Homemaker Monday: Blackberry Pie and Making Cookies With Your Toddler

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YOURS: This weeks "YOURS" goes to Tamy over at 3 Sides of Crazy. And she must be crazy! Just wait 'til you see how she has ALREADY prepared for the coming holiday season. For her holiday visitors, she ALREADY has meal plans laid out for nineteen days and has at least TEN of these meals ALREADY made and stored in her freezer, awaiting her company! She is SUPER-WOMAN!

...and to top it off, her kitchen looked like THIS when she was finished with her two-day cooking spree!


For Tamy's meal plans and recipes, click HERE. You are amazing, Tamy! Thanks for joining up here and we hope you have a wonderful holiday season! I KNOW you will!

MINE: Today I'd like to share a couple of ideas with you. The first one is the idea of a blackberry pie. Check out these beautiful berries I bought from my neighbor...


She even threw in an extra crate for good measure. After freezing most of the blackberries on cookie sheets, then putting them in Ziploc bags back into the freezer, I used five cups of the leftover blackberries to make one of these...


For the recipe, click HERE.
For a healthy and great-tasting pie crust how-to, click HERE.

The second idea I'd like to share is an easy way to let your toddler help make cookies.

After making any type of pie crust, you will have leftover dough. Since I am always trying to find a TV-free way to keep Johnny occupied so as not to perform experiments on the twins, I thought he might enjoy making cookies with the leftover dough. Here's what we did. I simply left the dough where it fell on the pillow case (if you're confused about why I was using a pillow case for my dough, click HERE), handed Johnny a butter knife and told him to start cutting the dough into cookies, like so...


That's weird. I just looked at the picture closely and realized he was using his left hand. Wow! Anyways, then I had him place his cookies on a greased cookie sheet, like so...


See the little finger prints where he smushed them onto the pan? At least they will be baked in a 400 degree oven. Next, together, we sprinkled the cookies with sugar and cinnamon...


...and put them in the oven with the blackberry pie for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until golden brown.


This took about twenty minutes for Johnny to complete, and that was twenty minutes that I didn't have to explain to Johnny why it's not a good thing to try to pump the baby's back with a bicycle pump.

I hope this works for you as well as it did for me!

OURS: All righty then, let's see what all of you handsome homemakers have to say today. Remember to check out what others wrote and leave lots of considerate comments. We all love comments, right? Have a great Homemaker Monday!



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