Things I have been cooking in the last few weeks:

• Corned beef. Last time we were at Costco we saw they had corned beef on sale, and grabbed a package. Yesterday we finally took it out of the freezer to thaw, and this morning I set it up in the crockpot. It was the perfect excuse to use up the two remaining potatoes that were starting to grow eyes (I cut those out) and the remaining carrots and celery in the fridge that were moving well past their prime (cooked, they’ll be just fine).
• Scones. Oodles and oodles of scones. A few weeks ago I was in such a mood to bake, and my little sister and I had been chatting about scone recipes online, so I spent an entire weekend afternoon in the kitchen, baking scones. I made five different recipes, one batch (8 scones per batch) – gingerbread, coffee cinnamon walnut, almond, peanut butter chocolate chip, and pumpkin. I finally stopped only because I was running dangerously low on flour. Luckily, scones freeze well, but nevertheless, we spent several weeks eating scones for breakfast every morning (and sometimes also for dinner if we were feeling particularly lazy). I did a more abbreviated version of scone-fest earlier this week, making a batch of plain cinnamon scones and one of gingerbread scones.
• Apple butter. See earlier entry on that subject. I had originally thought this might be good for gift-giving, but I suspect, considering how much Richard loves this stuff, that we will be keeping the entire batch all for ourselves (either that, or I’m going to have to go get a bunch more apples and make another batch).
• Sweet potato gnocchi. I found a recipe online (actually, that’s how I find *all* my recipes these days), and so last time we were at the farmer’s market we picked up a pair of sweet potatoes. This weekend I finally got around to cooking them up and making a double-batch of the gnocchi. They are delicious – just a hint of spice and a hint of sweet – but they are not remotely pretty to look at (think pale, misshapen critter turds). Luckily they also freeze well, which is why lunch today was a little container of gnocchi, spaghetti sauce, and a quartet of the vegetarian meatballs from Trader Joe’s.
• Dried apples. The remaining apples from the box we got up in Apple Hill started turning pretty quickly. So this weekend I did a lot of peeling, coring, and slicing apples and filling the dehydrator trays; 24 hours later, they’d all be done and I repeated the process, until there were no more apples left in the box. Richard likes dried apples, but not as much as I do, so I’m looking forward to being able to bring a little container of apples with me each day for lunch for the next few weeks. Hmm. Maybe getting another giant box of apples for apple butter and for drying would be a good idea after all…

It’s NaBloPoMo time again!