the one!”  Confused, I hurry over to mrslovey, to see her with cookbook in hand.  She’s convinced that it’s the same one she wanted a year earlier, but to be honest, I’m skeptical.  You’re going to remember this glanced at and passed by item for that long?  Eager to prove me wrong, she pulls out her phone, skims through the photos, and I’ll be damned, it’s the same book.  Since we’ve now encountered and been interested in it twice, we decided it was a safe buy. Read the rest of this entry ?

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muffin remix

October 18, 2010

A few weeks ago I found a recipe for apple cheddar muffins that looked fairly promising, but ended up falling flat.  Way too much baking powder, really bland apples, and you could barely tell there was cheese involved.  I knew they had potential, I just had to figure out what their secret desire was.  What did these muffins want to *be* when they grew up?   Read the rest of this entry ?

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October – maple & apples

October 4, 2010

Ok, the September thing was a horrific crash and burn, sorry.  Life dealt us quite a handful on several fronts, and it was all we could do to take a deep breath and keep moving to the end of the month.  The recipes that didn’t get made won’t be forgotten, I’ll work on incorporating them into future months.

But October!  Oh, October!  It’s autumn in New England, such a spectacular time!  The air is cooling down, the leaves are starting to turn, and everywhere you look there’s an amazing bounty of glorious fall produce.  We’ve been spoiled by our local orchard, and now eat apples like maniacs for a couple of months, and then not so much the rest of the year.  That plus a day trip to Vermont led to an obvious conclusion for October’s theme.  Well, obvious, but we each had a different idea.  I thought it would be apples, no questions asked.  Mrslovey was equally adamant about maple.  Even though I tried to deter her by pointing out that maple is technically a spring crop, I decided to compromise since she does all my dishes.

So I give you, glorious October, recipes that feature apples, or maple, or a combination of the two.  And seeing as I have forty pounds of apples in my garage and a full gallon of grade B syrup in the pantry, I’m hoping like hell to generate a respectable number of posts for this month.