This was another fun food week.

I am, as I mentioned before, tired of my own food. With few exceptions, I have been eating my own food almost every day since the end of last March.

Oh, sure, some takeout, but it is expensive and not a whole lot better than what I can make at home. Okay, it can be a whole lot better than I can make at home. But before the pandemic, I rarely ate three meals a day, so these days my own food can be caloric, way more caloric, like including chocolate chip cookies I’d frozen warmed up in the microwave.

So this week was nice. My friend Richard Swanson dropped me off some homemade hot dogs; I never knew anyone who tried to make his own hot dogs. I put the hot dogs into a lightly toasted piece of challah and added some Gulden’s mustard. It was really good.

He also made his own mile-high chocolate cake and left a slice of that, too.

Earlier that day, my neighbor and friend, Sue O’Farrell, asked if I liked apple sauce. Who doesn’t like apple sauce? After dinner she also sent warmed apple crumb dessert. That was good, too.

She gave me the recipe for her applesauce. And I found another recipe for baked apples I’d not made. Here they are.

Apple Sauce

From Sue O’Farrell

5 pounds of apples, peeled, cored and cut up

1 cup water

1 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ cups fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Place all the ingredients into a slow cooker and set on high for 4 hours. When it was cooled for about 30 minutes, she used an immersion blender to puree the applesauce. (I do not have a stick blender, so I pureed it in my Ninja when the sauce was cooler.)

Baked Apples

From some magazine, October 2017

Serves 4

4 small honeycrisp apples, cored and seeded, bottom intact

4 tablespoons softened butter

½ cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon cardamom

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ cup chopped walnuts

Mix butter and spices together and fill each apple with butter mixture. Place on a baking pan. Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, until apples are tender. Great with ice cream.

On the Side

I made chili last week. For some reason, it seemed better than the last time I'd made it. Maybe I was hungrier. I ate it for dinner and gave lots to friends. I still had enough for two meals.

I had forgotten to add the beans (maybe because Texas chili doesn't use beans, and I was thinking about Texas). So I decided to finish it off but didn't want to make rice. I found an unused package of white quinoa from Trader Joe's so I made it to go with the chili. It was delicious.

Quinoa is gluten-free, has fewer calories than rice, is loaded with protein and, although not tasty by itself, works as a great canvas for chili. I might use it instead of pasta with marinara or Bolognese, for scampi, in salads, of course.

Another food world opens up.

Lee White lives in Groton. She can be reached at leeawhite@aol.com.