Two friends recently had babies (both big healthy boys 9lb 9oz, and 10 lb 14 oz!) and I signed up to bring them dinners. Wednesday was a marathon of baking – black bean and carrot stew with brown rice for both, beer bread and ginger chew cookies with plum jam filling for one family, and olive oil bread and apple crumble pie for the other (one family had an egg allergy, so i had to make no-egg bread and dessert for them)
 I forgot to soak the beans overnight, so I did a quick soak at 8 am, and was cooking all day until i left to deliver dinners at 5:15pm! Needless to say, the next night I made spaghetti, opened a jar of homemade sauce, and a jar of homemade applesauce, and that was dinner!
SouleMama, Domesticali, Big and Little, Little Faces Looking Up, Rose Garden, Smitten Kitchen, PleasantViewSchoolhouse, and Red Dirt Mother have also been baking yummy things with apples recently. In case you’d like it, here’s my apple pie recipe (makes two 8-inch pies):
Angelas Apple Crumble Pie
2 crust pie dough, rolled out, and put in the pie tins, and returned to the fridge to chill. (I use 2 cups flour, 2/3 cups lard, 1tsp salt, and enough ice water to make a nice dough. You could use butter or shortening to make it veggie or vegan, respectively, but lard makes the flakiest, best crust)
10 granny smith apples, peeled, cored, and sliced thinly
1/3 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar (if apples are less tart, you can reduce this amount)
for the crumble:
1 cup oats
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg (I use Penzey’s East Indian, which is quite strong, so you may want more if you use another brand)
1/8 tsp cloves, ground
1 stick butter, cold, and cut into small cubes
Directions:
Preheat oven to 425 F. Toss the apples with the 1/3 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar. Set aside. In a medium size bowl, combine the oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, spices, and butter, using hands to cut the butter into the mixture until small pea sized pieces.
Divide the apples in half, putting half into each pie shell. Next, divide the crumble mixture in half and packed into the top of each pie. Bake in preheated oven until top is browned and apples are soft, about 40-50 minutes (you may need to cover the crumble with foil at the end to prevent over-browning.)
That sounds absolutely delicious. You’ll have to send us pictures of the new tykes.
Those dinners you made for your friends sound so wonderful…those lucky people. 😉 My family would love it if I made that pie you gave the recipe for.
Yum – I am so making an apple pie this weekend. And the stew.
You’re so kind – this is just the sort of help that’s really needed when you’ve just had a baby 🙂
I’m glad you like the balaclavas – I think it really helps to have matching doll’s hats when you have a child that’s not so keen on keeping their hat on (as so many small children don’t).
You may need to adjust the stitches around the face as this can vary a bit depending on the child – typically I pick up too many first and have to frog back and pick up less, but they’re so quick to knit up it’s never really a problem.
I’m currently making a dress for my daughter (although typically the 4.5mm crochet hook has gone awol since I put it down and I can’t find it anywhere, so need to get a new one so I can finish it) and I will be making a similar dress for her doll. I’ve got so much knitting to do in the next few weeks as it’s her birthday at the end of October, plus we’ve been invited to a Halloween/Samhain party so I need to sort out costumes too (I could do with a few more hours in the day and the energy to use them!)
Love the part pie part crumble combination!
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