I don’t know about you, but I’m obsessed with old homey recipes that remind me of holidays when I was little. For some reason, the Gooseberry Patch books do that for me. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always loved those “grandma” country stores that always smell like a cinnamon bomb went off and are filled with boutique, overly-cute decorations and knick knacks. I can’t remember what the one in my hometown was called, but it used to be my favorite place to go and just look around. My mom took me there so often that the woman who owned the store knew us by name. LOL.

I still love that cozy country “grandma” vibe and now that I’m a grownup, I can just lean into it. In one of my “home cooking” cookbooks (The Harvest Table, by Gooseberry Patch), I found a recipe for bacon fried apples that sounded incredible. The original recipe called for 1/3 cup of sugar (yikes!) to substitute the natural caramelization a longer cook time would give it. That’s totally fine if I’m in a hurry, but I’d rather wait and let the apples to their thang.