When life gives you lemons

Or rotten apples.

Recently, Dear Darling, picked up one of those 3 or 5 pound bags of apples at the grocery store.  I hate those.

I worked in a grocery store, I know how "the kids" handle those bags.  They get tossed and thrown and dropped like crazy.  What do kids care?  When no adult is watching them, they don't.  They want to have fun and they don't care if the apples get bruised and then rot before selling.

So, when we got home, I felt the apples in the bag and about half were soft or rotten.  Before, I would just throw them out.  That would have been more than 30% food waste going to the landfill.  Instead, I let them sit on the counter while we put away the rest of the shopping order.

The apples still "looked" nice. It was as if they were just asking to not be thrown away.

I could put them into the compost pile, or feed them to the worms, were my initial thoughts.  But then, I remembered that my mother used to make a snack type cake with apples and a box of cake mix, and I knew I had a box of yellow cake mix in the pantry. 

My mother is not around to ask for this recipe, so I went to allrecipes . com and put apples into the search and got the following recipe.

Apple Snack Squares

I followed the recipe, but I did use all the apples, which were Macoun, and on the smaller side, so I ended up with about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of chopped apples.

It came out WONDERFUL! and we both loved it.

Dear Darling mentioned that this was something that his grandmother would have done, she never wasted anything.  For me, that was a great compliment.

Next time that life gives you lemons, or rotten apples, take the time to look at them from a different angle and see what you can do with them.