This is how I Roll

I haven't done a cooking post in a super ridiculous long time... So here we go.

I am REALLY tired of commercial bread.  It has all these weird ingredients which totally goes against healthy eating.  I am all about making my family as healthy as possible, but yeast scares the living crap out of me.  Its SO much work to make the dang bread and most of the time what I get is less than stellar, and sometimes downright inedible.  Which sucks when I put all my proverbial eggs in one basket and try my hand at bread to go with the soup I am making.  If it sucks, we have no bread.  Which makes this carb lover unhappy.  My dad has a breadmaker, and while the results are edible, they are far from fabulous.  So I continued with the mystery ingredients until a better solution presented itself.  Enter my happy solution.

Exercising the new top front teeth

I got this recipe off of Pinterest, and then tweaked it to make it manageable for weeknight meals and made them whole wheat instead of white rolls.

Whole Wheat Buttercrust Rolls
Original recipe from Jenna on Eat, Live, Run


Ingredients:
4 1/2 t dry active yeast (2 packets)
1/4 c warm water (about 125 degrees)
1 1/4 c hot water
1/3 cup sugar
1 stick butter, softened
5T powdered buttermilk
1.5 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
3 c whole wheat flour
1 1/2-2 1/2 c all purpose flour plus more for dusting
2 eggs

1 egg yolk plus 1 T warm water for wash

1) Dissolve the yeast in the water and let sit for five minutes, until foamy.

2) While the yeast is activating, microwave the 1 1/4c of hot water until really hot/starting to boil. Add the butter, stirring so the butter melts completely. Add the sugar and stir till it dissolves. Let cool for 5-10 minutes.

3) Meanwhile, mix flours*, baking soda, salt, and powdered buttermilk in the bowl of a standing mixer (you can knead this by hand if you want, but it takes some serious time and effort). Pour in the yeast/water mixture, followed by the semi-cooled water/butter/sugar mixture, and finally the eggs. Knead by hand or with the dough hook on your standing mixer until smooth and elastic, about six minutes (perhaps longer if doing it by hand). Make sure the dry ingredients are being incorporated, and stir a bit if needed. Add flour if the dough seems really sticky. If using a mixer, turn the dough out onto the counter, and knead a few times by hand.  Form the dough into a ball

4) Lightly oil a bowl and plop the ball in, cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel (to prevent the dough from drying out) and place in a warm area to rise (about 80-90 degrees is ideal).  Let rise till doubled in size or about 1 hr.

5) Preheat oven to 375. Punch down dough on a lightly floured surface and divide into 2-oz balls (use a food scale or make small golf balls). Roll each ball into a rope and tie it into a knot, trying not to let the end stick out too much.

6) Line baking sheets with parchment paper, place rolls about 2" apart, and brush each one with the egg wash. Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown.


* Add the lesser amount of flour at first.  Flour in different climates in different seasons will have varying amounts of moisture in them. As the dough mixes, sprinkle the flour in a little at a time until the dough has the "right" consistency.  Its hard to explain what the right consistency is, but here goes: it should be sticky, but not SO sticky that you cannot get it off your hands and is impossible to work with.  This dough is a little wetter than some other bread doughs, so don't worry if it is a little stickier than you are used to.  Just flour your work surface and carry on. :-)

My 1 year old son LOVES these rolls and I admit, I am a big fan, too.  I made the white flour version for Thanksgiving, and then gave the half whole wheat flour a spin recently, and both came out just stellar.  I may swap out the egg wash for a butter wash just to see what they do, but they are really glossy and pretty this way.  Enjoy your preservative- and weird-ingredient-free bread!

Giant Soft Pretzel Skeleton

I used to be a massage therapist (seems like another life, really).  In my course of study, I learned all the bones of the body.  Well, I actually learned them in high school and then learned way MORE about them in massage school, but that makes me sound like too much of a nerd...  So when hubby came home a few weeks ago and asked if I could make him a snack to take to his office Halloween party, I immediately longed for an anatomically correct skeleton.  I am so tired of seeing incorrectly formed skeletons casually on display.  And I love eating and making soft pretzels.  It seemed like a match made in heaven!

I am not a total idiot, and I know that I will have to make some compromises on the anatomical accuracy.  For example, I am not going to make a hyoid bone.  (Look it up.)  Or a crapload of tarsals and carpals.  No one would recognize them in dough form anyway... :-)  But I can do better than the leg bone is connected to the other leg bone. The skeleton at least deserves to have a tibia and a fibula and a femur separated by a patella, right?

