I got to play with my new popover pan this morning!
Hot Baked Apple
Popovers
The recipe in the cookbook for Hot Baked Apples wasn't very detailed. It tells me to bake the fruit in a moderate oven (350-375 degrees F), but doesn't tell me how long to bake it:
Sour apples cook more quickly than sweet ones, and summer or fall apples take less time to cook than winter apples.
Thank goodness for the internet. Advice like that would've been meaningful for somebody who'd grown up baking apples, but for me --- not so helpful. (Boy, you skip one generation when it comes to passing down traditional knowledge about cookery and the information is practically lost!) Recipes online suggest baking the fruit for 40 to 65 minutes. With a little research, I was able to find out that Braeburn apples - the kind in my fruit bowl - are a winter variety, so I figured one of those would take at least an hour.
I realized the other night that my closet has become a little segregated. The clothes I've hung up in there since I started ironing my clean laundry on Tuesdays are all neatly hanging on one side of the closet. Wrinkle-free, by the way, even after a week in some cases. That still suprises me! I've been so fearful that the wrinkle-free will be contaminated by The Others - all those wrinkled clothes I haven't cleaned since the days when I only ironed things on my way out the door. So they each have their own sides of the closet. And I'm hoping that the wrinkle-free side will just get bigger and bigger until it takes over the whole place someday...
One of the things that's taken me by surprise lately is just how much I like being in my own home. How much more I genuinely enjoy being here when it's not as messy as it used to be. It's certainly not clean by any stretch of the imagination, but the living room and bedroom are tidy. There aren't dirty dishes all over the kitchen counters and stovetop. My clean clothes are all put away, and the dirty laundry is in its place. There's something about a neat(er) home that makes me want to spend some time here. Fancy that! It's no wonder I always felt kinda antsy at home before this. Who can relax in a messy place?
