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I absolutely LOVE apple pie, and as I said in my first blog I was determined to make one. So for my last recipe that I am going to blog about, I will teach you how to make an apple pie. My mom called up her friend who has made pies before and we got some tips from her along with the recipe for the crust. For the crust, combine 2 cups of flour and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a bowl. Make a "well" in the middle of the bowl as a spot to pour in the liquid ingredients. For the liquid ingredients, measure 1/2 cup of vegetable oil and 1/4 cup of milk into a measuring cup. Mix it while it is still in the measuring cup and then pour it into the "well" we have created. Then you slowly combine the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients. This part is kinda tricky but compared to other crust recipes you can't really mess it up. Eventually you will get a ball of dough that should be rolled out in between two pieces of wax paper.

Then you place your big circle of dough in the pie pan, cutting off the excess that hangs over on the edge. For the filling I used Ida Red apples which are good for cooking. Peel and slice 2 pounds of apples (6 cups) and place in a bowl. In the future I would have put in 3 pounds of apples because we made a deep dish pie so it could have used more apples. This was my first time ever peeling an apple so I was very scared that I was going to cut myself! Good thing our knives were somewhat dull. I did an ok job, but with practice I will get better!

In a separate bowl mix 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, and 2 T. flour. The filling turned out pretty runny so in the future I would add about 1/4 of flour. Pour this mixture onto the apples and mix well. Next pour the apples on top of the crust. It should look like this:

For the topping I decided to make a crumble top because I think those taste better. Originally I wanted to do a criss-crossed top, but my mom said that it would be too much work. I agreed. The topping calls for 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 flour, 1/2 teas. cinnamon, 1/4 teas. all spice, and 1/4 cup butter. The butter needs to be cut up in cubes and covered with the mixture before mixing it all together or else the butter will stick together. To mix in the butter you can use a pastry cutter and just press and twist.

Sprinkle on the crumble top and it goes in the oven at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes.

KFC at home

When browsing for a dinner recipe on the http://www.foodnetwork.com/, I came across a chicken tender recipe that looked like something that the whole family would like so I decided to give it a try. One technique I learned in this recipe was how to bread chicken. Basically there are three stations, flour, eggs, and bread crumbs.

Breading stations

 For each station I used pie pans so that they would have a high wall to keep the ingredients in. For the bread crumbs I used 1/3 cup of store bought bread crumbs, and then crushed up one bag of croutons to add more flavor. Crushing up the croutons was quite hard, probably because they were still frozen when I started :/ I ended up laying them out and using a rolling pin which worked somewhat well. The breading went well except for the fact that when you try to bread the chicken, you end up breading your fingers at the same time! To fix this so that I didn't have to wash my hands between each chicken piece, I had my mom do the bread crumbs and I did the first two stations. The raw chicken must be handled very carefully because you could get sick from it. One tip I learned is that if raw chicken sits in your trash then it will start to smell. To fix that, we put the chicken scraps in a ziplock bag and freeze them until trash day! I also made some orange barbeque sauce (sorry no picture). I didn't eat the sauce because it had chunks from the marmalade, but my mom said that it was good and that it had a hint of orange but wasn't too overpowering. For the chicken and barbeque recipe you can visit this website: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sandra-lee/crouton-crushed-chicken-tenders-with-orange-barbeque-sauce-recipe.html Here is a picture of them before they went in the oven. They pretty much looked the same when they came out.