Bonus Post-- Recipes with Applesauce

Because I'm excited to be back posting (hopefully) regularly and because so many of you are still coming back to visit even after my long break, today you get a bonus post!  Even better, it's in the form of food.

I made a pretty interesting dinner today, so I figured I would share the recipe for it.  As I don't have a microwave in my apartment, something I think I referenced in my earlier post on onions and garlic, the next easiest way to cook is using a slow cooker or Crock Pot, where I can just throw things in and leave it.

Here's a preview of what today's recipe made, with my awesome Eeyore cookie jar in the background.

Chicken and Applesauce

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts, halved

2 cups applesauce

1/4 cup barbecue sauce

2 tsp. honey

1/2 tsp. lemon juice

The recipe I used also called for 1/2 tsp. of poultry seasoning, which I don't have.  Instead, I used 1/2 tsp. of thyme and 1/4 tsp of parsley.

Steps

First, season the chicken with salt and pepper, then brown in oil for five minutes per side.  Then remove it from the pan, cut it into 1" cubes and move it to the slow cooker.

Mix the rest of the ingredients.  Pour them over the chicken and mix it all well.

Cover and cook on High for 2-3 hours, or until the chicken is tender.  Yum!

I served mine over rice (see below), but it would probably be good over pasta as well or by itself.  I even added carrots and cucumbers on the side.  I feel so healthy!

Of course, then I also did have some of the applesauce cake I made yesterday, which might have ruined it.  Quite delicious though!  Check it out.

I actually can't find the exact recipe I used for it again, but this is the closest approximation.

Applesauce Cake

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup chilled applesauce

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda 

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 

Steps

Cream butter with sugar. Add applesauce; beat well. Stir in flour, soda, and spices. 

Pour the batter into a greased and floured 8 inch square pan. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 40 minutes, or until done. Serve warm. 

Applesauce cake, if frosted, usually has cream cheese frosting or caramel frosting. I didn't have the ingredients for these (you can see this is a trend of sorts with me), so instead, I mixed up something on my own. 

I had some store-bought vanilla frosting, but thought it would be too sweet for this type of cake. So I added to it: 

Ingredients

2 tsps. cinnamon 

Dash of ginger 

Dash of cloves 

2 large spoonfuls of flour (to make it less sweet) 

After mixing these all in, the frosting was less sweet and a bit spicy, making it the perfect topping for a thicker, richer cake like applesauce cake. 

So there's your bonus post for this week.  Let me know how you like these if you try any of them out!

How to Remove Onion/Garlic Smell from Hands

So among other interesting features, like not having a single level surface anywhere, my apartment has no microwave.  Being both poor and cheap, I decided to see if I can get by without buying one, and thus far, it's actually been pretty easy.  One unexpected benefit is that I've been making the time to cook a lot more often, knowing that I won't be able to toss a Hot Pocket in the microwave when I get hungry.  Plus I actually really enjoy cooking.

What I don't enjoy is how, after chopping onions, garlic or other strongly scented ingredients, the smell can stay on your hands for a ridiculously long time.  It reminds me of when I worked at Quiznos and smelled sandwiches all the time.  Thankfully, there are ways to solve this problem, and I'm going to share the best two with you today.

New Apartment!

I am now successfully moved into my new apartment in Ann Arbor!  Hurray!  There are still a few things to sort out, such as having my carpets cleaned because the hot water tank flooded my place the day I moved in, but all in all, I'm close to being settled.

On top of that, I managed to finish a project I had set for myself this summer.  My mother keeps her recipes on index cards in a box, sorted by type, and I've was trying to create a recipe box for myself, copying over all of the ones she has that I'm interested in.

There were two minor problems with this.  First of all, my mother has a lot of recipes, so my hand kept cramping up from copying them over.  Second, copying a recipe isn't much good if you can't follow it.  While I know most cooking terms, one area I do get confused about occasionally is mixing.  There are a lot of different ways to mix ingredients together, usually dependent on what the ingredient is or what effect you want to get.  And mixing incorrectly can really ruin a recipe.  When I was watching "Good Eats" the other day, the host, Alton Brown (one of my favorites, since he's the geek of the Food Network), said that something as simple as stirring muffin batter for too long can ruin its consistency, making the muffins tough and leaving "wormholes" in them when they bake up.