Not quite a foodie...

Today is my last quiet day for several months.  My husband is at shift, all 3 kids are at school and I am enjoying it.  It's rainy & windy outside so I don't feel guilty for spending the day indoors, my office work is caught up for the moment and I figured out how to play my iTunes through the surround sound!  Bonus!

So...what am I doing with these few precious hours?  Baking.  Cuz I like it.  I enjoy being in the kitchen and creating good (hopefully) things for us to eat.  So far today I've made individual apple pies with carmel icing and apple cinnamon rolls with the same carmel icing.  I really like the icing, ok?  Well, truthfully, only half the apple cinnamon rolls have icing because I ran out.  And I may or may not have run out because I was eating it on graham crackers while waiting for the dough to rise.  Or maybe the cats ate it.  But probably it was me.

The apple pies were supposed to be homemade pop tarts but I figured if I called them that the kids would want to eat them for breakfast and while I have fed my kids some interesting things for breakfast, I do have standards people!  Although, in a valiant effort to offset the icing, I made the crust whole wheat with flax seed.  On the great nutritional balancing scale that has to be worth something, right?  Plus the applesauce filling was my homemade low-sugar applesauce.  See, that's nutrition!  Maybe they will be breakfast tomorrow morning...

The apple cinnamon rolls turned out really well.  It's a new recipe and the dough was really soft so I thought I had messed it up but they turned out nice and light.  Again the filling was my applesauce with grated apples added to it and then cinnamon sugar sprinkled over that before rolling them all up.  Nummy!

I posted my food pics but I'm not really a 'Foodie".  I don't spend my days experimenting with new cooking techniques and ingredients.  I just like to bake.  And I make a mess when I do it.

No Martha Stewart kitchen here...there are no perfect plates of carefully shaped cookies or vases of flowers or bowls of fruit too beautiful to eat.  Almost all of my plates are chipped and my favorite vase is an old molasses bottle and we have an empty fruit basket at the moment (payday is tomorrow...yeah!).  Mine is a small kitchen with minimal storage and comically sloping formica countertops.  And there's a melted spot in the linoleum where I spilled hot candy syrup two Christmas's ago when making hard candies.

But my kitchen can produce lots of great and imperfect treats and meals.  It's where I put up countless quarts of applesauce and corn and berries and jam.  It's where my kids are learning to cook and bake.  Every Thanksgiving it's full to the brim...every inch of counter space is covered with pots and pans and platters.  And, most importantly, it's where we all hang out.  Even when we have company over,  everyone seems to just hang around the kitchen and visit.

So eat your heart out Martha...my kitchen is awesome.