Impromptu Pie/Tart/Delicious Thing

 Yesterday I did not want to cook. I had the beginnings of a headache and just felt lazy.  Yesterday morning I had seriously contemplated staying in bed and taking the kids to school late.  Alas, I am a compulsive rule-follower(although not a recipe follower) and just couldn't do it.  Instead I dragged my sorry bottom out of my nice warm bed and hustled my little monkeys off to school.  Then I spent the rest of the day longing to go back to bed.  This did not make for good cooking inspiration.

 But we're trying to be extra-careful with our finances this month and it didn't seem right to make my poor hubby cook.  So instead I made him a great big mess to clean up.  I'm sweet like that.  A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this recipe for wiener rolls.  Zane really likes hot dogs wrapped in Pilsbury Dough so I decided to give this a try.  Since it was a recipe for Zane, I made him help. Of course, if one sibling is helping, the others have to be involved too.   Kian helped add ingredients to the food processor, including the flour I had set aside for flouring the table.  Aris helped roll out the dough. ( I am loving having children that are old enough to help and bake.  Aris can make cookies mostly by herself).  Zane proudly wrapped up the wiener pieces in dough as well as measuring out the flour and pushing buttons on the food processor.

 We had leftover dough that I was going to let Aris play with later.  She likes to make tarts with the dough scraps.  But then I remembered our drawer full of apples.  After asking permission to use her dough, I rerolled it out, sliced up some apples, shook out what turned out to be frozen sour cherries(I thought they were cranberries) and sprinkled with brown sugar and cardamom.   Although I would use different dough, I am definitely making this again. The flavours blended well, with little chunks of brown sugar on top since I was in too much pain to stir it.  Some of the apple juices cooked down into apple butter on the pan.  It was perfect!  So perfect in fact that Steve and I polished off most of the apple tart/open-faced pie all by ourselves. Our kids were engrossed in a computer game and didn't even notice that we had pie until this morning.   We were enjoying it so much that we didn't want to share.

 Sometimes it pays to make myself cook. :)