Baked Apples, Book review links and Plans for July

First off, welcome and thank you to Ivy at Simply Beautiful and Healthy Living for becoming a follower of my site!

Hello family and friends. What interesting things have you been doing, eating, drinking and/or reading in your part of the world? Staying cool, planning vacations?

I have been reading a little more lately...a fine balance of fitting it in before dinner and a glass of wine or two, or later in the evening before bed. Having roughly 10 days off for vacation allowed me to get quite a bit more book time in as I didn't have to adhere to a schedule. Other than the dog's meds that is....otherwise, we did quite a bit of chillin' out!

My last book was How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher (For a review click on title)


This is the current book on the reading list at Cook the Books. Great read, even if it was printed waaay back in the 1940s. Of all the intriguing recipes in her book I will settle on baked apples. Growing up we had several apple trees which bordered our garden. My mother, an ingenious cook who made miracles with meager supplies, would use the fruit so many different ways. She made our applesauce, apple tarts, pies, roasted apples with pork and of course….baked apples. My father slathered the baked apples with way too much vanilla ice cream.




Baked apples

Apples…almost any kind, although Delicious are delicious.
Brown sugar (1 TB for each apple)
Cinnamon, nutmeg
Raisins, dates, leftover jam butter
water

“Core the apples, and put in a baking dish. Fill each hole with the fruit or jam, and put a dab of butter on top if you want to. Mix the sugar with enough water to fill the baking dish almost to the top, and bake slowly until the apples are tender.”

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A few other reviews I posted are The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Hills of Tuscany, both of which I added to my reading challenge at Goodreads as well as getting me in the mood for reading about foreign terrains again. Hey, it's a cheap way to travel and has me experimenting in the kitchen a bit more.

Beautiful Italian Countryside....would love to see this one day.....



Now I am gearing up for the humid scorching weather for July, planning some cooler meals and utilizing the grill and slow cooker more. As we speak I have a very large bowl of lemons I scored at Costco. Before they go bad I plan to make lemonade (all natural, no high fructose corn syrup for me), Lemon Posset and a Lemon Chicken with balsamic onions. Vodka Collins would be good too (Doug would use Sapphire gin in his).

Soon I will have some photos to share of us at the range as well as weekend outings in search of seafood. Can’t wait for the oyster months to arrive for fat, juicy salty oysters. Mmmmmmm………

I hope you all are enjoying summer and using lots of sunscreen!