I don't post many recipes on my blog, primarily because I'm not the most innovative cook around. I'm a follow-the-recipe-precisely kind of gal, except when I'm out of a key ingredient, in which case I'll try to substitute something else, often disastrously. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to share two apple-related Thanksgiving recipes that I look forward to all year long!
Because my parents always had two apple trees in the backyard while I was growing up—and I now tend to one of my own—apples often figure in to our fall cooking schedule.
This first recipe is a scrumptious dip Elizabeth Dillow shared with me years ago. It's now a must-make on Thanksgiving, and often Christmas too. Here's a helpful tip: to keep apples from turning brown throughout the day, submerge them in Sprite or 7-Up right after cutting, drain, and place on your serving tray!
The second recipe, for Spinach Salad with Apples and Pomegranate Seeds, is one I patched together from several recipes found on kraftfoods.com last year. This was one instance where a vast series of substitutions was delightful rather than disastrous. I've truly been thinking about this salad all year long. Yummy!
Here's a cute photo of my niece Breanna seeding the pomegranate last year, and trying not to ping red seeds all over the kitchen. (Slippery little suckers.)
About my recipes...
Whenever I deem a new recipe important enough to keep for all eternity, I write the recipe on the lovely recipe cards you see above—always including a short caption about where the recipe came from or why I love it—and slip it into my beloved C.R. Gibson recipe book.
I have several other printed cookbooks, with various extra recipes scribbled in the margins, but this is the book that houses all my favorite, tried-and-true, never-want-to-forget dishes. It has a very scrapbooky feel about it, and I like that. And, I just discovered that there's a matching recipe box. Fun!
About this post's title...
Yes, that's a cliche, and yes it's a grammatical nightmare, and yes I feel just fine about using it. I've got a whole month of cliche fun planned for the future, but in the meantime, I'll share a bit of background about this one:
"How do you like them apples? Meaning: What do you think of that (usually in contrast to something else)? The term probably originated in a comparison of certain apples with others in a marketplace. By the 1930s, it was serving for almost any comparison. In Edward Albee's play, The American Dream (1961), Grandma says to Mrs. Barker: 'They wanted satisfaction; they wanted their money back.' Mrs. Barker responds, 'My, my, my.' Grandma says: 'How do you like them apples?'"
Fun, eh? The source is Dictionary of Cliches: Over 2,000 popular and amusing cliches—their meaning and origins
Now to figure out where "How Now, Brown Cow" came from...
