the home-front this week

It's been a pretty quiet week around the home-front (thank You, Lord). My rooommate was retreating this weekend, so that left a quiet weekend of Bountiful Basket pick-up-ing and nesting (in my experience with nesting, it always gets worse before it gets better). Part of nesting was taking care of my new piece of furniture,

Isn't she SO pretty? I love china & table-linens, and this is such a good home for them! I got it at an incredibly good deal at a moving sale, and spent Saturday cleaning and buffing it.

It's about 100 years old (the glass is a little loose so I have to tread lightly with it till I get it fixed/retaped), and has cool things like two of the compartments being bins. Bonus is that it fits in well with the dining room! It still has plenty of space in it too...

On Pinterest I had seen this pin saying that if you put a wooden spoon on a boiling pot of water that it wouldn't boil over. On Saturday while I was cooking I tried this and look!

It worked! Well, mostly. I had put the spoon on and was marveling at it working, so I went and grabbed the camera for these photos. Then, as I was turning around to put my camera up I heard a little sizzle as there was a bit of overflow, but still, nothing in excess. I was impressed!

And my Bountiful Basket this week!

I have made nothing special with it. I made best broccoli and microwaved a potato one night, apples and bananas have gone with breakfast/lunch, I am making a citrus fruit salad and a green salad for school on Thursday, and that's about it. I'm not crazy about the mango (they hurt my teeth), so I'm pondering what to do with them still.

Hope you're having a good week!

pop-tarts!

Let me begin with I HATE pop-tarts. I avoid processed food and since those are about 100% processed, they never come home with me. But one day day a few weeks ago while Pinterest surfing I came across a recipe for homemade pop-tarts. Disdain for pop-tarts aside, the cuteness just called to me.

To begin, giving credit where credit is due, I used this recipe as my guide.

Gathering Ingredients

Pie-crust. I didn't have time to make my own pie crust (which I'm looking forward to doing next time), so I selected this from Earth Fare:

It was easy to use! And they are not kidding about letting it get to room temperature before using. Impatience made my first round a little rough.

I used this jam (product shout-out: this jam. OMG. This brand was on sale a few months ago at Earth Fare so I picked up a jar and I won't use anything else now. It is out of this world good).

And for my glaze I put in about 3/4 cup of powdered sugar and added milk till it looked right. My glaze was a little thin, but it was still good! (And the sugar crystals were necessary. They have to be pretty!)

Construction

The steps were fairly easy:

-Cut pie crust into one big square, and cut into smaller squares of the same size. There was a lot of size variance in my pop-tarts, and my favorites ended up being the smaller ones

*I put all the dough scraps in a pile and rolled them out into more squares so I wouldn't waste any dough (literally and financially, hah hah)

-Put jam in the middle

*Note, it speeds up the process to put jam on a whole row, not one at a time, stop, crimp, carry on, etc. It took me about 10 or so to catch onto that short-cut.

*The recipe said to put 1 tsp. of jam in the center but that was way to much for the smaller ones I was making, so just eye it. I probably put about a 1/2 tsp in each of mine.

-Crimp the dough around the edges to seal

*I did not have a dough crimper, so I crimped it with the end of a fork.

*Some overflowed, others didn't. I baked them on parchment paper so clean-up was easy.

-Bake at 400-something for 8 minutes,

-Put glaze on top (I did 2 coats with a silicon food brush), sprinkle with sprinkles, let harden, and done!

They were really good, and I'm looking forward to making them again!