Harvest Bliss: Cranberry Pumpkin Nut Bread

A Decadent Fusion of Fall Flavors

Get ready for a delicious adventure with our Cranberry Pumpkin Nut Bread—a recipe that embodies the flavors of fall. It’s not just a bread; it's a hearty combination of pumpkin, spices, and delightful textures. Although it demands a bit of attention, trust me, every effort pays off in each aromatic slice.

Ingredients:

1 cup water, warm, plus enough water to fill a kettle

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

1 15 ounce can plain pumpkin

2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 1/2 cups flour, divided

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1/4 cup dried cranberries

Tools:

parchment paper

Dutch oven, caldero, or four loaf pans

measuring cups and spoons

mixing bowls

tea kettle or pot for water

smaller, heat-proof bowl

colander

clean kitchen towel

Quick word of caution: This will be a messy, time consuming recipe! Do not attempt to do this on Thanksgiving. If you're an experienced baker of bread, you might pull it off. But if you're us... You'll just create a mess and not have the bread til after dinner. 

Well before you intend to get anything going for this recipe, start a tea kettle or a pot of water on the stove. You can use the time while you wait for it to reach a boil to get your other ingredients out.

Once you have all your ingredients handy, begin by measuring your yeast into warm water and setting it aside to double in size. This should take five minutes or so.

Measure the flour, stopping at three and a half cups. Reserve the additional cup in another bowl. Don't forget to level your flour! It's going to be sticky dough and you'll likely be tempted to add more flour, but don't fall for it, and definitely don't sabotage yourself by starting with more than you meant to.

Include your sugar, salt and spices in the dry ingredients. We want to see them evenly mixed into your flour before any wet ingredients join the party, that way you don't end up with bland spots and spots that have too much cinnamon or something.

Around this point, our kettle usually begins to boil. Remove it from the heat, toss the cranberries in the heat proof bowl, and cover them with boiling water. Ignore them for five minutes or so - we just want them to be partially rehydrated so they're not sticky lumps in the bread later. After they've had time to absorb some of the water, strain the water out through the colander.

Add the pumpkin and the yeast mixture to the dry ingredients and stir well. Once you've got a relatively uniform consistency, you can add in the chopped walnuts and the cranberries. This is also the first point that your reserved cup of flour will make an appearance - work about half of it into the sticky dough you have here.

Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel and let it rise on the counter for three hours.

At the three hour mark, move the dough to the fridge, keeping it covered with the towel. Keep it in the fridge for at least an hour, or as long as overnight (if you're a forward thinker and got this done long enough ahead of time that you can refrigerate it overnight! Congrats on being wiser than us).

The chilled dough should be easier to work with, but we still recommend a set of food service gloves for this part. Take that reserved flour and dust a surface - a cutting board, the counter, some parchment, the table - whatever you have. We recommend parchment paper for ease of lifting later. Turn the cold dough out onto this floured surface and work it until it's smooth. Allow it to rise again where it sits for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 450. That is not a typo, we really do mean 450.

In the photos, we've done this as one large boule in a covered pan - but we find the results to be much better if done as two small loaves in average loaf pans, and doing two loaves reduces the cooking time and the risk of burning dramatically. Learning from our mistakes here.

Toss two loaf pans into the oven to heat up with it, keeping the other two loaf pans out on the counter. Divide your dough in two and shape into two even-sized loaves. Place each loaf on its own sheet of parchment paper.

Once the oven has come up to proper temperature, don your oven mitts or grab a towel and remove the pans. Using the parchment to transfer them, place one loaf into each pan. Place both pans onto the middle rack of the oven. Invert the cool pans over top of the pans in the oven (we're using them like the lid of the Dutch oven here). Set a timer for 15 minutes.

At the 15-minute mark, remove the covers and set them aside to cool. Bake the loaves uncovered for another 15 minutes. When the timer is up, turn the oven off and let the loaves sit in there for another five to ten minutes before removing them. Use the parchment to lift them. Allow them to cool before cutting with a serrated knife.

As you savor every bite of this Cranberry Pumpkin Nut Bread, remember that Appliance Rescue Service is here for all your home needs. Share your baking success on our Facebook page and feel free to contact us for any appliance-related queries at (214) 599-0055 or through our website. From repairs to routine maintenance, count on us for all your major appliance requirements. Let the lingering aroma of this delightful bread remind you that we're dedicated to ensuring your home runs smoothly.

