Two other couples came over yesterday to play Canasta. We went out for dinner, & I made dessert. It was really good & tastes better warm. Despite the length of the recipe, it's easy to make, especially as it can be done a day ahead. There are a lot of apples, but the cake is better with a lot, & I rewarmed the leftover for breakfast this morning. Yum, yum. Brown-Sugar Spice Cake with Cream and Caramelized Apples from Gourmet, March 2006 For caramelized apples 8 Gala apples (3 1/2 pounds) 3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar For cake 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar 1 large egg 1/2 cup dark amber or Grade B maple syrup 1/2 cup sour cream 1 teaspoon vanilla For cream 1 1/4 cups chilled heavy cream 1/2 cup sour cream 2 tablespoons sugar Special equipment: an 8-inch square nonstick cake pan (2 inches deep) Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter and flour cake pan, knocking out excess flour. Make caramelized apples: Peel and core apples, then cut into 1/2-inch-thick wedges. Spread softened butter in an even layer over bottom of a 12-inch heavy skillet and sprinkle with brown sugar. Add apple wedges and cook over moderate heat, without stirring, until sugar is melted and apples start to give off Cook, stirring occasionally, until apples are just tender and juices become syrupy, about 30 minutes more. Pour syrup from skillet into a small heatproof bowl, then sauté apples, stirring occasionally, until caramelized and very tender, about 30 minutes more. Return syrup to apples and cook until heated through, about 2 minutes. Make cake while apples cook: Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices in a bowl. Beat together butter and brown sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg until combined. Add maple syrup, sour cream, and vanilla and beat until combined well. Reduce speed to low and add flour mixture, then mix until just incorporated. Spread batter in cake pan and bake until cake is golden brown and a wooden pick or skewer inserted in center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool in pan on a rack 10 minutes. Make cream just before serving: Beat cream with sour cream and sugar using cleaned beaters at high speed until it just holds soft peaks. To serve: Run a thin knife around edge of pan, then invert cake onto a plate and cut into squares. Serve warm or at room temperature, topped with warm apple mixture and cream Cooks' notes: ·Caramelized apples can be made 1 day ahead and cooled completely, uncovered, then chilled, covered. Reheat over low heat. ·Cake can be made 1 day ahead and cooled completely, uncovered, then kept, loosely covered with plastic wrap, at room temperature.

Shaun, there are several things on that list that The Picky One would eat and The Little Gourmet would go nuts for - thanks for the ideas! Terri - I will also be making your Pizza Rolls they look fantastic and I am going to make it even easier on myself and pick up a ready made pizza dough at our local pizza shop. Here is another list from a few years ago where I have found inspiration. It is similar to Grainlady's link, but there are a few differences. 14 Fresh Brown Bag Lunch Ideas Pasta Lover's Lunch Salad. Pack a cold pasta salad and a plastic fork, and your pasta lover will love you, too! Make your salad with lean meat or low-fat cheese (so it has some protein), lots of vegetables to boost fiber and nutrition, and use a whole-grain blend pasta, like Barilla Plus. Then just drizzle some light vinaigrette over the top and toss. Pita Pocket Sandwich. Pack your whole-grain pita pocket with chicken Caesar salad, or any other lean meat or cheese filler mixed with vegetables and dark green lettuce. The Fruit and Cheese Plate Special. Make crispy cracker sandwiches with whole-wheat crackers, slices of assorted cheese, and lean meats. Don't forget the fruit, which goes nicely with the cheese and adds fiber and nutrition. Peanut Butter Fun Pack. Pack 1/8 cup of natural-style peanut butter, along with a plastic knife or spoon, wheat crackers, and celery sticks, and you have a peanut butter fun pack! Bagel With Cream Cheese, Please. Bagels are a wonderful foundation for hardy sandwiches that stand up to being in a backpack or locker all morning. You can toast a bagel in the morning and simply spread some light cream cheese in the middle. Or make a bagel sandwich with, say, a little light cream cheese, some turkey, and cranberry sauce, then top it off with alfalfa sprouts or Romaine lettuce. Carry a Cobb Salad. Plastic containers can hold the makings of a delicious salad lunch. Fill it with chopped green lettuce, chopped hard-boiled egg, light cheese, and/or lean ham. You can buy packets of light dressing, or just use extra packets of light salad dressing left over from your last trip to the fast-food chain. It's a Wrap! Wraps are a nice change of pace from the usual sandwich. Use one of the new higher-fiber tortillas, like the multigrain flour tortillas available in most supermarkets. Then fill 