#90 - Bake 50 Things that Aren't Cookies, Pies or Cakes Update

One of my absolute favorite things in the world to eat is baked apples. My mom used to make them for us when we were little kids and she'd make them very very simple. Just sprinkle some cinnamon and butter on them and bake them. Well I decided to get fancy the other day :p My family had come over for the Saints game on Sunday and I had cut up some honeycrisp apples and served them with a bowl of nutella to dip them in (best snack ever) but had lots of left over apple slices! I also had a bosc pear that I had been meaning to try.

So I decided to peel the pear and peel the remaining apples and bake them. And then get a little bit more fancy :P First, I heated my oven to 350 and melted about a half stick of butter in the bottom of a glass dish while I was peeling everything. Once that was melted, I mixed 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of white sugar and a splash of vanilla extract in with the butter to make a caramel base that would cook into a liquid and laid the apples and pears on top of that and let them cook on top of that for 30 minutes, then flipped everything over and let them cook for 30 more minutes until all of the fruit was soft. They came out looking like this:

I took the fruit out of the dish and put it into it's own dish:

Already looks yummy, right? But that wasn't good enough for me :p I was left with all of this yummy caramel-y goodness that had liquified in the glass dish. So I put that in a saucepot on the stove, threw in about 6 or 7 cloves and about 4 tablespoons of almond milk and brought it to a boil, constantly stirring it to reduce it...I cooked it I guess for about 5 minutes. In the end it looked like this:

I poured all that back over the fruit:

Then put some in a bowl and to make it extra yummy, I put some cold sweet vanilla almond milk on top of it. It basically tasted like melted vanilla ice cream making it taste like a perfect pie a la mode! This was SO GOOD!!!!! Good way to start off this goal ;)

#88 - Experience 50 Different Fruits Updates

Guess what? I've never cut a kiwi and eaten it fresh before! Here's a good example of my intentions behind this goal. It's not so much to only eat fruit that I've never had before, but also to truly savor and experience different fruits that I've never truly appreciated. I know I've tasted kiwi in a fruit salad or on a cake, but if you asked me to tell you specifically what kiwi tasted like or if I closed my eyes and blind tasted kiwi, I couldn't really tell you what it was. So I bought a kiwi and cut it up myself and tasted it :) They're odd little fruits aren't they? All fuzzy on the outside and then FULL of seeds on the inside. But they are SO gorgeous when they're cut up!

I have to say that this has by far been my favorite of the fruit goal so far!!! This was absolutely divine and the entire kiwi was gone in probably a matter of 15 seconds. I probably sounded like I was having an orgasm in my kitchen eating this thing :p There were lots of "mmmmms" It has a deliciously lime like flavor without being sour...perfectly sweet..and I love the crunchiness of the seeds too. I could do some damage with some kiwis!

I also had a bosc pear this week which I've never had before. I usually eat bartlett pears..you know the green ones. But I've never had these bosc pears before. They're super hard and look like a potato! I'll tell you what I did with it in the next post ;) I'll tell you now that it was freaking amazing. So two more fruits added to the list!