Additional Reading 

Impress Your Guests with This Easy-to-Make Apple Pecan French Toast Bake

Escapee From New York: Chocolate Bagels

Household Hauntings: The Frightening Reality of Appliance Neglect

 Don't Let Your Home Become a Haunted House

We’re a day late, but still very much in the spooky spirit at Appliance Rescue Service HQ! We’ve waited all year long for our favorite holiday, and we’re back with some of the terrors that can plague your home. Now join us as we dive into a haunted Halloween story that could take place in your very own kitchen. 

It's a dark and stormy night, as any good Halloween should be. You are baking away in your kitchen, looking forward to handing out goodies for the few brave trick-or-treaters. All is quiet in your home, and it’s looking to be a good night. 

 When you start smelling smoke, you think it must be the cookies you have going in the oven. But no, your oven isn't up to temperature yet, and the cookies are still in front of you. You open up the oven, thinking maybe there's something burning on the bottom, but no, there's nothing there, and yet the smell of smoke is getting stronger. 

You rush around looking for the source, and you keep coming back to your oven. That's when you notice there's a flicker coming from behind. Your wiring finally gave out and caught fire during the preheating stage. 

You rush to turn off the oven and grab your emergency fire extinguisher that you keep handy. Nothing else caught fire; nothing else has been damaged, except for the back of your stove and a bit of your wall. But the smell is gone; the fire is gone. 

You take a deep breath thanking heaven that it's not as bad as it could have been. Except now you hear a dripping. Drip drip drip. You take a deep breath and hope that the trick-or-treaters will forgive you because it seems like there's yet another problem. You start to search, and you find that this time, there is an issue with your dishwasher. It's a matter of your dishwasher valves having given out. You can't unplug it. You aren’t even sure where that plug is. 

So you rush to grab towels from your linen closet and throw them on the floor in front of it, praying that the damage won't be too bad and that you can catch it all in time. What else could possibly go wrong, you moan to yourself. 

Except it's Halloween, and that's a question you should never ask. As you kneel on the floor, picking up soaking wet towels to toss into the wash, there's a rattle, a rattle and a shake, and a vibrating unholy sound that is one part screaming metal and one part rattling of the chains of the Damned. 

You rush to your laundry room to find that it has rattled itself away from the wall and is even louder when you're standing in front of it. The clothes inside of it are perfectly fine, but you're not so certain about the wall. In rattling its way forward, your dryer has shaken down everything from the wall above it and is currently playing tug-of-war with both the electrical outlet and the vent housing. At this point, all you can do is pray that the lint catch has been cleaned recently and that it doesn't catch on fire as well. As you step forward to try and shove the dryer back into place, or maybe unplug it you, you slip. 

Your feet go out from under you, and you land smack on your back, feeling like you’ve been horribly maligned by someone designing a scene for one of the Final Destination movies. You stare up at the ceiling and notice that there are spots of mold creeping across your ceiling. Had they been there long? Were they the reason that this whole night had kicked off? Just one long hallucination induced by black mold? 

We hope you enjoyed that haunted tale, but take heed of the dangers that it represents. As taking care of your home and it’s needs means it will take care of you as well.  Other than the sounds that your dryer might make having been kicked up a little for narrative embellishment, everything we pointed out as a potential failure point for a non-maintained appliance can actually happen. All of these are issues that can occur in any home with any appliance. All of these spooky instances can and do happen in your home when appliances aren't cared for properly or regularly. Some appliances, like your oven or your dishwasher, might be able to get away with only yearly maintenance checks. Others, like your refrigerator, your dryer, or your ice maker, require more frequent checks, typically every 6 months if not every three. 

Appliance Rescue Service offers just that. We can work with you to set up a recurring maintenance schedule so that you don't have to worry about these issues. We review your appliances from top to bottom, looking for issues before they become hazardous to you or your home. If you're interested in finding out more about how we can work with you to ensure your home keeps running smoothly, you can give us a call at  ((214) 599-0055), or reach out to us through our website. We will work with you to set up a time that fits best with your schedule.

