This week's cooking experiments: pudding, apple butter, and a meringue failure!

As I said in my weekly goals this week, I wanted to try a few new things in the kitchen: homemade pudding, chocolate peanut butter banana smoothie, and making homemade apple butter. I also needed to blanche and freeze celery, plus I wanted to make another batch of crockpot applesauce.

My week was shortened due to a conference, but I still accomplished most of my list! Here's the rundown on my kitchen experiments this week:

Homemade Chocolate Pudding!

Oh. my. word. Homemade pudding is awesome! I can't believe I never tried this before! It was super easy to make...and I found myself saying "Wow" as I made it on the stove. So cool! I needed to use up my $0.99 gallon of milk, and this was a perfect way to do that.

I made both chocolate and vanilla, and both were delicious!

Since the homemade pudding left me with extra egg whites, I thought, "Gee, I'll try to make some meringue cookies. Those don't seem too hard..." Yeah. Let's just say that I think my meringue techniques need some help! My attempt was a complete and utter failure!

The mixture was way too runny to pipe out onto a cookie sheet, so I thought I'd put it in a cake pan and see what happened. It promptly hit the trash can after that failed!

The second time I made pudding, I froze the egg whites in ice cubes trays and then popped them into a freezer bag. Now I can use them for baking in the future!

On Monday, I also blanched and froze my free celery (I used these directions). The most complicated part was trying to get these little packages vacuum sealed because the celery was so juicy!

On Tuesday afternoon, I made a Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie for an afternoon snack. I thought it was just okay - not great, though. It was another good way to use up milk, though!

About halfway through the process

On Wednesday, I made homemade apple butter in the crockpot. Boy, did my house smell amazing all day! My grandma made amazing apple butter, so this really reminds me of her. :) I'm so looking forward to apple butter on my gluten free toast for breakfast in the mornings!

I didn't get around to the homemade crockpot applesauce, so I'll save that for next week sometime. I am really loving all the experimenting in the kitchen - now I need to figure out what next week's experiments are going to be!

What have you done in the kitchen this week?