Apple Fritters

We are Getting Healthy. Tomorrow.

Which means today I made apple fritters.

There is this coffee shop down the street that makes apple fritters so good your mouth falls off your face when you take a bite. And everyone on Pinterest was pinning pictures of droolicious apple fritter bites, so I decided to take a whack at them, even though we're Getting Healthy and even though we don't own any proper frying equipment.

They were... okay. Not as sweet and apple-ly as traditional fritters. They were lumpy, because I wasn't sure what the texture of the batter should be. They got overdone because I couldn't regulate the temperature of my oil very well. The texture was okay and the glaze wasn't right.

The lighting in the kitchen wasn't right when I took the picture, so they kind of look like meatballs with rice poking out of them... or something.

But they were still apple fritters, so we still committed to eating them. We each had like 4? Or 5? They're about the size of quarter gumballs you get in restaurant candy machines. They weren't bad, they just weren't the apple fritters of my dreams. The recipe I followed is here, if you want to try them, though this hasn't exactly been a ringing endorsement. I'll take credit for a lot of the okay-ness of these, because I lack the proper equipment and know-how for this kind of attempt. But despite that, the recipe itself was lacking in apple-ness. If you decide to make this, I'd suggest stewing the apples before putting them in the batter. That should help. I'd also suggest looking around online at a few more recipes to see what other people are including that this recipe is not.

I'll try them again sometime, but definitely only after reading up from someone who knows what they're doing.

Apple Chips - The Simplest Snack

I bought this bag of organic apples the other week, and was all excited to get home and eat one. Back when we lived in a DC suburb, we had access to AMAZING produce via the Silver Spring Farmer's Market. The Gettysburg area is a great region for agriculture, which I did not know before moving DC. Virginia is also a great place to farm (which I did know), which meant that being in the middle of those two places was about as good as life got in terms of a locavore culture. We would regularly come home with bags full of apples the size of my hand.

The problem with apples, though, is that I'm allergic to them. Not deathly allergic to them, but my mouth gets terribly itchy and I spend the next hour or so uncomfortable until my saliva has done its job and washed all the apple pollen out of my mouth. And I somehow always forget this and then buy apples and they don't get eaten. However! I have learned that if I cook the apples before eating them I don't get itchy mouth! Magic.

In our quest to Get Healthy, as I mentioned, we're trying to go healthy in our snack choices. So the other day I came home with a little pouch of Bare Fruit organic apple chips from Target. They were something like $2.99 or $3.99 for a bag of just over 2.5oz. We opened up the bag and were like "Hey! 2.5oz does not a lot of apple chips make!" At this point I remembered those forlorn apples sitting in our refrigerator and decided that it could not possibly be over $1 an ounce worth of difficult to make apple chips.

Once again, this turned out to be ridiculously simple. It can be as simple as one ingredient. I went with three ingredients, but you could make these in a lot of different ways.

Preheat your oven to 225. This is probably the lowest temperature on your oven dial.

If you have a mandoline, great, break it out. If you don't, like I don't, just get a serrated knife and cut yourself nice thin slices of apple. Cut straight through the middle of the apple so you get the pretty star shape. Pop out the seeds into the trash and discard the end pieces.

I did two apples, skins on, and filled a 16x14 cookie sheet with a couple of oddball slices left over. My slices varied in thickness, and most of them weren't perfectly round. That's ok. Your mouth will not know the difference. Conveniently, varied sizes of apple slices also give you varied crunchiness, which adds to the fun.

I sprinkled mine with cinnamon and sugar. Those are the other two ingredients. Some people like just plain ol' apple chips. Some people like cinnamon & sugar or ginger or allspice or whatever. Do your thing. Then put the apple slices into your preheated oven.

Check them every 30 minutes and flip them over. Reading around online, everyone suggested putting them on parchment paper or on a baking rack. Who do I look like, flipping Tyler Florence? I don't own either of those things. I have T-Fal AirBake pans from Target. And I will swear to you that I didn't treat my pan in any way and I had absolutely no sticking issues whatsoever. I suppose the key to this trick is having a light colored pan and being very good about flipping them. But no special equipment was required in the making of these apple chips.

Mine ended up taking about 1 hour and 15-20 minutes to bake. The very thin, small chips came out after about an hour. The thicker ones probably could've stood another 10 minutes-or-so in the oven, but they smelled heavenly and we couldn't wait to eat them.

I would love to tell you if they get any crisper after they've cooled for a while, but I have no idea, because we ate the entire batch that evening. So basically each of us had an apple onto which we'd sprinkled less than a combined 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon & sugar.