Additional Reading
Halloween Horrors in Your Home 

37 Reasons To Have Your Appliances Maintained Regularly

Purple People Eater Pieces

A Frightfully Fruitful Crumble From The Crypt

As we move closer to the best holiday of the year (no objections! - they'll just fall on deaf ears), it's time to start looking at creepy party recipes to feed a crowd of little ghouls, gremlins, goblins, or what have you.

Every year we try to conjure up at least one new spooky recipe. This year's is a dessert - purple people eater pieces.

It's a little bit pie and a little bit dump cake, and it's also a whole lot of mess if not carefully contained. So do be cautious in serving this one to littles or the spill-prone.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups frozen blueberries

1/2 cup frozen dragon fruit

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon five spice

1 container refrigerated biscuit dough

Tools:

large covered pot or Dutch oven

bowl

spoon

measuring cups and spoons

knife

cutting board

Begin with your blueberries - just scoop them out into a bowl. Your measurement doesn't have to be exact. Just get somewhere in the ballpark of a cup and a half.

Add the dragon fruit pieces to the blueberries. We know dragon fruit is not something you find in the produce aisle on a regular basis, but even in the middle of nowhere we were able to pick some up frozen at a big box store. We've also had the opportunity to grab fresh dragon fruit at a local family grocery store. If you don't have the same luck, fear not! Any red- or pink-hued fruit can sub in. Strawberry, cherry, cranberry, pomegranate, guava... Just know the color may not be so vibrant. Dragon fruit is rather exceptionally in-your-face pink.

Measure in your brown sugar and your five spice. We know the five spice doesn't look like much, but just a little of this stuff makes an impact. You'll know it's there.

Dump the bowl into the dutch oven. Measure the water into the same bowl to take up as much of the sugar, spice and fruit juice as possible, and pour it over the fruit and spices in the pan.

Turn the heat on low and give everything in the pan a good stir. The sugar should dissolve right off the bat, but it will take a bit for everything to heat through.

While waiting for it to come up to a simmer, grab your biscuit dough and pop the container open. Split them apart and put them on the cutting board, and cut your biscuits into pieces. We start with roughly quarters, then trim down a little from there. In our experience, there's always one biscuit in the package that's about three times the size of the rest on one side and squished down paper thin on the opposite. That one gets cut into a great many awkwardly shaped chunks.

Give the contents of the pan one more good stir, then drop your funny-shaped biscuit pieces on top of the fruit mixture. From this point on, do not stir.

Once you have your biscuit dough on top of the fruit, increase the heat to medium-low. Cover the pan and allow it to simmer untouched for 15-20 minutes. Stay close to the pan - the smell is the best indicator of when it's done. If you can smell the fruit and spices getting fragrant without lifting the lid on the pan, it's close to done. If you have a clear glass lid that's not too fogged up, it should look syrupy between the pale biscuit pieces.

When you feel like it's ready, turn the heat off and lift the lid. Allow it to breathe and set for five minutes before serving.

Serve in heaping scoops, with or without a little ice cream.

As our spooky culinary adventure comes to a delicious conclusion, we hope you've enjoyed crafting and savoring "Purple People Eater Pieces" as much as we've relished sharing this unearthly treat with you. Let us know over on our Facebook page how it was received! 

Halloween is a time for enchanting flavors and mysterious gatherings, but it can also be a season of unexpected surprises. If, amid the spectral celebrations, you find yourself in need of a visit from one of our trusted repair technicians at Appliance Rescue Service, don't hesitate to reach out at our website or by giving us a call ((214) 599-0055). Just as we've crafted this bewitching dessert to delight your taste buds, our skilled technicians are ready to ensure your appliances continue to perform their culinary magic, ensuring your celebrations remain seamless and your spooky feasts flawless. Wishing you a hauntingly good time this Halloween season!

Additional Reading:

Chocolate Pecan Cake for a Special Date

Sweet Veggie Tropical Curry

Explaining the Basics of Appliance Recycling

Why It Matters To You And The Planet

Imagine a world where every home, every neighborhood, and every city makes a conscious choice towards a greener, more sustainable future. A world where your old appliances, once destined for the scrapyard, find new life and purpose, reducing your energy bills, lessening the load on our aging power grids, and shielding our fragile environment from harm. This world isn't a distant dream; it's within reach, and the key to unlocking this greener reality lies in something you might have never considered - appliance recycling. In the pages ahead, we'll unravel the complexities of this vital practice and show you how, by recycling your appliances, you can become an eco-warrior, an economic champion, and a guardian of the planet. Welcome to the beginning of a journey towards a brighter, more sustainable tomorrow.

