#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!

#98 - Bake 50 Cakes Update

The Beekman Boys released a new cookbook! A cookbook that's nothing but desserts.....dangerous....It's the Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook and it had plenty of things that I wanted to try, but the first was this one, a lemon and orange olive oil poundcake with a lemon glaze. Sounds nice and healthy, right :p What I really loved about this recipe is the simplicity and the naturalness of it. The cake is just cake flour, sugar, eggs, olive oil, lemon and orange zest and fresh squeezed lemon and orange juice...not lemon and orange "flavoring". The real stuff! And the icing is just confectioners sugar mixed lemon juice.

The recipe calls for an entire cup of olive oil! So I knew that with all of that oil mixed with 4 eggs, it was going to be quite a moist cake! Not to mention, quite a heartburn making cake, which I can testify, it is :p But when I cut the first slice....so beautiful just how moist it was!

And then of course came the taste test. I was worried that with all of that lemon juice it would be too tart. I tasted the glaze by itself and it was REALLY tart! But when you spoon the glaze over the cake, you end up with most of it on the parchment paper underneath the cooling rack :p But it adds a nice hard glaze on top that is fairly tart, but it's PERFECTLY balanced with the cake that's not overly sweet, but perfectly moist and just oh. so. good. Seriously I love this cake and it's going to take all of my willpower to limit myself to one piece a day....I think I'm going to have to bring half of this to my mom :p

#106 - Try 40 Different Artisinal Cheeses Update

This cheese comes from Whole Foods and it's called 6 Month Maine Cheddar Pineland Farms. I can tell you now that there probably won't be a bad review in these 40 cheeses :p I've yet to meet a cheese that I didn't like. Well that's not entirely true....I don't like blue cheese and I don't like brie...but then again, you won't see me buying those to write about on here ;)

One of the things I LOVE about Whole Foods is their cheese department...yes DEPARTMENT. They have literally hundreds of cheeses. I like really sharp cheeses. The sharper the better really and this is a pretty sharp cheese. They always have samples out too, so if I take a sample of a cheese that I like, I usually end up buying a small block of it :p And that's what I did with this one.

This cheddar was just PERFECT! Very sharp and aged perfectly and fairly soft too which I like. I don't like really hard cheeses. This was just creamy and yum yum yum. How cool would it be to get to visit these dairy farms too?? Maybe I should make it a goal to visit some of these places :p I could see Pineland farms! Anyway...this is one I can see myself buying again. There are a handful of cheeses I've bought from Whole Foods over the years that I go back to every now and then and this is one I would add to that list.

#88 - Experience 50 Different Fruits - Two Updates!

This goal is just fun. I've found that whenever I go to the grocery now, I have to stop myself from buying too much produce, because I know it'll all end up going bad if I buy EVERYTHING that I haven't tried before...or at least everything I've never really properly paid attention to in the fruit department. Two updates here...one a total failure and one a huge success....well mostly a success.

The first one is muscadine grapes. These make me think of Matt actually. His grandfather grows them on his farm and he used to talk about them all the time, but I've never had this type of grape before and saw them for sale. The first thing I noticed was how BEAUTIFUL these are! The picture doesn't quite do them justice but they have an almost metallic sheen to them. They look like little golden orbs. Ok...well not so little, they're actually huge. That's the other thing you can't tell in the picture. Some of those grapes are as big as ping pong balls! I couldn't get over the size of them!!! I was super excited about trying these because I love grapes and imagined a big, juicy, super sweet grape.

I got home and rinsed them off and bit into one.....and spit it out immediately. They have an EXTREMELY thick skin and seeds in them too! Two things I didn't know so it freaked me out at first and I instictively just spit it out :p So I tried again...this time, I peeled the skin off the grape (it really is THAT thick) and took out the THREE seeds in the one grape. And it was just gross. Which was really sad. I can't even imagine a grape that doesn't taste good and I can't even describe the taste of these really. Obviously some people love them, but not me....I had to drink lemonade just to get the taste out of my mouth. The best way I can describe the taste is sort of melon-y (and I hate melon) and very "plant-y"...like you're eating chlorophyll. Oh well...we can't love them all.

Next up was a guava! Which I found at walmart believe it or not. Who ever thought that Walmart would carry tropical fruits! They had a tag for "starfruit" too, but sadly, they didn't have any in stock...but I'd definitely like to try out a starfruit whatever the hell that is :p I believe they have them in Kingdom Hearts the video game :p Anyway, this is what a guava looks like from the outside. I had no clue how to eat it, what to expect or anything. So I looked it up. Some people said just to eat it like an apple! And others said no, don't eat the skin. So I decided to cut it up like an apple and then cut the flesh from the skin. This is what it looks like when you cut it in half:

Isn't that gorgeous? It smelled so good too! Very nectary and very sweet. I cut it into triangles just like an apple, and then cut the skin off the bottoms and I ended up with this:

People who say to eat it like an apple are nuts! They say to eat the seeds and everything.  The seeds are hard as pebbles. I ended up having to cut the sections with seeds away too which left me with very little fruit sadly. I probably could've either blended the part of the fruit with the seeds in a food processor or just strained it and gotten some really good and sweet nectar, but I tossed it. The fruit that I ended up with was DELICIOUS!!! This was a really nice surprise. I was just sad there was so little of it. I honestly have nothing to compare it to. It was perfectly sweet and very nectar like actually....It's a pretty soft fruit and just...yum yum yum!! This would be so good served ice cold on a hot day. Definitely one I'd like to try again. Might look up some recipes or try to find something else I can do with it. I know there are some popular Mexican drinks made with Guava.