Caramelized Apple Peanut Butter Biscotti

I have recently discovered that peanut butter brings on severe GI attacks. I know I'm not even supposed to be eating peanut butter since it's on my low oxalate diet "bad" list but I can't help it. My afternoon snack is an apple with peanut butter and cinnamon. Now I can only eat the apple :( It's frustrating because I experimented by eating a handful of peanuts--nothing; no attack. It's bizarre, and a mystery, what will set off my GI attacks.

Needless to say, I have been craving the apple/peanut butter combo. It took a few days for me to decide to try to make some kind of apple peanut butter biscotti.

It took a few attempts, but I finally tweaked the recipe just right.

I started with caramelizing apples in butter, brown sugar and spices....


Then I stirred in the rest of the ingredients and formed my loaf:



Baked, and out came deliciousness. I polished these off in record time.

Philadelphia Snowman Cookies

These cookies are one of my favorite holiday treats; they are so addicting. The recipe comes from my sister. She usually makes the dough ahead of time, freezes it, then thaws and bakes the cookies. Then we all help decorate them.

Honey-Roasted Almonds

These are some delicious, honey-roasted almonds my sister made for us over Christmas. I didn't eat any, since I'm trying to be better about eating low oxalate, but Mr.Surly gobbled them up. They looked and smelled wonderful.

I Can't Believe I Actually Ate That

Alright, I still don't have a food post ready, so I thought I'd share a bit about food and drink I had while in NYC. Again, these are just straight out of my camera; no editing so I apologize in advance. Some of these should have been cropped.

Yes, that is a bone in the above photo. The bar had bone marrow on the menu, in addition to other typical pub fare. I was very skeptical about it, I can't even eat meat off a bone, why would I ever eat what's inside the bone.

My sister-in-law (SIL) is the one who convinced us to try it. I thought what the heck, how often does a person have the opportunity to try bone marrow.

Still Trying to Ring in the New Year

Is anyone else exhausted from the Holidays? I definitely am. Mr.Surly and I drove up northeast and when we got home we went on a cleaning-up-the-clutter spree, so this year our chi can flow easily through our home.

Hopefully, this week I can get a food post up but today I'm feeling too tired. I'm going to cheat and show you a few things I did over the holidays. All the photos are unedited, straight out of my camera; I couldn't muster up the energy to attempt editing them. So I'm sorry if they are dark, kinda blurry, or badly framed.

First, we went to the City of Brotherly Love to visit my family. We decided to go visit Valley Forge, George Washington's winter camp during the Revolutionary War. Growing up, my dad was a huge history buff and kinda passed that on to me and my siblings.