EatingWell Wednesday - Baked Apples with Agave Nectar

Seeing that yesterday is the official beginning of Autumn, I started daydreaming about all there is to come here in New England: The leaves changing, the leaf pile jumping, the trips to the cider mills, and the pumpkin hayrides. This is my favorite season and we love to be outdoors. In fact, yesterday many of our friends went apple picking and I picked up some apple cider (organic but the same price as the non-organic!).

We love apples in this house: great in breakfast items, a perfect on-the-go snack, quick side for a meal, soups, salads, and dessert. Lately, our local grocery stores have not been carrying granny smith apples so I grabbed a bag of golden delicious and they are our new favorites.

Also, sticking with tradition, I wanted to share some great apple recipes from EatingWell.



Delicious Baked Apples with Agave Nectar
2 organic golden delicious apples
Handful of organic raisins
Tablespoon or so of sliced almonds
Thin slice of butter
1 teaspoon of agave nectar
A few dashes of cinnamon
1/3 cup apple cider

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Core the apples (leave some of the bottom intact if you can) and peel away just a bit of skin around the top. You do not need to but I started to peel them and then realized that I did not know need to do that.

2. Place the apples into a oven proof pan. Add the raisins & almonds into the apples, stick the butter on top, drizzle the agave nectar on and a few dashes of cinnamon.

3. Pour the cider around the apples and bake for approx. 45 minutes. Test doneness by seeing if a skewer can easily penetrate the apple.

Now, kids being kids, they love sweet so we drizzled more agave nectar on top and needed a few more dashes of cinnamon. My daughter, husband and I love this little treat but naturally, my son had the opposite opinion.