happy valentine's and several unrelated recipe ideas

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope everyone's enjoying their chocolates and roses and dates and dinners with candle lights and whatnot, and I'm guessing a chocolate post would be most appropriate but sadly, this is not a post about chocolate or Valentine's Day.

This is a post about recipe ideas that are very much unrelated to Valentine's Day.

:)

I haven't posted in a while huh? It feels weird, probably because I used to post almost every single day when I first started up this blog...well, times have changed!

So instead of celebrating Valentine's Day I've compiled a few simple and healthy recipes that I tested over these past few weeks.

gluten-free apple cranberry tart

I have never in my life felt so much love for apples until today. 

I woke up around 5:30 AM today to set up for a community garage sale. After 6 long hours of waiting and watching and pretending to be somewhat of an entrepreneur, my nose became runny and I felt congested and I thought I was about to get sick. Took a nap and woke up STILL feeling congested, and you know what they say: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away"! :D And so I ate an apple. And it was the juiciest and crispiest apple I've ever had en mi vida and that's my story of what brought me to this apple recipe. An apple recipe is pretty fitting for autumn too :)

Teresa Cutter's apple pie recipe gave me the idea to attempt something fruity. I mean I've used bananas and such but I've never actually made a baked good where the main feature was the fruit. It was usually chocolate, but I'm open to switching things up a bit :)

Instead of using apple juice that Teresa's recipe calls for, I simmered my apple slices in cranberry juice. The cranberry added a sour kick to the sweet apples, a combination that paired rather nicely with the crust.

Apple slices simmering in cranberry juice

Apples all soaked up in cranberry juice :)

At first I wanted to lay my slices out in a line, but it looked plain and the slices didn't fit well with the tart mold, so I went with the rose. I was a bit scared of attempting the rose because I've never made a fruit tart before, but overlapping the slices wasn't as hard as I thought, and I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome :)