This is how I know it's really fall in our house . . .

I made another failed batch of caramel sauce. My daughter makes beautiful caramel sauce. Mine, not so much. 

But I keep trying. Wasn't that a car rental slogan -- We Try Harder? I try harder each fall to make a good caramel sauce. What I will say is, I'm persistent. 

Each fall I get this idea that homemade caramel sauce for dipping apple slices would be wonderful. We have all of these crisp apples from our own trees. A nice caramel dip would turn a fresh apple into dessert. Surely this year my batch will turn out. Each year it fails miserably. But I do try to fix it. This year's batch is not quite caramel sauce. It's something like a cross between brown sugar syrup (I added molasses at one point in the "fixing") and milk-less butterscotch pudding (after trying to reduce the graininess, I added more water then finally gave up and thickened it with corn starch).

See, it looks like caramel sauce. But it's really not, at all.

My family is grateful that there's any sort of sweet sauce to add to tea or for apple slices. So there's that. It also might be good as a topping for vanilla ice cream.

I'll try again in October, maybe under the tutelage of my daughter.

Why does a tidy-looking fridge matter to you?

We're been working hard to use up leftovers lately. And I've made a point to keep the refrigerator organized so we can find everything. I mentioned to my family how clean the fridge has looked for the last week or so and how happy that makes me. One daughter said she loves that too, then asked why I thought a tidy fridge would make us happy.

My thoughts:

• it's clean and that's always pleasant to see.
• it means we're not wasting any food, so more food to go around for others. 
• it means we are getting full value of the food we grow and purchase. We could and do compost food waste, but commercial compost is much cheaper than food. So using food to make compost is not a good value.
• it saves money, obviously. If we spend money or labor procuring food then don't eat it, we have to spend more money or labor to proceed additional food at some point. This is why I work hard to use as much of our garden produce as possible. I try new recipes to use fruits and vegetables that don't have a chance to ripen, or over-ripen, or are tough, or have a strong flavor. If I go to the trouble to grow something, we're going to eat it.
• keeping a tidy fridge just seems like the responsible thing to do and being responsible actually makes us happy. 

If you like a clean and tidy refrigerator, what are your reasons?