A day off.....

The day off began (mostly) with breakfast at Humpty's. It was a sunny/cloudy/sunny/cloudy kind of morning and our raven friends were out having breadfast too, on 2nd Avenue.

This was followed by a - "shall we try going in to Superstore???!!!"trip. We went. It wasn't bad at all. I think everyone else was thinking that they wouldn't think about going to Superstore at noon on a Saturday in December either, but we dared to venture. We amazingly gathered up our few things without crowds and clouds of people, and hit the check-out in record time!

Next....the baking.

Husband cut out a recipe from the local newspaper: "Glazed Apple-Ricotta Tarts". Sounded really good...........not to mention 'healthy'....

WE had to try them out. Quite the procedure. It involved many apples, Ricotta cheese, apple brandy (which we substituted with apple cider), apple jelly (naturally), lemon zest and of course, my made-from-scratch pastry (is there any other???:-)

I THOUGHT husband had all ingrediends as this was HIS recipe. Nope. Another trip. This time to Safeway. I made pastry while he made his second trip.

Peeled and peeled and peeled and peeled. Apples done. Crust done. Make filling.

I put the Ricotta cheese in with the apples and cider and lemon and I started them cooking on the stove..........

The cheese was curdling.........then I read further into the recipe. ONLY PUT THE CHEESE IN AFTER THE APPLES ARE COOKED AND COOLED. Shoot. I knew I should have read the whole dang thing. Oh well.

My philosophy was, after we both chided ourselves for NOT reading the entire recipe, that since it had all healthy ingredients....apples, cheese, lemon, apple jelly.......that even if the stupid things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, we'd eat 'em anyway.

The cooked apple mixture was delicately placed into each tart shell, uncooked apple slivers placed on top of that and then a teaspoon of melted apple jelly poured over each-and-every-single-ding-dang tart.

I could see disaster happening. The jelly was overflowing down the outsides of the tart shells.

Sugar + heat = burn

All cooked and out the oven. Around and around each tart with a knife to get the burned shells out of the pans. We had one fatility. They don't taste too bad actually.....and very healthy, we reminded ourselves.

Between cooking/cooling/pouring/scraping the healthy apple tarts, we also found time to make some raspberry tarts (daughter loves those) and some teeny-tiny-iddy-biddy tart shells for the lemon curd we shall make......one day.

FFFWWWUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMPPPPPPPPPP!!!

That was a pound of lard settling nicely on each of my hips.......