Slow Cooker Cranberry Applesauce

If you've never fixed homemade applesauce in a slow cooker, get out your "To-Do" list and jot it down right now. The toughest thing about homemade applesauce is peeling and coring the apples, and heck, that ain't so hard. And the payoff of that warm, sweet, chunky applesauce more than makes up for a few minutes peeling some apples.

I'll give you my basic applesauce recipe below, but what I really want to show you is a twist on homemade applesauce that I made a few weeks ago: Slow Cooker Cranberry Applesauce.

One of my happiest days of the year is the day that cranberries show up at the grocery store, and we usually have a bowl of fresh cranberry sauce in our fridge from November through February (cranberries freeze beautifully, so I stock up). I eat it as a side to the Thanksgiving turkey, of course, but also on top of yogurt or with some granola sprinkled on top. (Find my recipe for cranberry sauce here.)

About a month ago when the grocery store was overflowing with fall apples, I decided to make applesauce. It was tremendous, but I had a nagging thought that it was missing something. Something like cranberries!

A quick Internet search turned up several cranberry applesauce variations, but I chose to stick close to my original recipe with cranberries added in.

Here's the recipe to use for basic applesauce, and if you want to add some cranberries, then just throw some in!

Ingredients: 

8 medium apples (Use a combination of Golden Delicious, Honey Crisp, Fuji, Gala, etc.)

1 tsp fresh lemon juice 

1 tsp lemon zest (optional)

3 inch cinnamon stick or about 2 tsp. ground cinnamon

5 tsp light brown sugar (unpacked) - or agave

(Optional) 1 cup of fresh cranberries

1.  Peel, core and chop the apples.

2.  Add the sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice and cinnamon stick, and cranberries, if using.

3.  Set crock pot to low and cook for 6 hours. Stir apples occasionally, apples will slowly become a delicious applesauce. 

Remove cinnamon stick and use an immersion blender or potato masher to blend until smooth or if you prefer a chunky sauce, leave sauce intact. 

So good! Try it this weekend as your after-dinner, cozy-up-with-a-movie snack.

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Workout of the Day
Still nursing the sore lower back, so na-da. Things better shape up soon, because I've got to be in tip-top shape to tackle Asylum 2 as soon as Zach is done with his marathon in a few weeks!

How to Get Soap Scum Off Your Shower

It's time for another installment of "Clean Cleaning," sponsored by Pinterest.

This one's all about the nasty soap scum in your shower. Don't you hate it? I've used all kinds of cleaners on my shower, and none of them seem to do much of anything. I scrub and scrub, and that nasty layer of brown scum remains.

So a few days ago I saw a pin that talked about using a solution of vinegar and Dawn soap on your shower to dissolve the soap scum. Upon further Internet investigation, I found sites affirming the method.

Here's what you do:

Measure 1/2 cup (the recipe actually called for a full cup, but my shower isn't that big) of vinegar and heat it for a couple minutes in the microwave.

Then pour the hot vinegar into a sprayer and add 1/2 cup Dawn soap. Shake it up a bit (it foams a lot!), and then spray it all over your shower. It makes a foamy paste that sticks to the walls pretty well.

Let the solution sit for about 1.5-2 hours. Then hop in the shower and scrub it down with a sponge or scrub brush. (It's always nice if you can combine an actual shower with shower cleaning, since then you don't have to worry about getting your clothes all wet, etc.)

I wish I had taken a before and after pic, but, quite frankly, I was pretty embarrassed about the state of my shower. We're talking pink and brown gunk and a very cloudy door.

But here's an "after":

Big whoop, you say? Well you can actually SEE inside the shower, right? This is a major improvement, trust me.

Aside from the fact that this little vinegar and Dawn solution worked famously, the best part of the whole thing is that it probably cost, what, like 75 cents maybe? A little vinegar, a little Dawn...voila! A clean shower without stinky, scary chemicals. Hooray! Try it out!

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And now another Public Service Announcement:

While we all know it is good to ice sore muscles, please don't overdo it.

Saturday morning I threw my lower back out of whack, which was really depressing to me because I haven't had lower back issues in more than a year. Not sure exactly what did it, but it was some combination of Vertical Plyo, a TurboFire Core 20 workout, and scrubbing the bathroom floor with yet another Pinterest cleaning solution (water, vinegar, baking soda, and ammonia...worked well!). 

I knew that I'd done something to it on Saturday, but Sunday is when it really seized up. It's the worst! Sorry to be graphic, but I could hardly wipe my own butt. I considered asking for assistance, but I thought that might put my husband completely over the edge, so I took care of the situation. 

Unfortunately I'm well aware of what to do when my back locks up, which is an all-day regimen of ice, heat, and Advil. But I fell victim to a flawed sense of reasoning in that if icing for 20 minute increments is good, 40 minutes must be better. It's not better, it's frostbite:

OUCH! Get me some Neosporin, stat! I didn't even know I had done that to myself until this morning when I was trying to do some light stretching and scratched it with that tag on my pants. Shoot, man...what am I supposed to do now? My back is still sore, but I sure don't want to put any ice on it! 

It's funny, I'm almost more wimpy about the skin than I am about the back muscles. I think because I can actually see the hurt skin whereas the muscles are buried under my frostbitten skin. 

(P.S., don't email or comment to tell me that it's not really frostbite...I know because I can't unsee the images I saw when I typed frostbite into Google. More likely it's frostnip, which comes before frostbite. Wikipedia told me that!)

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Workout of the Day

Getting out of bed. No workouts for me till these back muscles quit barking at me!