Unveiling Appliance Recycling: A Green Solution

Courtesy of Vlada Karpovich

Let's start by clarifying something: recycling, surprisingly, can mean a couple of different things when it comes to appliances. It might mean the resale or reusing of a unit, or it might mean the breaking down of the unit as far as possible and reselling the valuable scraps while everything else is sent on to a landfill. This second option is especially problematic, as it does not contain or safely dispose of the hazardous chemicals contained within the refrigerator. Our point here is that "recycling" can be a vague term that does not always line up with best environmental practices.

It is important to figure out how to recycle your appliances and how to do it safely, as the outcome is directly tied to your future health and that of everyone else. We all know that at this point.

The concept of reduce, reuse and recycle has probably been drilled into our collective consciousness for 30 plus years at this point - at least in the United States.

What most people don't know, though, is that recycling doesn't have to just be paying somebody else to take the appliance off your hands. In fact, there are several ways that recycling appliances can actually benefit you. By working with us through this four post series, we'll show you how you can benefit from recycling appliances, how the environment benefits, your partners you can look to in the process, and how to go about it.

Eco-Warriors Wanted: The Environmental Impact of Appliance Recycling

Now that we've told you why you want to be involved with recycling, let's take a look at the environmental impact of it.

The most obvious benefit of recycling household appliances is personal energy savings. The lower bill is nice, but especially nice is the knowledge that you're helping reduce overall usage in your area. 

Think of how often during the summer Texas has rolling brownouts because of the age of our electric grid. How often do you have to prioritize utilizing your washer versus running your air conditioner? Now think about if every household was able to switch over to modern, efficient, energy-saving appliances. Given that household appliances are among the biggest draws on the electric grid, you can see how beneficial this could be to Texas as a whole.

Now we won't say that industry, agriculture, entertainment venues or schools don't have their own impact on the grid. However, those things are much larger than our purview here at Appliance Rescue.

Recycling your major appliances allows for the recovery and reuse of materials. For every appliance that gets recycled and broken down, that's one less that has to be created from scratch. The energy isn't put into mining new materials from the Earth; the fuel isn't used for processing those materials. Instead, what has already been used can be reused, and the hard workers in our factories and appliance sections are still able to be paid.

Another benefit is that the recycling of these parts reduces the emission of harmful substances that negatively impact our ozone layer. 

In Texas, we are acutely aware of the heat every summer. You have days at a time where you're told "don't go outside if you can avoid it," because it is just that hot. We are more acutely aware of this than people in some of the farther north areas of the country. Part of the reason for the growing heat year-over-year is the impact we've already made on our ozone layer.

While we cannot go in-depth into all of the myriad things (both caused by humans and caused naturally by cycles within the Earth) that are affecting the ozone layer, we can say that the materials used within major appliances do affect it if allowed to just release into a landfill. If we could stop adding to that, we won't say that it's a miraculous cure for the heat - but it is one less step toward making it any hotter.

Another topic to consider is E-Waste. For the last decade or two, the concept of e-waste has started to filter into our understanding of recycling and issues with the environment.

Courtesy of Pixabay

Many of us wouldn't look at our appliances and think that they would be contributing to this problem. After all, e-waste is from things like cell phones, computers, tablets and gaming consoles - not your refrigerator or your oven, right?

Nope! As we shift towards smarter appliances, this means that your e-waste also includes your appliances. There are circuit boards within your stove. There are tablets built into your refrigerator. If you've got Wi-Fi connectivity, that requires its own set of bits and bobs built in, which means another layer to be conscious of when disposing of your appliances.

However, all of this e-waste contains valuable resources that can be reprocessed and reused. Metals, glass, plastics: all of these can be returned to a purified state and reused for making other materials, either for new appliances or for something else entirely.

