Thanks, FK, I'll see if any of my local grocery stores have that kind! It looks great.

Oh my, SL. On the bright side, it's thought that capsaicin may be good for weight loss.

I love using greek yogurt as a substitute for sour cream with spicy food, IlF. It tastes so similar and it's a nice way to boost my protein intake.

Mmm, all of those apples sound delicious, Mel! You're lucky that you can pick them in your own backyard and know what's been sprayed on them. Apples are said to be the most heavily sprayed produce when it comes to pesticides, according to this site. I don't know why all of the fruits and vegetables in the "dirty dozen" list have to be ones that I love. Thankfully, I really like all of the stuff in the "clean fifteen" section, too. I think I just like food in general.

In other foodsy news, I've been experimenting with muffins made out of coconut flour lately. I tried converting this really yummy and simple recipe to coconut flour, and it turned out a lot better than I expected. I think I could use it for a grain-free cake recipe sometime.

You have to be careful when you're converting a wheat flour recipe to coconut flour, though. If the original recipe calls for one cup of wheat flour, for instance, then you'll be using 1/3 to 1/2 cup of coconut flour instead. You just have to eyeball the thickness of the batter as you're adding it in. You also have to use more eggs, or else it will end up rather dry and crumbly. (It soaks up liquid like crazy!) Even though it's a little tricky and requires experimentation, it's a nice, healthy flour to work with. Two-thirds of the carbohydrates are fiber, and a cup has 28 grams of protein.

I'm not a good recipe creator, I always use somebody else's stuff. But that coconut flour looks really interesting. I'm gonna have to see if I can find some around here. Where did you get yours Rose? Local grocery store? Specialty food store? Online?

Well, since everybody is dieting at the moment, there's probably no point in me linking this, but I'm going to anyways. My parents gave us a butternut squash from their garden. As far as squashes go, it's one of my favorites, though I'm just not big on squash. Just the way I am.
A few days ago, I was commenting to my husband on souffles. I've heard of them, seen them made many times, but I've never had one. I went looking for recipes online and stumbled across this butternut squash souffle recipe we made for dinner tonight.
http://www.food.com/recipe/butternut-sq ... gel-108926
It was SO good. I really liked it. (My husband ate about a third of the whole pan. ) Now I'm looking up cheese souffles because even though they contain a bit of flour, they're not necessarily sweet at all so I can eat a lot of them. This may be my new "thing".

Mmmm, that kugel looks so delicious! Want. One of my favorite ways to eat butternut squash is in soup. Yum!

I'm not a good recipe creator, I always use somebody else's stuff. But that coconut flour looks really interesting. I'm gonna have to see if I can find some around here. Where did you get yours Rose? Local grocery store? Specialty food store? Online?

I've always ordered mine online (this kind), so I'm not certain where you'd want to look in order to find it locally. I'm pretty sure you could find it at a health food store, although it's possible that you'd be able to find it in the baking aisle with other gluten free flours.

I'm hoping to give this coconut flour cake recipe a try when I have some free time this week... I'll let you all know how it turns out if I do! I'll probably skip their glaze recipe and do my own thing if I feel like it needs something extra.

our apple harvest this year is something, we've got so many apples, I don't know what to do with them! Boxes and boxes and they are going bad. Does anyone have any recipes of how to perserve/cook apples? So far we've been making apple juice and apple pie, but I want to try something different.

You could try apple butter. It's delicious on toast. Or there's apple cake. Or you could cut out the cores and stuff them with nuts and raisins and then bake them.

Applesauce! My personal favorite because it's used in so many baking recipes. ... or you can just eat it.

You could always send some over to me, Wild; I was supposed to pick up some apples at the grocery store yesterday and I forgot. Something I've always loved is to cut up apples into thick slices, sprinkle a little cinnamon and sugar on top, and then bake them in the oven. Similar to what Lady Haleth suggested, but simpler. So good!

Applesauce and apple butter are probably the best long-term ways to prepare apples. And cider.

Ditto the suggestions for applesauce and apple butter, wrose. We've got buckets of apples sitting in our living room waiting to be processed too. I made some of them into sauce this morning. If your oven goes low enough, you could dehydrate them. Dried apples have a decent shelf life (which is good because we've got lots at the moment.)

Now I'm looking up cheese souffles because even though they contain a bit of flour, they're not necessarily sweet at all so I can eat a lot of them. This may be my new "thing".

Nope, it's not my new thing. We made three of them yesterday. And they came out really pretty! The first couple bites I liked a lot, but the more I ate, the more I didn't care for it. It was one of "those foods". But I love trying new things and this was fun.

So I was browsing the back posts on this thread and I came across a recipe that SnowAngel posted for coconut brownies. I decided to try some because they sounded delicious. And they were! I just ate the last one. Half of them got taken to church the other day, and they all got eaten too. Thank you for the recipe, SnowAngel!
Now I've got to go bake some pretzels.

Doing a test run on some cupcakes for my kiddo's birthday party next weekend. We're going for a Very Hungry Caterpillar theme.

^^Inspiration. Certainly not an original idea.

I didn't know what flavor to go with so we decided to go with vanilla on vanilla, and then add various ice creams to go with it.
Here's the recipe we used...
http://www.food.com/recipe/amy-sedariss ... kes-181181
...and the cupcakes are VERY tasty. They're cooling now and we'll make the icing here in a bit.

We're also going to have some snacky fruits and veggies to go with it, and we're gonna punch holes in it like the caterpillar that eats through everything (again, not an original idea). Should be cute. I'm excited!!!

Oooh, that looks like a lot of fun, fk! And tasty.

So, Winter, Meadow, and I have found ourselves in the new position of having to cook all our own meals for an extended period of time and we're starting to reach the point where our favourites-to-cook aren't going to quite cut it. We're also all very busy, and it's hard to come up with a ton of energy to cook especially with varying schedules and all of us not always being around at the same time to eat. So I was curious if anyone had any simple and quick meals that they'd be willing to share the recipes for (15-20 minutes, though if it bakes for longer that's fine as long as there's less prep time)? Alternatively/in addition, if the meals freeze well, that'd be great: we seem to alternate between cooking only enough for everyone eating that evening (meaning no leftovers) and cooking for a full family (and thus having way too many leftovers). Thank you!

I'll have to think about recipes. One thing that helps is to cook up hamburger ahead of time. We cook it up and then freeze it in recipe sized portions. The same thing would work for chicken, etc. Sometimes we cut veggies up the day before so they are ready to throw into the recipe.

We always freeze a meal's worth of any soup we make. We've also made up some meaty marinara sauce that's in the freezer in 1-meal portions.

As for quick meals, if you like quesadillas, we've found that black beans, cheese, and salsa will make a quick, filing quesadilla. Pasta is also quick if you just add jarred sauce.

I'm sure I've got actual recipes somewhere to fit your request, but this is what comes to mind at the moment.