Better than Air Freshener

Wow, I'm a terrible blogger--nearly 2 weeks since my last post! But that's okay. Midterms may have temporarily stopped me, but I'm going to get going again. Huzzah! I haven't made anything particularly cool recently, so I won't be sharing a recipe, just something neat I learned from my awesome parents.

A little while ago, my room was smelling really weird. I think something went bad in the fridge (I just threw out a bunch of stuff in the hopes that one of them was the culprit), but I'm not sure. I really hated that my room smelled funky, so I decided to remedy this situation--without using an air freshener. All I did was throw some water, cinnamon, clove, a bay leaf, and some orange peel into my rice cooker (which I haven't named yet! I can't seem to settle on something that'll stick), and set it to cook. Whenever it came close to boiling over, I just set it to "Keep Warm" for a little while.

My room ended up smelling really nice in a relatively brief amount of time! Yay! The cool thing is that a rice cooker is definitely not necessary--a hot pot would work just as well. All you need is to have the spices available and keep an eye on whatever appliance is being used. It probably would have worked better to use a cinnamon stick instead of ground cinnamon, and some vanilla extract for extra goodness, but I have little use for these, so I haven't purchased them.

Anyway, I'm having a lovely time taking a break from cooking for myself in a cramped dorm room! I love spring break.

(P.S. Even though I sound like one of those super cool crazy partiers who LOVE being social and NEVER spend their weekend nights doing laundry and having Big Bang Theory marathons, I'm not actually partying like these people this spring break.)

Applesauce

Since I had a few apples lying around, a brand new bottle of ground clove, and a neat recipe, I decided to try applesauce as my next foray into slow-cookery.

I found this recipe on About.com:

• 3 apples, peeled and minced
  
• Water
  
• Cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg
  
• Sugar
  

If you take the time to actually go to the page and check out the recipe, you'll see that I modified it slightly. Namely, I decided to use way less apples (I don't need 10-12 apples' worth of applesauce), added clove and nutmeg, and made no attempt to gauge the amounts of the other ingredients.

All I did was prepare the apples, pour them in, add the spices and sugar, pour in water (way too much, as I discovered later on), and set Gretel to “Low.” I finished this all at about 10:00 PM and turned Gretel off at about 8:00 AM.

It was pretty good. Sweet (the sugar probably wasn't necessary; I'm not sure why I included it in the first place), spicy, and cozy. Also, it made the room smell comfy and spicy, which was great. (The picture doesn't really capture the essence, as I'm sure you've deduced--the only camera I have is the webcam on my mac.)

I don't know that I'll make it again—I enjoyed it, but not enough to justify peeling three apples (easier said than done) and not being able to use Gretel for 8-10 hours. I might try this with another fruit, though; nothing comes to mind immediately, but I really like the idea of slow-cooking fruit for hours and hours with a bunch of spices.