'er up with chicken Caesar salad or assorted lean meats, cheese, tomato, sliced onion, shredded Romaine lettuce, and light dressing. Just roll it up and wrap in foil. Noodle Soup Cups. Many schools offer a hot water dispenser so kids can add hot water to packaged noodle soup cups. Some brands are higher in sodium and fat, and lower in fiber than others. Check out the options in stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. Veggie Sushi. Not all kids will go for this one, but there are some out there who really like seaweed-wrapped sushi rolls. You can now buy pre-made sushi at many supermarkets, too. Choosing the veggie-filled sushi means there's no chance the sushi will get a little "fishy" while it's in your kid's backpack. Toss Some Taco Salad. If taco salad is a favorite, you can pack the meat mixture tossed with the shredded cheese, tomatoes, and chopped Romaine lettuce in a plastic container. At lunchtime, your child can add crunchy, reduced-fat tortilla chips and a little light dressing. Fried Rice Can Be Fun. When made with eggs or chopped lean ham and lots of veggies, cold fried rice can be a satisfying noontime treat. Make your own, or plan on leftovers the night before if you're ordering from a restaurant. Talk About Taquitos. I started doing this last year, and it seems to have stuck with my girls. I pop some Bean and Cheese frozen Taquitos from Whole Foods into my toaster oven in the morning, then let them cool. Then, I wrap them in foil and make sure they stay cool by packing a frozen juice box or small water bottle. By noon, they are cold, fun finger food. BBQ Chicken Sandwich. Your child can assemble a yummy BBQ grilled chicken sandwich fresh at lunchtime. Just pack a grilled, boneless, skinless chicken breast (you can make it in your indoor grill the night before) with some lettuce and sliced tomato in one baggie, and a whole-wheat bun in another. Add a packet of BBQ sauce to the lunch bag, and it's good to go. Meal Muffins. Certain types of muffins work as a lunch entr. If you bake them over the weekend and keep them in the freezer, you just have to pull one or two out in the morning. By lunch, they are nicely chilled and ready to eat. Try ham and cheese muffins, Mexican Cornbread muffins, or quiche muffins (quiche filling, baked with or without crust in a muffin pan).

You will never be satisfied unless you move the dining room doorway and the sunroom door. Sorry, but it's true - I have similar AWFUL doors / doorways in corners - they SUCK! Really, the solution is simple: close up the dining room and sunroom doors to create a solid wall for cabinets in that corner. Put in a 4 ft wide doorway next to your fireplace (where those tall cabs are now) - this is an EASY build! I did it all by myself to fix an old doorway - anything shorter than 6 ft is an easy DIY header - either use 2x6's with blocking above or 2x10's or 2x12's without blocking - 4 ft. is a short run. Then, put the door to the sunroom next to your laundry closet - enter from the DEN, NOT the kitchen! You can put a pass-thru over the sink if you want to, but WHY should you have to go through the kitchen to get to the sunroom? SO ANNOYING! Seriously, HAVING to walk ALL THE WAY through either the living room or dining room to get from the front door to the kitchen just DOES NOT WORK! If the doorway is next to the fireplace it is a straight run from the front door, it is still accessible to bring food into the dining room from the kitchen, AND you can even make the current mini-peninsula you have 2 feet longer so that your husband can comfortably sit there with his laptop. You can keep the sink and dishwasher in the same location (less cost for new plumbing). The new 4 ft. doorway will end approximately where your range currently meets the cabinets that will be gone, so shift the range 2 feet in towards the corner and put a 2 ft. cabinet next to the new doorway. Then you can use the existing hole in your roof for the vent by simply getting a new flexible duct and angling it from the new hood position through the attic to the roof at an angle. Framing costs - approx. $200 to frame out the new 4 ft. doorway, and a new 3 ft. door next to the laundry into the sunroom, add a few new studs to fill in the old dining room and sunroom doors in the kitchen for drywall. Use the old sunroom door in the new frame and you save more money. Cost of trim and other finishes is totally up to you. Seriously, as far as construction costs go, you can VASTLY improve the flow of your ENTIRE HOUSE by moving these two doorways for less than $500 (and that would be with really nice wood trim). I'd put a new window on the back wall of the now U-shaped kitchen, simply because you will get great light from all the south-facing windows in the sunroom. Again, a cheap and easy frame job. You can use stock off-the-shelf Anderson windows from Home Depot to save money. Your back wall is 128" wide so I'd run a blind corner cab (42" gives good play) opening along the range wall, then put the fridge on the back