Football and Apple Picking

Football and apple picking! Great way to kick off fall!  Ryan and I went to Raleigh yesterday for NC State's first home football game this year.  We won and had a great time!!  There is nothing like the first beer of the season!  A friend of mine has a monogramming business called Libbie and Winston and she made me this adorable koozie.  You can check out more of here stuff here.

 It poured down on us for about 30 minutes, but other than that it was the perfect weather for the first football game!

 Ryan was so excited about the start of college football that he woke up at 5:30 AM to start smoking this pork shoulder.  I will say it was well worth that early wake up call!!

 We didn't take kids to the first game, but plan on taking them next week.  Our sweet baby sitter sent us this pic of them playing on the Panther playground near our house!

Since we left kids all day Saturday we spent Sunday doing fun things with them.  This sweet boy missed us yesterday and wanted to hold both our hands when we arrived at the apple picking farm.

Hayride out to the apple trees!

This little guy loves animals.  He waves and talks to them and is just so excited to learn about each one.

The farmer let the twinkies take his tractor for a test drive.  When I was younger I used to stick out my tongue when I was concentrating...Ellie does the same thing now!

Ellie was very serious about apple picking.  She would make sure the apples didn't have any booboos and take her time picking the perfect one before putting it into her bag.

After seeing animals, picking apples and taste testing a few we went back to the farm house to try some fresh apple cider.

We bought some fresh apple cider and okra to make tonight!

Once we got home and saw the four huge bags of apples we knew we needed to start cooking!  We made muffins, cookies donuts and more!
First recipe we tried was for Muffins.  Recipe here!

 Me and my little bakers!  Say cheese!

The kids love to stand on the bench and help or watch us cook.  I will measure stuff out and let them dump in in the bowl and they are great at stirring! (excuse the bed head hair!)

 Ellie thought my grocery list was the directions and kept telling Bobo what to do next.

 Muffins turned out great!  We ate a lot of them and then I froze the rest.

Next up healthy Apple Pie Cookies.  Recipe here!

I made a healthy no sugar Apple Sauce in the slow cooker.   Recipe here!

I have never made donuts so I thought this could be fun!  This recipe is for gluten free apple cider donuts, but there are plenty of other easy baked recipes out there!  Recipe here!  I didn't have a donut pan so I used mini bunt cake pan instead.

We will obviously eat a lot of the apples, but we may do some Apple BBQ sauce like last year and maybe some more homemade apple butter for the twinkies!