Today I learned about crazy apple contraptions

Lesson Learned Thursday, March 11, 2010

My mom loves apples. Her kitchen is decorated in apples. Her fridge is stocked with apples. We have an annual apple-pie assembly day with our extended family. She even works at an orchard seasonally. And today we learned about her cool apple contraptions.

I should start by saying that we recently learned that not all contraptions are useful.

Although we got a LOT of entertainment value from her handy-dandy egg-cracker.

Here is attempt #1

Attempt #2

Attempt #3

ROFL! To quote Larry the Cucumber:

"I laughed, I cried. It moved me, Bob."

The funniest part about that is that she is a total pro at cracking and separating eggs.

With all the batches of homemade bread she's made, she could do it in her sleep.

But there's such allure in those late-night infommercial wares.

Especially if they sell them at the store where she works.

Oh, and BTW, I totally covet her Perfect Brownie Pan.

I love edge pieces and in this cool thingie, they are ALL edge pieces!

It's the little things. :)

But back to mom's apple contraptions...

Of course, she introduced us to that standard corer/slicer long ago.

Tonight she showed me her twist-corer. It's pretty neat.

You just twist it right through the apple . . .

 And then you pull it from the apple and just push the core through the device.

Aw, man! Cinnamon under my fingernails.

(My husband is going to give me such a hard time about that...LoL!)

Oh! And look! What could that be???

Yet another unintentional doughnut sighting!

I'm going to have to start tagging them...

And now that your apple is cored,

you can bake it in this cool microwave apple baker!

Baked apples are such a good dessert! They take 20-30 minutes in the oven

But only about 4 min. to "wave" them. (That's what they say in Japan. :)

They're especially good sprinkled with a little cinnamon or apple pie spice.

The last cool contraption is one that I've seen her use before but never learned how to use it. It comes in really handy on our pie-making day. Last year we made over a hundred pies. With about five apples in a pie, you can probably guess that peeling apples and slicing apples and coring apples would get pretty tiresome.

And that's why this gets Top Apple Thingie-Bopper award:

And if I find any other cool apple contraptions -

I'll keep you posted.