Hey, where'd that sun go?

Despite the imminent snow forecasted for today and tomorrow, we' had yet another lovely weekend. I think, if we have to keep see-sawing between winter and spring weather, I like our current mix of cold, bitter weekdays (when I'm stuck in my window-less office) and warm, sunny weekends when I can go out and play. With the previous weekend being a long weekend, the weather gods decided to take that into consideration and gave us a lovely Friday, too!

On Friday Mr. Broccoli and I went to mosque with his family. There isn't really an equivelent to East in Islam, but because everyone gets the day off it tends to be one of the days when everyone goes to Friday service. We didn't balance this off by attending church on Sunday, but when we have kids that will definitely be the rule. Before mosque we spent about an hour and his parents' house so that I could go through the picture boxes with Mr. Broccoli's mother. My mom wants to do a slideshow during the reception and has asked for pictures of my sweetie growing up. I ended up taking all the boxes and albums home and I will hve a phone conference with my mom sometime this weekend to decide which ones she wants.

The rest of the weekend was taking up with my fierce and sudden urge to nest. All I wanted to do was spring cleaning, so I did several loads of laundry, some organizing of my craft studio, and some baking. I'd like to get into the habit of baking every weekend. I made some crepe batter, which I promptly forgot about in the fridge, and pie crust dough. The crepe batter will keep for a few more days, so I'll need to make the crepes some weeknight this week. Ihope to keep a batch of cooked crepes in the fridge for quick breakfasts.

The pie crust was an experiment of sorts. I took the recipe from a 1970s book about cooking food for the freezer. I got it at a church sale and I love how it refers to freezers as brand new technology and even has a chapter on why you would want to bother buying one. I substitued whole wheat flour for white in the hopes of making it more nutricious (Mr. Broccoli is trying to lose weight), but it turns out the whole wheat flour isn't as easy to work with. It took more water than the recipe called for to make it ball up without crumbling in my hands (and I still didn't quite overcome this) and it baked into a much denser crust. I wanted to make little mini pie crusts to use some of my homemade caramel apple jam as filling, but the only circular cookie cutter I had was smaller than the tart molds so I ended up with all kinds of little slightly curved disks of whole wheat crust. Hmmm, not quite what I was going for. Next time, I'll use white flour so I can get a sense of what it's supposed to come out like and then maybe experiment with substituting part amounts of whole wheat flour. I'll also need to get a larger circlular cutter of some sort. Maybe an aluminum can. I'm still eating the little disks with apple jam for breakfast.