Dig in.

How to Make Ballin' Kale Chips

Now that we've got a kid, the desire is upon us to Get Healthy. At 9.5 months, our boy is crawling everywhere, which means we're dashing after him everywhere to stop him from getting into things he shouldn't get into but which we haven't figured out how to babyproof yet. Like All the Books. Where do you put All the Books when you live in an apartment?

But soon he'll be walking, then running, then... And we want to encourage him to be healthy and active and fit. But if we ourselves aren't modeling that behavior, well, good luck to us.

Part of our attempt to Get Healthy is by enjoying healthier snacks. So while I was at Costco the other day, I stumbled upon a 1.5lbs bag of organic mixed baby kale for $4.99. 1.5lbs of kale is roughly the size of my husband's torso or the cat when she's laying like monorail cat or a large throw pillow. Big. And if there's one thing I love about kale, it's that you can turn it into chips.

I went online and found a recipe. 3 ingredients, super simple. Olive oil, sea salt, kale. Then I started reading the comments where a few people noted that they'd used cooking spray in lieu of the olive oil and that they'd turned out great. So for my first batch of kale chips I used olive oil cooking spray and sea salt. They were pretty good! The next batch I tried butter cooking spray and sea salt. They were less good, but still pretty okay. They stayed mushier than the olive oil spray, even after baking them for longer.

For my third batch I used real, legit olive oil and sea salt. I don't know why I let those fools preaching cooking spray talk me out of using real, honest-to-goodness olive oil. Because these kale chips are ballin! They're a tiny bit sweet, they're incredibly crunchy... they're perfect. We just sat down at the table and started chowing. Even the 9.5 month old seems to prefer these kale chips, because he was eating them so quickly that he cut his lip. This seems like something only I'd be able to accomplish, but apparently accident-prone is hereditary.

Now. On to one of the easiest snacks of all time.

Preheat your oven to 350. I've been doing a middle oven rack for these.

Take a dark, metal baking pan with raised edges and cram as much kale on there as you can. Don't worry about having a single layer or anything like that, just give yourself a nice blanket of kale. Mine usually comes up to about an inch or so above the pan's edge. As they cook they're going to shrink considerably.

Now. Olive oil. I put my thumb over the mouth of my organic olive oil so that just a drizzle would come out and gave myself what I would consider to be about a teaspoon or so of olive oil. Start small -- you can always add more later. You want your leaves to have a nice, light coating of oil. The key word is light. Toss your kale around with your hands to ensure that you've got an even distribution of oil all over. Sprinkle with sea salt -- however much to your taste.

Once your oven's good n' hot, put in the chips. I don't know if it's necessary, but I've been pulling them out every five minutes or so to toss them around a bit. You do what you want to do. Depending on how much kale you put on your pan, you'll want to let these bake for about 12-15 minutes. Keep an eye on them, because they can go from crispy to dry, brown horribleness within a minute or two. You'll know they're done when you go to toss them around and find, to your surprise, that they're magically crunchy all of a sudden.

And there you go! Put them in a bowl and eat away. The torso-sized bag of kale at Costco is roughly 6 batches of kale chips. So for $4.99 you're making yourself several days of snacks -- healthy snacks -- for almost no effort. Go! Make kale chips.

I'm Not Sure Which Group He Meant

There's this homeless guy I pass every day, twice a day. Usually he's just sitting there drinking Starbucks (I don't know) and minding his own. But sometimes he's talking to himself. On Monday, he was talking about the film industry.

"No, we're talking about HOLLYWOOD here, man! And you know them Indians are gonna take over and pay me for that! HOLLYWOOD!"

Children of the Corn

Last summer, the hubs and I had a small container garden in the back yard of our rental in Uptown Minneapolis. We grew tomatoes, green peppers, eggplant, banana peppers, broccoli, basil, and oregano. It was lovely.

This summer, we live in a suburb of DC with no balcony and not even a view of grass. Circumstances being what they are, we've enrolled in a CSA. We signed up with Spiral Path Farm, a mom-and-pop certified organic farm about 2 hours from us in Pennsylvania. We payed around $400 for a medium-sized share in the farm and every week we pick up a giant bag of produce from our local farmer's market. The share goes from May until November, and works out to be about $17 per week for our share.

Being a local, organic, small operation, Spiral Path Farm experiences abundance and scarcity -- and as share-holders, we experience that right along with them. We have had an incredible experience every week -- our box overfloweth each Saturday, despite obnoxious heat and a rainfall deficit plaguing a large part of their growing season. The produce is fresh and delicious, bountiful and varied.