Think back to science class as a kid. One day, if you were lucky, your teacher pulled out this beautiful silvery liquid to show the way that it could collect on surfaces, be manipulated, and then group back together easily at room temperature. And then, at the end of the display, you were told that although it looked like fun, it wasn't. It was definitely not something you could play with bare-handed because it would get into your skin, then into your bloodstream and from there into your brain.

Or maybe you remember learning about the story of Alice in Wonderland and the dark reasons why the Mad Hatter is mad in the first place.

Yes, we're talking about mercury. Mercury is in many older models of refrigerators; more of them than you might think. Unfortunately, when old refrigerators aren't recycled properly, that mercury does leech out of them and into the ground below. Then it works its way into the water, which then goes into the plants, on into animals... And while it does take time, just like microplastics, it eventually ends up in what you're eating. Even for all of our best attempts at eating organic, or fair trade, or vegan - without taking care of where materials are disposed of, it still circles back around. Everyone - elders from even the most isolated tribes all the way to scientists studying in their labs - will tell you on every level, everything is connected. Unfortunately, that means that if you feed the water table mercury, you will eventually be feeding it to yourself.

A final point to consider is that recycling major appliances or even minor ones as we'll cover in a later post, does not simply benefit you. It doesn't just benefit the planet. It also greatly impacts our economy in a positive way.

With the amount of trash that gets collected just in a single year, there is an amazing amount of job security. You need people to sort everything. You need people to handle the processing. You need people to handle extraction. All of these (and so many more) are necessary jobs that would not exist if not for recycling. More importantly, the industry can stand to grow further, given how little is actually being recycled as of right now.

By recycling your major appliances as a consumer, you are telling the industry as a whole that this is something that matters. You are saying that you want to ensure it continues, and that it is worth their time and resources to see it done more often or more thoroughly.

Not only do you support jobs when you recycle, you also support the creation of a circular economy. When things are broken, they have multiple options. Right now, you might look at it and see there are only two choices: take it to a landfill (and probably pay a fee), or call somebody like us and have it repaired.

But what about when it gets to the point that even our best technicians can't keep your appliances running any longer? It might not be that we don't know how to fix something, but instead that we don't have the materials or tools, or that the parts simply are not being made for this model any longer. At that point, a circular economy says, instead of sending this off to a landfill to become just another piece of garbage (taking up space and not having any use), the next step is to break it down. Take every single piece and material that we can out of this. Instead of having to purchase new, raw materials from a company that's going to rip them out of the Earth, we can reuse what we've already harvested. The circular economy is good for you the consumer, it's good for the economy of the United States, and it's good for the planet! Three wins in one.

Leading the Way: The Responsible Appliance Disposal (RAD) Program

If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed that at several points we touched on how few people or industries or companies recycle right now. We've also mentioned that recycling does not always mean the best environmental practices.That is where the Responsible Appliance Disposal, or RAD, program comes in.

They are a leader in responsible recycling practices. The RAD program was developed by the US environmental protection agencies partnership, launched in 2006 to protect our ozone, cut greenhouse gases and benefit communities like ours.

The RAD program recognizes partners all over the country who are committed to collecting and disposing of old appliances using the best practices. These partners are going well beyond what is currently required by federal law.

 They take on the responsibility to recover things like insolation foam out of  end-of-life appliances. They also collect the less efficient models of appliances from the secondary market. From here they work with recyclers to ensure that the materials are handled properly and broken down safely to comply with federal law. 

Together, we've uncovered the immense potential of appliance recycling and its profound impact on our world. As you embark on your journey towards a more sustainable lifestyle, remember that Appliance Rescue is here to support you every step of the way. When your faithful appliances are in need of care, trust our expert technicians to breathe new life into them, ensuring they serve you for years to come. Let's make recycling a part of our daily lives and embrace a future where both our planet and your appliances thrive. Join us in this eco-conscious mission, one repair at a time. 

You can reach out to us via our contact page or by giving us a call ((214) 599-0055). You can also connect with us on Facebook. 

Additional Resources For Things We’ve Mentioned Throughout :

Waste | Take Care of Texas

https://www.epa.gov/rad/responsible-appliance-disposal-rad-partners-affiliates-recyclers

Additional Reading: 

https://appliance-rescue-service.com/blog/appliance-disposal2023