Preparations

Posted on by Jordan

Hi there!

Instead of posting over the past few days I have found myself working a lot more than expected, and in my free time slowly using up the contents of this picture:

(not pictured, 15 cups of flour large quantities of sugar)

You may be thinking “…but Heather and Jordan are always eating healthy things, and Heather doesn’t even eat sweets”

Right you are my friend! But what you haven’t considered is how much we wanted to create some Christmas traditions for ourselves. The plan is to finish baking several hundred cookies and then invite friends over to help decorate them. Hopefully sending the majority of the finished cookies home with the decorators. (Otherwise I am going have no choice but to eat them, thus feeling sick from too many cookies every day for weeks)

🙂

-Jordan

Skating And Cookies

Posted on by Jordan

It looks like I am just going to have to accept that winter is here.

This past weekend was full of winter activities, starting here:

Look at all those people lined up! You would almost think we started going to trendy places in town or something…

Well, no actually those are all middle school students and you just can’t see the line of min-vans dropping them off. The question remains, what could everyone be lined up to do?

Ice skate:

The rink wasn’t overly large, but it was outside, and downtown making for a fairly cool atmosphere. An atmosphere lessened by the surprisingly young clientele combined with the unrelenting inappropriate “dance” songs being played by the helpful live DJ.  (Then again maybe I am just getting old /sigh )

Heather and I went out to the skate rink with a few of her friends from work. Our little group had a great time, despite the unexpected atmosphere.

Note that we captured the entire city skyline in that picture 🙂

The next morning, we pulled together some cookie recipes and got the ingredients just in time for a friend of Heather’s to come over and bake with her. Six hours later, they had enough cookies to pass out to our entire building, and then some:

That night, we went out for dinner and wrapped up the night driving around some of the Des Moines hot spots for Christmas lights. I worry that we may be peaking early, but I am starting to feel ready for Christmas.

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights all included knocking on doors here at our building to hand out plates of cookies. We tried a similar thing a few years ago, and didn’t meet with much success. I am happy to report that this year nearly everyone we tried was home, and we met some great neighbors!

-Jordan

Pie!

Posted on by Jordan

Yesterday was cake, today is pie, you might think this blog was desert oriented! 🙂

Heather was given some “for baking” apples from somebodies back yard a few weeks ago, and we had said over and over again that we should try making something with them. We never had time over the last two weeks until last night.

I had looked around for a recipe that would come close to being healthy, or at least not loaded with sugar. The best I could come up with was a recipe for “Sugarless Apple Pie,” a recipe that used apple juice concentrate instead of sugar for sweetness. I was a little skeptical, but figured it was worth a try… the worst we could do was ruin some free apples and a little pie crust.

Heather undertook to peel the apples using a “cut them up and then remove the skin” method that I didn’t really think was going to work, but without a peeler I couldn’t say much. It turns out her method actually works really well… faster than my peeling them with a knife and then cutting them up (moral of the story, we need a peeler). Once the apples were cut up, we just followed the recipe for the filling.

The crust came as 2 pie crusts, both in tins. If the directions hadn’t explicitly said you could dump one crust out and use it as a top for your pie I don’t know if I would have figured that out. I guess you can’t be an expert when its your first pie. We did that, but the crust stuck really bad to the foil we thawed it on so it was kind of a mangled mess when we tried to move it onto our pie. We were also worried that, because the picture in the recipe didn’t have a top, we shouldn’t have a top. I wish I would have taken a picture of the pie before we baked it, there were just strips of crust haphazardly tracing across the filling without any symmetry or plan. It was awesome, in a really sad sort of way. 🙂

we baked it setting in the middle of a pizza pan, didn’t use foil to protect the crust, and it came out perfect. I suppose if you tried it right next to another apple pie it might not taste as sweet, but on its own it tasted great and I certainly didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

notes for next time:

  1. Use more nuts
  2. A full top crust would be fine
  3. Get a peeler

-Jordan