The farm is organic, meaning no pesticides. Pest-control is done by birds and other pests, just like it was in our back yard garden last summer. So it comes as no surprise that on occasion we find holes in our lettuce or aphids on our leafy greens. They're part of what happens when nature does its thang. And nature's thang features insects. Lots of them.

So it comes as no surprise that insects find the farm's sweet corn as delicious as we do.

What you see there are three ears of corn that have been nibbled by bugs

(the tiny one never really matured, so I just lopped it off).

What kind of bugs, you ask? Well, let me show you!

The smaller one is a corn earworm. The larger is your standard inchworm.

A baby corn earworm and our friend the inchworm.

The larger corn earworm had by this time scooted off somewhere

in the bag of corn leavings to continue eating.

I believe this was because the corn earworm and the inchworm seemed to be

having some kind fight that involved the two of them biting each other.

Many people would probably be ooked out by finding worms in their corn and toss the ears. But, in a move that will probably surprise no one, I opted to do this instead:

Because here at the Farley house we do not simply throw away perfectly good corn.

I just took the wormy bits off and will proceed to eat the rest of the perfectly good corn.

Now why does this not gross me out one bit? Well, because... honestly because it comforts me to find Children of the Corn. It makes me feel connected to my food. It makes me feel connected to my community. It reminds me that the corn and the worm came from a system that still lets nature do the work, where insects still get to play a role in the growing process. It makes me feel like my food was grown on a farm, not in a warehouse. It reminds me that a family went out onto their land in Pennsylvania and picked this corn, and that their choice to grow and pick this corn has allowed my family to make the choice of leaving the supermarket behind. And it makes me feel like even though I live in a crowded suburb with no grass right now, I will not always be in this right now. It makes me feel like someday I'll be able to get back out into a yard where I can grow my own food and pick my own wormy corn.

And I feel like I'll have a connection with those worms, too -- the same connection I had this morning -- when I got to nod with these worms and say "I know, this corn is so good, right?"

younger at heart

This may shock some of you, but when I was a kid I wasn't exactly the active, sporty type. No, no, it's true! While my compatriots were out playing tee-ball and soccer and tag, I was inside drawing pictures and imagining to myself what it would be like to be a piano phenom. Don't get me wrong -- my imagination also supplied me with visions of being the world's first great female catcher or a tennis superstar, but mostly it supplied me with cartoons and music.

I loved to color on construction paper, which is why this edition of MS Paint drawings are done on yellow backgrounds. Yellow was the closest you could get to white when you'd already colored on all your white pages.

I didn't know this until sometime in early elementary school, but it was while Peg Oman was doing daycare for me that it was brought to my attention that I liked to draw people. And that I liked to draw people whose proportions were all wrong. Their heads were ENORMOUS and they had these teeny, tiny bodies. The MS Paint up there I'm pretty sure doesn't even do it justice... I'm sure the bodies were really more like half that size. But I remember loving to draw hair and mouths, so I'm pretty sure this is why I paid all the attention to their heads and just drew on little bodies really quickly so I could move on to the next face.

"Why bother drawing bodies at all?" you may ask.

Excellent question. Apparently I am hard-wired to be... sick in the head. People HAVE bodies, we can't just go around drawing people WITHOUT bodies because it wouldn't be RIGHT!

But my imagination was always there, right alongside my obsessive side. When I was very young, I remember "inventing" a new symbol. I was so proud of it, and I would fill dozens of pages of construction paper with this symbol... over and over and over again. (This is an example of where imagination and obsessive go hand-in-hand, kind of like Jane Seymour being unable to stop painting what is clearly the female form over and over and over again.)

Imagine my disappointment in third grade when we began to learn cursive and I discovered -- after all that time -- that I'd only managed to invent the capital letter "L."

today my day is...

drama llama

I'm a green

There's a funny thing about being hired to be someone's boss, and it is the following secret: you were kinda thrown into the deep end of the pool, and some of the things you're saying are nothing more than your best guess. Yes, this is true of many jobs, but when you're also someone's boss it adds an extra dimension of danger, because your best guess could turn out to be a great big FAIL, and then you've not only hurt your own reputation but that of your employee. This is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Luckily, I find myself with an awesome staff who are not only solid at their individual jobs but are great at serving as backups for one another. They also have a really great understanding of now they work as individuals and how they work together as a group. One of the ways they came to this conclusion was through a personality test, taken about 9 months ago. Naturally, the first thing they did was insist that I take the test, too.

It turns out I'm a green.




Which means I'm good at being a boss, but not a lot of fun to be around.