Own Your Beauty!

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Cranberry Love

So I finally got a fully functioning laptop! Yeah! I have spent the last 6 months with a laptop that wouldn’t type the letters W, S, A or D.  Understandably this made blogging difficult because it meant I either had to type a post missing all those letters, then go to a webpage and copy and past each letter individually throughout the post (which is probably one of the most annoying things to do EVER!!) or I had to post at school or at work.  And honestly, I found that time was more often used for, you know, school…or work Smile But I got an early Christmas from my Mommy in the form of a fabulous little netbook, the perfect size to toss in my bag to take to school, and with up to 11 hrs of battery life.  So in other words – Tina is connected!!  Hooray!!

My food has been kind of boring lately.  I’ve been penny pinching and trying to stretch my food stamps  since my budget is about $30 a week so I’ve been taking bits and pieces from my pantry and eating the same thing almost all week.  It works though…still doing soup for lunch, been baking fresh bread using the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day recipe, lots of fresh fruit, some string cheese and almonds as snacks.  Hey, it may be basic but it is tasty, homemade and filling.  Can’t knock on that!

I have also been snacking on leftover cranberry sauce I made for Thanksgiving.  It was actually cranberry/apple sauce because when I made it with just the 1 bag of cranberries it didn’t look like very much, so I chopped up 3 apples, cooked them down a bit and mixed it in with the cranberries to bulk it up.  Of course I got to the potluck and someone else had brought a giant kettle of cranberry sauce so mine ended up coming home with me.  Hey, I’m not complaining…it’s good!  I put 1 bag of cranberries in a pot with about 1/2 cup of apple juice, the juice squeezed from 1 orange, the rest of that orange (peels and all), a dash of ginger and 1 cinnamon stick.  While it was simmering on the stove I brewed a cup of very strong Earl Grey tea.  After about 10 minutes I added the tea and then sweetened it up to taste with about 1/4 cup of brown sugar and about 1/8 cup of honey (the sweetening I did all by taste).  Let it all simmer about another 10 minutes and then pulled the orange and cinnamon stick out and put the sauce in a bowl.  Saw that the bowl was only about 1/2 full so I chopped up 3 apples and simmered it in another cup of strong Earl Grey tea for about 10 minutes until the apples were soft.  Added them into the cranberry sauce and refrigerated overnight.  By the morning it was nice and thick, bright red, sweet/tart and all the things I love about homemade cranberry sauce without just being a bowl of cranberry flavored sugar!  And this is what I have been nibbling on all week with lunch.

I have a bag of mixed chocolate/peanut butter chips in my cabinet that are begging to be baked into something…the question is, what?  Yet to be determined…

No comments:

Post a Comment