"Autumn" food

We had two glorious days of autumn like weather and all I wanted to eat was tasty fall flavors like apple and pumpkin. Luckily, we received a few butternut squashes in our CSA share this week, so that started the weekend off right with Lucy's butternut squash soup. Initially, R grumbled about having soup for dinner, but he added some red pepper flakes and loved it!

Saturday morning I woke up ready to tackle the kitchen! First, I sorted our spices and filled up our spice rack. Then, I searched high and low for a pumpkin muffin recipe and decided to go with Lucy's pumpkin cream cheese swirl muffins. R was a great sport about these because 1. he doesn't really like pumpkin flavors and 2. we went to four stores looking for pumpkin! While we were out running errands, I "made" some applesauce from the apples we received in our CSA share.

This is a crockpot recipe my mom found and I totally love it ...
Ingredients:
4 lbs. apples (we like to have a mix of red and green apples)
1/3 - 1/2 c. sugar
2 cinnamon sticks

Directions:
1. peel and chop apples
2. Place the apples, sugar, and cinnamon sticks in the crockpot
3. Cook on high for 3 - 4 hrs.
4. Remove cinnamon sticks
5. Mash with a potato masher

(The first time I made this, I thought the apples weren't cooking down and we were going to have apple mush, but lo and behold, around hour 2.5, they started to get really soft and I used the masher to help them along).

I don't have a picture, but trust me, this applesauce is super tasty.