Penney’s Palate

My applesauce consumption has gone up considerably from 0 a day to 1 a day for the past month or so. I like eating a little something sweet after I eat lunch at work… I quit yogurt cold turkey because I got tired of it, and promptly made the switch to applesauce. One day I am not going to want applesauce, but before that day comes, I thought that I would like to try to make my own. It can’t be that hard right? It has always seemed like a mystery to me, so now we can all unravel the mystery together.

I picked 3 different recipes that I felt represented 3 different ways to make applesauce. Feel free not to use them. I will post my applesauce adventure on March 23rd. To my surprise, all of these recipes seem very simple (I was thinking that applesauce took hours and hours of hovering over a stove). I’m guessing that apple selection is critical to good applesauce.

Microwave Method
Few ingredients with a little sugar for a sweetener
Exotic

I’m curious: How do you go about deciding what to eat for dinner?

Tommy and I have been cooking at home more and more. Sometimes there is no dinner plan until one of us comes home. Other times, I have planned out what to make for dinner every night of the week, and I even go to the grocery store on Saturday or Sunday to pick up the ingredients for at least the first few days of the week (when buying meat, I prefer to buy it the day of, or at most, one day prior to eating).

I used to use only foodtv.com and my Food & Wine magazines for recipe ideas. I don’t like the search feature of foodtv.com, but if you have an idea of what you want, it works pretty well. Tommy and I are always able to find tasty recipes (and some not so tasty) on the website. Lately I feel as if the site has failed us. I haven’t been able to find many recipes that I am interested in making. So last weekend I stumbled across Epicurious. I have known about epicurious for a very long time, but have never made an effort to really poke around the website. I like the site a lot. The three things that I like most about it are: 1. It has recipes that are available from Gourmet and Bon Apetit Magazines, providing a nice alternative to the Food & Wine recipes that I have available. 2. Users can post their own recipes… most of which seam reasonable and easy to sort through. 3. You can review or read reviews of all recipes that are posted. This is the one thing that foodtv.com does not have. I like browsing through the reviews of a recipe to see if there are other things I can add or things I should leave out of the recipe. Are there any other good places to go to look for recipe ideas?