Posted in This week in the Silver lining

Another name for this blog entry is:  Christmas weekend part II.  The day after Christmas, Jesse and I said bye to his mother and pretty much slept a good part of the morning. 

When we did wake up, we were hungry.  We noticed that there were about 10 assorted apples in a basket on our baker's rack.  So we began to think of ways that we could use up the apples, before they went bad.  I looked around for recipes that envolved apple deserts.  I found some great Apple pie recipies.  However, we didn't have all the ingredients. 

We settled at first on making Cinnamon baked apples.  I say:  "at first", because we soon after realized that neither of us knew how to make cinnamon baked apples, and we might have do something different.  This realization sparked my curiosity.  I thought to myself, what a great opportunity to experiment!...How fun!

And so I began to gather up ingredients that 'sounded' good in theory for my baked apples, as Jesse began to slice up the apples.  In doing this, I realized that I had purchased two packs of cream cheese that we normally don't buy just to use.  My wheels began to turn at that point as I asked myself:  What if?

What if, I made a cheesecake, and topped it with the baked cinnamon apples?  Sort of a marriage between apple pie and cheesecake?  Do I have all the ingredients to make cheesecake?  How is cheesecake made?  I knew that I had recipies for cheesecake, but what I didn't have was something to make the crust! 

I looked around again in my refrigerator and to my surprise I saw:  fridge-hardened Oatmeal cookies!   They were so "crunchy" that neither of us had envisioned eating them any time soon.  Again, my wheels began to turn. 

One of the cheesecake recipiees called for using grounded up Graham crackers.  The lightbulb went on right then!  I proceeded to replace the graham crackers from the recipe to the oatmeal cookies I grinded up in my coffee grinder!  (Tip:  coffee grinder works great for making a powdery oatmeal cookie mixture.  Just make sure to break up the cookie first into small little coffee bean sized pieces). 

I baked the apples until all the ingredients were caramelizing and then put them atop the cheesecake in a round about design.  Well, just to let you all know, I have gotten nothing but rave reviews from that Baked Apple Cheesecake pie.  Jesse has even had it for breakfast since then! 

Anyway, we had little meals throughout the whole ordeal so that we'd have room that night for desert!  And to think, that he was so worried about my concoction!  He was really thinking:  "oh, Lyssie, I think you should stick to a recipe.  I don't know how this is going to turn out!" 

Cooking to me is fun!  But only when I have room to experiment!  If it is a scripted recipe, somehow I just don't enjoy it as much.  The great part in all of this is that we were able to use up the apples, and the cheese, and the oatmeal cookies.  That is pretty much the only thing that we did that day.  And the next day we went back into work.  Did any of you experiment with any new recipes this weekend?  (Besides, Jeremy and Elizabeth with their haggis)???

God bless you all,