From the Hound's Kitchen: Pina Colada Oatmeal Bars

I absolutely LOVE pineapple and coconut so when we discovered Mrs. Miller's Homemade Pineapple Jam at PA Dutch Tea & Spice I knew I had to adjust one of my favorite recipes into a Pina Colada style bar. The original recipe is from The Pioneer Woman and is called "Strawberry Oatmeal Bars"(click on the name to get to the original recipe). AND THEY ARE DELICIOUS! Seriously, these things are addicting- they don't last more than 2 days in our house.

Anyway, after discovering the intriguing Pineapple Jam I set out to start adjusting the oatmeal bars recipe into a new recipe full of tropical goodness, and here it is :

Ingredients:
- 1-3/4 sticks cold butter, cut into pieces
- 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1-1/2 cup Oats (quick or regular)
- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 tsp baking powder
-1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 jar Mrs. Miller's Homemade Pineapple Jar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9 x 13 baking dish

 Mix together the flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt and coconut. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter until it resembles coarse crumbs*. Sprinkle half the mixture into the pan and pat lightly to pack it a little tight.  Spoon preserves evenly over the surface, then use a dinner knife to carefully spread it around **. Sprinkle the other half of the oat mixture over the top and pat lightly again.

Bake until light golden brown on top, about 30-40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool in the pan.

When cool cut into squares and serve.

* Our pastry cutter broke a couple weeks ago and I have yet to replace it. So what I did was I used the biggest holes on my cheese grater and grated the butter. This worked well and if you are in a pinch I say go a head, but on a regular basis I would not recommend this as it was a pain in the butt of a process.

** Because of the consistency of the Pineapple Jam, it didn't really spread well so I used my fingers to press the jam around to spread it. If I tried spreading it, it would pull up the mixture underneath.

One of the things I think I will try next time is melting white chocolate chips and drizzling it over the top to make it more of a dessert bar. The bars are also delicious crumbled over ice cream.

The Pioneers Woman's recipe is also in the back of her new picture book Charlie Goes to School which is an adorable story about Charlie, her basset hound, starting a school for the animals on the ranch. I highly recommend the book as well.

Organizing: Pots & Pans

Every now and then, Dork_Syd or I get the urge to organize, or re-arrange something. A couple weeks ago Dork_Syd got that urge about our living room/kitchen furniture and rearranged everything (with help from me once I got home from work). A week ago, about an hour before I had to leave for work I got a similar urge- only mine was to organize the pot cabinet. I really don't know why I had that undeniable urge, but I did. It might have been triggered by noticing a dent in one of the pot lids that came from pots falling over on top of it (but that is a guess). I remembered seeing a post on pinterest that suggested using command strips and hooks to hang the lids. Of course, I didn't pin that post apparently because now I can't find it. But there you go.

So anyway, an hour before I had to leave I got that urge and I went with it. I grabbed my tin of command strips and extra hooks and pulled everything out of the cabinet and proceeded to match up the size of the hooks with the lids. I ended up short so I have one pot lid that doesn't have a home on the door but that is ok. One is much better than the large number I had before.

Once I got the idea of the hook sizes needed for each lid, I attached the hooks to the door and tested the hang of the lids. I ended up having to move around a couple of the hooks- so it was a good thing I had extra strips because I needed a few of them! The first couple times I had the hooks too close together so the lids just toppled over. After a few mis-sticks I got the hang of it and finished up quickly! I put all the lids in their places, put the pots away and went off to work!

It was a quick and easy project that left that kitchen cabinet much neater! Now it's so much easier to find the lids that I need!

Flower bed number two!

For most people the 4th of July is a day for fireworks and cookouts and generally being lazy. Not so for Dork_syd and me! We are very lucky to have friends who were willing to come over on a holiday and help with the process of boxing in our flower beds. About a month ago the same friends came over and helped up with boxing in the first of the front flower beds- see the post about that here - this time the focus was on the right side as you look at our house.

This is a close up of the flower bed before ---->
we started working on it- even before we put mulched leaves down to help us visualize the size we wanted the flower bed to be. It's hard to tell from the picture but the side yard- and really the yard around the flower bed as a whole- slopes A LOT. Because of this the guys figured out the edge of this flower bed is going to have to be stair stepped because the top of the slope is higher than the front of the flower bed.  When they discovered that it slowed work down a bit because now not only did they have to dig out the basic trench that the landscape timbers would go in- they had to figure out the placement of the timbers and it proved to be a much more in depth process than it was for the first flower bed.

So between the heat and the difficulty of this side- and the fact that both of the guys had to work the next day they decided to make this flower bed a two-part process. Once they decided on that path they focused on figuring out and laying out the main frame work- cutting a minimal number of timbers since the measurements are likely to change once they are fastened down. When we gather for the finishing of the flower bed the guys just have to pull out all the timbers (explode them!) and work on drilling the holes for the re-bar support and nail them all down, cutting the timbers as they go.  I am very excited about the flower beds! Even not finished the front of the house is looking better and better!

After the flower beds are finished we will be working on pulling up the bushes since one of them is not there at all any more (it's asymmetrical -ARG!)and because the way they are growing I can't even trim them all to look the same without making the ones on the right bring to mind Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. We will then be looking into getting dirt/top soil to fill in the flower beds and the holes make from the roots. Planting will not happen until the spring most likely. We haven't 100% finalized what we're going to put in the flower beds but we're thinking of focusing on spreading plants, Dork_Syd would really like to put in some juniper bushes (which I'm good with) and I would like to put in some phlox. My parents have them and when they are in bloom they tend to grow over into their ditch and I think it would be really pretty to have them draping over the front of the flower beds. We'll see- we can always move the plants to a different location if we end up not liking them in those flower beds :-)

A place to rest your head

Due to the awesome generosity of my department head at work I now have a hammock in our backyard. Once we got the ant invasion MOSTLY taken care of (some reappeared in force this weekend) I was able to actually spend some time in said hammock. By some time I mean I spent all afternoon in the hammock a couple weeks ago reading. That got me thinking that I needed an outdoor friendly pillow that I could leave outside if I so desired without worrying overmuch about damage due to the crazy amount of rain we've been getting here in VA recently. I remembered seeing an idea on pinterest that used kitchen towels and up-cycled plastic bags to make an outdoor pillow. So I decided to do that! Only I put a different crafty spin on it.

I have a LOT of yarn to use. So I decided instead of using dish towels I would crochet the case. So that's what I did! I chained 52 using a J hook and cotton yarn, half-double crocheted in the 3rd chain from hook and across. Chained 2 and turned and kept going until I had the length I wanted.. or in this case ran out of yarn.  I then made a matching back and crocheted three of the edges together with a single crochet.

I then pulled out the gigantic bin of plastic bags we had and dumped them out. I picked a bag that was closest to the size of the pillow case I made (in the future I will make the case to the size of a bag instead of having to find a bag the correct size). I then picked another back to go within the bigger bag- since the size of my case required a lot of bags- and started stuffing it with the plastic bags. I decided to fold the bags lengthwise so I could get more bags within the bag and therefore the case. When I filled it to the amount I wanted I folded over the top and stapled it in place. I put that stuffed bag within the other bag and made another stuffed bag. Once that was finished I stuffed it in the bag with the other one and stapled that shut. I placed the gigantic bag with the two stuffed bags into the case and crocheted the case shut. Check out the slide show below to see pictures of the process.




I haven't had an opportunity to use it since I completed it- its just been too hot- and then the ants invaded again. But I will! And if I leave it outside it won't be a big deal!