Category Fruit Creations

Homemade Pop Tarts are officially off the bucket list of homemade goodies to make. I’ve already tackled homemade pasta and homemade bread, now behold, the homemade pop tarts. Thanks to my daughter who ate the last store-bought pop tart this morning. When I threw the box out I told her we could make our own which got her so excited so I made the crust, stored it in the fridge for 2 hours, and told her to be patient. Because it doesn’t really take that long to bake pop tarts, I decided to wait until after dinner to continue the process. It was a nice incentive for my daughter to eat her dinner. “Dinner first, then we’ll make pop tarts.” It worked like a charm.

Making homemade pop tarts is surprisingly easy. All you really need is a tried and tested recipe for a pie crust, then pick whatever fillings you want. The most obvious choices for fillings are fruit jams. We’re lucky to still have a few jars of my mother-in-law’s homemade strawberry and blueberry jams so I used that as fillings. I used my trusted apple pie crust with additional tablespoon of sugar.

I’m quite fond of pairing up pork chops with fresh fruits sauteed in a little bit of butter. The natural sweetness from the fruits, like apples and peaches, gives that caramelized flavor enhanced with a bit of salt and pepper as seasonings. The traditional way of serving pork chops with apple is the pork chops & apple sauce combo. Well, I much prefer being able to actually bite into the fruit so I use sliced fruit instead.

For a different variation on the fruit as a sauteed side dish, I sometimes add sliced onions too. In this apple side dish, I added sliced green pepper too.

The weekend plans of making blueberry and strawberry waffles happened earlier than planned. As soon as I got fresh blueberries and strawberries the husband said why not have that for dinner instead of waiting for the weekend. Yes, why not indeed.

I prepared the batter, sliced the fruits, mixed them together, in 2 separate bowls, and even poured 5 oz of batter into the waffle maker to make 1 waffle but that’s as far as I went. My husband took over and well, he made the waffles. No complaints here. It’s always nice(sexy) having my husband in the kitchen to cook.

By the way,...

When there are fresh peaches in the fridge expect everyone in the family to ask if Mommy is making peach cobbler. Sometimes Mommy will answer, “perhaps”, and perhaps she’ll actually make it. Sometimes she’d rather eat the juicy fresh peaches as is since peach is her favorite fruit. And sometimes when she’s not being lazy, she’ll actually make cheesecake with peach compote topping. She’d make peach ice cream too someday once she gets an ice cream maker. While searching the archives here for a recipe of peach cobbler to link to, I couldn’t find one. I’ve made it so many times and I know I’ve posted them before but apparently not here but most definitely in the other food blogs I used to write for. So I might have to make a peach cobbler using the remaining peaches in the fridge to post here after all. In the meantime, here’s a recipe for Savory Pork Chops With Fresh Peaches & Onions that we enjoyed as tonight’s dinner.

While the cable/internet technician was doing his thing last Saturday I made myself scarce by perusing some of my cookbooks. I stumbled upon the recipe for apple cake from the Better Homes and Garden cookbook which was a gift from my mother-in-law. The instruction is easy enough and I don’t have to make frosting so I thought, why not? It would be a great after dinner dessert with coffee and the leftovers would be for breakfast, with coffee as well.

The recipe called for finely shredded lemon peel and apple sauce but I was lazy to shred lemon peel and don’t have applesauce so I skipped those ingredients. No biggie coz I didn’t miss the lemon and extra apple flavors. Just to make sure I’m doing it right, I checked online for similar recipes and found one from Big Bold Beautiful Food Blog which doesn’t call for lemon peel and applesauce.

I am ending the month of July, which happens to be National Blueberry Month with blueberry pancakes. But of course. Last weekend was the weekend my husband finally had the weekend off so we were able to do our traditional weekend breakfast. He even woke our daughter up so she could eat with us since “Mommy made breakfast.” Mommy doesn’t make breakfast everyday. She’ll tell you to get a bowl of cereal then point you towards the fridge to get the milk. So when she makes breakfast you better sit down and enjoy it. Because Emma Lyn is her Mother’s daughter, she went back to bed after eating her blueberry pancakes and sausage patties.

I used the silver dollar griddle cakes recipe from my Reader’s Digest Kitchen Secrets cookbook as the base for the pancakes. This recipe gave us 18 blueberry pancakes so there were leftover pancakes that were warmed up for lunch for the kids after they spent hours in the backyard pool.