Summer Tunes

Here are some sweet summer tunes I'm rocking out with on my summer vacation in Michigan.

On the Road Again - Willie Nelson

American Pie - Don McLean

Summertime - Sublime

The Joker - Steve Miller Band

Life's Been Good - The Eagles

Smoke on the Water - Deep Purple

Low Rider - War

Love her Madly - The Doors

Sweet Home Alabama - Lynard Skynard

Spirit in the Sky - Norman Greenbaum

Kid Rock - All Summer Long (of course this had to be included; A Michigan classic)

Can you tell I have an affinity for 70s classic rock?

What are you rocking out to these days? Leave a comment and let me know...

Homemade Poptarts

I love the idea of taking childhood favorites, and making them at home with better, more wholesome ingredients. I LOVED S'more PopTarts growing up, I just felt that they were perfection. I used to break of the edges, eat those, then slowly savor the middle. I haven't had a PopTart in years so when I searched google reader for recipes to use up an abundance of strawberries, and this great recipe from Smitten Kitchen popped up, I knew I had to put it on my recipe to do list.

Homemade Pop Tarts
Adapted from King Arthur Flour

Pastry
2 cups (8 1/2 ounces) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks or 8 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into pats
1 large egg
2 tablespoons (1 ounce) milk
1 additional large egg (to brush on pastry)

Cinnamon Filling (enough for 9 tarts)
1/2 cup (3 3/4 ounces) brown sugar
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, to taste
4 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1 large egg, to brush on pastry before filling

Jam Filling
3/4 cup (8 ounces) jam
1 tablespoon cornstarch mixed with 1 tablespoon cold water

Make the dough: Whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt. Work in the butter with your fingers, pastry blender or food processor until pea-sized lumps of butter are still visible, and the mixture holds together when you squeeze it. If you’ve used a food processor, transfer the mixture to a large bowl. Whisk the first egg and milk together and stir them into the dough, mixing just until everything is cohesive, kneading briefly on a well-floured counter if necessary.
Divide the dough in half (approximately 8 1/4 ounces each), shape each half into a smooth rectangle, about 3×5 inches. You can roll this out immediately (see Warm Kitchen note below) or wrap each half in plastic and refrigerate for up to 2 days.
Assemble the tarts: If the dough has been chilled, remove it from the refrigerator and allow it to soften and become workable, about 15 to 30 minutes. Place one piece on a lightly floured work surface, and roll it into a rectangle about 1/8″ thick, large enough that you can trim it to an even 9″ x 12″. Repeat with the second piece of dough. Set trimmings aside. Cut each piece of dough into thirds – you’ll form nine 3″ x 4″ rectangles.
Beat the additional egg and brush it over the entire surface of the first dough. This will be the “inside” of the tart; the egg is to help glue the lid on. Place a heaping tablespoon of filling into the center of each rectangle, keeping a bare 1/2-inch perimeter around it. Place a second rectangle of dough atop the first, using your fingertips to press firmly around the pocket of filling, sealing the dough well on all sides. Press the tines of a fork all around the edge of the rectangle. Repeat with remaining tarts.
Gently place the tarts on a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Prick the top of each tart multiple times with a fork; you want to make sure steam can escape, or the tarts will become billowy pillows rather than flat toaster pastries. Refrigerate the tarts (they don’t need to be covered) for 30 minutes, while you preheat your oven to 350°F.
 Bake the tarts: Remove the tarts form the fridge, and bake them for 20 to 25 minutes, until they’re a light golden brown. Cool in pan on rack.

Recipe and image via Smitten Kitchen

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Wordless Wednesday

Success

It's hard to define success when it comes to a blog. Is there such a thing? There are those blogs out there that are ad free and proud of it, blogging only to share their worlds with the rest of us. Then there are those with sponsors, product giveways, affiliate coupons, google adsense ads, and amazon associates store pages. I read both. For me, it's more about the content than the commercial, but I do enjoy a nice giveaway or links to products. I always try to tell myself that I blog for myself. But I can't seem to get over the fact that I'm not outright-amazing-quit-my-job successful with this whole blogging thing. I pour through my reader and find all these blogs with a thousand+ followers, sponsors, and freelance opportunities and wonder what magic formula I'm missing. My super computer brother Eric once said that if I could blog for a year, I would start to see some growth. Well it's been about a year and I have seen some. My radius has expanded outside of my family members and now includes some email subscribers and some who subscribe to the RSS feed. But, I still find myself checking my monetize tab daily in hopes of seeing a small jump in page impressions. Last Sunday, I hopped on to work on a post and found a nice new tab in my dashboard titled "stats" I combed through it excited to see that I had visits from all around the world and a whopping 800 page impressions a month. Energized, I decided to contact some friends with small businesses and ask if they would be interested in some free advertising as "sponsors" on my blog, excitedly sharing my magic number. So the next day I check my blog per my usual routine and the stats tab is gone. It felt like I dreamed the whole thing, like some delusions of grandeur. I hurriedly scoured the blogger help topics and nothing seemed to explain the appearance of this optimistic tab or it's subsequent disappearance. I did find a sentence somewhere stating the words "blogger stats" and "google analytics", so I signed up pasted the code and waited, eager to see the encouraging stats. I'm still waiting...

To me, my blog is similar in content to many of the blogs I follow. It may not be topic specific but it is narrowed down to a smattering of topics that appeal to myself and I imagine, other women. I played around with different designs and fonts but I kept coming back to the basic blogger "minima" with a few (painstaking) tweaks such as a three column layout. I want it to be classic and simple, how I've always seen myself. I tweet my posts on Twitter, I post them in my facebook status, I use all the feedburner tools I can find, and still, mediocre success. For someone who has had relatively immediate success throughout life with good grades, award winning sports teams and success in the workforce, this is hard.

Much harder than I thought.

Crochet Flower

I finished my first crochet project, a cute little flower to wear on Olive's chic black leather collar. While it may not be as lovely as my inspiration flower, I still think it turned it pretty well.

I'm also interested in becoming a blanketeer for Project Linus a nonprofit organization that provides "new, handmade, washable blankets to be given as gifts to seriously ill and traumatized children to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort"

I'd love to give something like this a try. Beautiful, but hopefully not overly ambitious.

image via curlsofsunshine

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