wall next to it with with a 3" filler space between them and a 27" corner upper cab and 27" corner appliance garage beneath it. This allows you to open the blind cabinet door and the fridge door without interference, and you can use that counter space when you pull things from the fridge. You can run a matching panel from floor to ceiling along the fridge with a deep cabinet above the fridge if you want. This means that your fridge will end about 63" (24"+3"+36") off the range wall. Your window can start about 6" from the fridge - this allows space for trim. You can fit a 30" wide window with trim starting 30" off the sink wall and install a 24" or 27" corner upper there as well (no appliance garage here - leave counterspace clear for prep). You can even install a small prep sink under this window as well (but that will add cost due to new plumbing). Get an over-the-range microwave / hood combo to save counter space. The sink wall will stay basically the same, and the range wall would go something like this: 4 ft. doorway to living room, 24" cabinet, 30" range, 18" or 21" cabinet (depending on size of trim around doorway), 45" space for 42" blind cabinet. Now you have plenty of counter space on each side of your range and next to your fridge. The new peninsula jetting out from the sink wall can be 5-6 ft. long and still allow 5 ft. walking space between it and the doorway (you save space by putting the doorway across from the peninsula instead of 24" deep cabs as exist now). At that length it might actually see more use than the small one you have now. Also, I'd actually change the height / counter material of the peninsula by extending the cabinets along the sink wall 12" into where the peninsula now is, then use 39" or 42" high wall cabs (12" deep) facing into your office area as the peninsula base and top it with 24" deep butcher block. That gives the cook 12" extra prep space on the D/W side of the sink (and avoids another corner cab), and allows people to dump their crap on the peninsula without it interfering with the cook. If you use two 24" wide wall cabinets as the base you can have 3 4" wide support pillars with brackets (one each end, one in center) to support the 10" counter overhang (butcher block should have a 2" lip on kitchen side of cabinets) and then curve the end that jets into the kitchen = 5 ft. base, 5-1/2 - 6 ft. counter. This is the cheapest and easiest way to go - you get a LOT more prep space in the kitchen and you don't lose any of your office space. It looks like you just have a table sitting in the space next to the laundry closet now, so it only makes sense to turn that into the sunroom entrance.

I think it looks very nice, and nothing is perfect, certainly not my own kitchen layout. WRT layout -- I like the available surface around and across from the range. I do wonder about the fact that you've positioned the fridge rather far from the range, and that there's nearly a corner to turn -- sort of, around the island, between both the fridge and the knives/prep on the one hand and the range on the other. I'm just sort of wondering rather than criticizing -- seems not so bad if you always do a very careful and complete mis-en-place before you start cooking, but add a family member or a couple of guests to the kitchen and what happens if you want to dash back to the fridge and/or the knives and cutting board? Wine racks -- our kitchen came with a wine rack and we finally had it removed when we did some updates earlier this year. Took up a lot of space and I didn't think it was very useful. I keep a few bottles upstairs, but I store my wine elsewhere. That suggests two different types and purposes of wine rack. For long-term storage -- anything from a month or two to decades -- wines should see stable, cellar or cave-like temperatures. For any volume of wines, it's easiest to do this outside the kitchen, and perhaps not very handy at all to try to do it right in the kitchen. For short-term storage, it can be handy to have a few bottles in or near the kitchen. You don't want them by the stove, and some people buy small 6-bottle wine fridges for the kitchen, but I think you can fudge temperature and humidity control substantially in the short term, provided you never get the wines super warm, and provided you serve them at a decent temperature. Maybe just a six-bottle rack in the next room? Or in a cabinet well away from the stove? The microwave-hood thing -- some of these work fine if you vent to the outside, and don't do much in the way of pan searing, pan frying, or stir frying. But having finally added a proper hood with a fairly high-capacity blower (1100 cfm in a straight shot up through attic and roof, via a 10" duct), I have to say that I never want to go back to the other type of arrangement. We have full depth, but our hood is no wider than our range and it works great. I realize that this type of arrangement doesn't work for everybody, but I thought I'd highlight it as something that can make a big difference in a kitchen.