Saturday Snack: peanut butter and jelly pockets

For the duration of VeganMofo, I'll feature some of my favorite snacks on Saturdays! I'm a big snack person. I get hungry often throughout the day and am always on the lookout for healthy, hearty snacks to bring to work or to slip into my purse. Whole Wheat Peanut Butter and Jelly Pockets from the Kitchn sounded right up my alley. Peanut butter and jelly inside whole-wheat-peanut-butter dough? Yesssss. While the linked-to recipe isn't already vegan, it is very easy to veganize: I swapped agave for the honey and soymilk for the milk. The non-peanut inclined can use any other type of nut/seed butter.

The recipe was delicious, but the steps for forming the pockets seem unnecessarily involved. I do not have the time or interest to thinly roll out 32 separate tiny sheets of dough! I followed the recipe's steps exactly for half of the pockets and decided it was 1.) a lot more complicated than the recipe makes it sound and 2.) a huge amount of work that whose only purpose is to make the pockets look cute. So I gave up on that, and instead shaped the second half of the pockets into mini PB&J calzones. It saved me a lot of work, tastes the same, and actually makes for less jelly leakage during cooking! So the recipe is a hit with me, though next time I'll use it only for the ingredients list, and I'll make up my own steps as I go along.

On the left, the shape you're supposed to make. On the right, my easier, much-recommended "calzone" shape.

This may seem obvious, but I didn't think of it for the first few: when you're applying the PB&J to the dough, start with the peanut butter. Trying to spread peanut butter on top of jelly on top of a soft dough was pointlessly messy and difficult. Also, a full tablespoon of jelly seems like a lot when you're making it, but the jelly sort of absorbs into the dough while it bakes, so anything less than the full amount will get lost.