Apple Crisp

We go to some local farm stands a lot in the fall to stock up on apples. The other week we had a TON that were a little past their prime for eating raw so I decided to make some apple crisp. If you've never been to allrecipes.com, you should! I always find great recipes on there and the reviews are usually pretty helpful. The recipe I found for apple crisp was DELICIOUS! I'll write up the recipe here and link to it as well.

Apple Crisp II (Diane Kester at Allrecipes.com)

*I did not take this picture, I'm a terrible food photographer. It was taken by Jessica at allrecipes.com

Ingredients
10 cups all-purpose apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup water

1 cup quick-cooking oats
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup butter, melted

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degree C).
Place the sliced apples in a 9x13 inch pan. Mix the white sugar, 1 tablespoon flour and ground cinnamon together, and sprinkle over apples. Pour water evenly over all.
Combine the oats, 1 cup flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda and melted butter together. Crumble evenly over the apple mixture.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for about 45 minutes.

Review

Awesome. Delicious. If you like a ton of crumbs, you might want to make extra. I left the recipe as-is because the last thing my thighs need are extra crumb topping and it was still delicious.

Apartment Tour: Dining Room

Our dining room is not really supposed to be a dining room. On the floorplans for the apartments it's actually a den or something. The room is pretty small so if we had a huge dining set, it definitely wouldn't fit. But our dining table is small and it's just a better fit for us to have that space be a dining room, not a den. This room also has a little bit of overflow from the kitchen. We keep our toaster oven on a microwave stand in the corner. We don't have room for it in the kitchen and we needed to keep it somewhere.


Future Plans: We need something up on the walls, definitely. We're also thinking about taking out one of the chairs and pushing the table up against the wall with the window. Then we'll get a small hutch or buffet to put in there to hold some of our overflow dishes from the kitchen.

Design Delimmas: None really. The space is small which poses a bit of a challenge, but really we don't use the space a lot so it's not a big deal.

By the way, those things on the far wall are wall decals. I got a bunch of them for like $1 each at the Christmas Tree Shoppe. I put them up in a few places and they looked great but for some reason in the dining room they kept falling off the wall. Eventualy my cat chewed them up and I had to throw them out.

Apartment Tour: The Living Room

Our living room is big, but narrow and we've been having a hard time trying to figure out where to put the furniture. There is one large wall with the fireplace on it, which is also where we have the tv set up. The opposite wall has a small wall space but is mostly made up of our "snack bar" area. There are two cable jacks in the living room, one on the big wall, one on the small wall. When we had the cable activated, we had it done on the big wall and put the tv there (this was before our furniture had been delivered). Well now you can see it's way to crowded with the furniture arranged the way it is, and the tv looks completely lost on that giant wall.

Future Plans: We have moved the chair over in front of the window and I like it there. We'd like to move the couch to the big wall next to the fire place and move the tv over next to the bar area. I would have done this already except we've hit a snag in the plan. Time Warner Cable only activated the cable jack on the big wall and to have them come and activate the other cable jack so we can move the tv will cost us $50. I'm having a hard time with paying them $50 so we can move the table 5 feet. We are also looking for some art for the walls but are having a hard time finding things we like that we think are also a good size for the space, and are in our budget!

Design Dilemmas: The space is narrow and it's difficult to get the furniture arranged so it's less crowded and the space is more utilized. And while this isn't really a design dilemma, Time Warner Cable is really holding us back here!

Apartment Tour Part 1

I’m going to kick the new blog off with a tour of our new apartment. Each post I’ll do a different room. I’ll upload pictures of what the room looks like right now and describe any future plans or design dilemmas we have.

First up: The Second Bath

I’m starting with the second bath because it’s the room that needs the least help. We are pretty much done in here except for a few pictures or wall hangings and maybe some curtains that we are still looking for. It’s a small bathroom off of our office. We humans don’t actually use it much, we mostly use it as a room for the cats. They have their litterbox and their food bowls in there. Both of our bathrooms have a Blue/White/Tan/Brown beachy design scheme going on (Or at least that’s what we try for).

The bathroom also has a corner shower stall that's to the left of the door. It's impossible to take a picture of because the bathroom is so small. And really, it's just a shower, nothing fancy.

Future Plans: We need to find some pictures or wall hangings but we're having a hard time finding what we're looking for. None of the stores are really carrying beach themed decorations seeing as we're approaching the Holidays. I'm also thinking I'm going to get some curtains or other window covering in here. That window looks pretty bare.

Design Dilemmas: None. But we do have one functional dilemma: There is no place in this bathroom to put our cats' water fountain, right now it's in the office, just outside the bathroom.

The Big Merger

I currently have a few blogs going. One for cooking, one for crafting, one for all of my money saving adventures. I actually rarely update them because it's such a hassle maintaining all of them. I've decided to completely get rid of the cooking and money saving blogs and merge everything into one blog. Except the craft blog, I'm going to keep that one separate for now.

My hope for this blog is that it will become an all-inclusive blog where I can post everything related to my home. We just moved into a new apartment and are still decorating, organizing and trying to "nest".