To make the skeleton somewhat proportional, Hubby and I looked up some art charts to see what the ratios are between body parts.  We found that 8 heads is about right for height, and the shoulders are about 3 head heights across (although not anatomically correct, the 8 head height looks better to the human eye, so we ran with that.  In reality its more like 6.5-7 heads, or so I read).  We wanted to fit the skeleton on 2 large cookie sheets that were 16" long each, so we used 4" as our "head height" and then used that as the basis for everything else.  I drew up a quick sketch of what the bones should look like so I had something to follow, and went to town on the pretzel dough!

my foot looks lame, but I ran out of room and can't really draw worth a darn...

Soft Pretzels
2 1/4 t yeast (one packet/envelope)
1 1/2 c water at about 110 degrees
1 t salt
1T sugar
4c flour
1 egg
coarse salt
extra flour for kneading and dusting

Combine yeast, water, salt, and sugar in a small bowl or measuring cup.  Allow the yeast to activate (bubbles should form).  Add yeast mixture to flour and knead.  Add flour until dough is not sticky, but still is a little tacky.  Knead until dough is silky.  Put dough in a bowl or leave on counter, cover it with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel, and allow it to rest for 10-15 minutes.  If you do not let the dough rest, it will be harder to roll out and will spring back on itself a LOT, so don't skip this step unless you want to fight with your shapes.  It will puff up a little from the yeast, but knead it a little and it will deflate again.

Kneading dough is therapeutic!

For the regular bones, I rolled the dough into ropes and cut it up, then shaped it as I wanted.  To roll the dough into ropes, start with your hands in the middle and roll them outwards away from one another.  If the dough is not tacky, it will not stick to the counter and will not roll nicely.  If this is the case, dampen your hands and continue to roll it.  Make sure you do NOT flour the surface you are rolling on or it will not work, either. :-)  My counter still had flour on it from kneading, so don't be confused!

Some of the bones, like the femur and humerus, I left very thick and created knobby "dog bone" ends by splitting the ends with a knife about 1 cm in and shaping each bit into a knobby ball.  The other bones I made of varying thicknesses as was appropriate and shaped them as needed.  Tip: use a butter knife to cut off the tapered ends after you roll the dough into ropes to keep more uniform thickness to your pieces.  

For the solid bones of the hip and skull, I rolled the dough out with a rolling pin and cut out the shape with a butter knife.  Once it was on the cookie sheet I smoothed the shapes a little with my hands.

I traced one hip bone to make the other so they looked kind of symmetrical.

For the patella, the "carpals" and "tarsals" I pulled a piece of dough out, rolled it in my hands, and flattened it into an appropriately shaped disc.

 

most of the upper skeleton and the hips

hands!

feet... only marginally better than my drawing... if even that.

Brush the pieces with egg, sprinkle with salt (if you want salt) and bake at 425 for 12-15 minutes.  You may want to bake the larger bones together and the smaller bones together on separate sheets and then rearrange them later, so you do not over or underbake certain ones.  Keep in mind that your bones will puff a little in the oven so you may want to space them a little farther than you will in the fully assembled skeleton, and you may want to adjust your dough shapes to make sure the puffing doesn't affect the overall look.

Much puffier now than before baking.  But much more beautifully golden!

I wanted to make a spicy cheese dip to go with this, but I was too sick this weekend to mess with it.  I am sending hubby with mustard instead.  All in all, this took a whole afternoon, but it was totally worth it because it was so fun and looked so cool!  We had a bit of dough left, so I baked that up and snacked on it while making dinner.

Originally I wanted the hips on the top sheet, but the hands took up too much space so I added some vertebrae and moved it to the bottom.  The feet STILL look lame.  Oh well.  I tried.

Of course, you could just make pretzels and forget the whole skeleton thing... They still taste just as good!

Baked Apples

Fall is here.  As much as I hate to say goodbye to the warmth of the summer sun, seasons are real in Wisconsin, and I have chosen to live here.  I CHOSE to live here?  I am an idiot.  But I digress.  With fall comes cooler temps, gorgeous colors, and a great excuse to heat the house with the oven.  So I get to do a lot more baking!  Also with fall comes fall tastes in the home - soups, cream, cinnamon, apples, squash... So many great things we don't get at other times of the year, right?  Hey, I am trying to look on the bright side, here.

As a kid growing up in California, I never had to deal with the extreme cold that is the north/midwest/hinterlands.  However, as it cooled outside, my dad and I did do a few things differently, mainly cooking warm things.  One of those was baked apples.  My dad was pretty much a fly by the seat of your pants cook (read: no planning and no training).  If he couldn't "throw" it together, we didn't eat it.  There is a reason I took over in the cooking department at a young age.  One thing he did make that totally rocked, though, was baked apples.  We would alternately make them in the oven or in the microwave depending on our patience level, but either way, the results were fabulous and for a seriously minimal amount of effort.  I set out to recreate this childhood favorite the way I remember it...

Baked Apples:
4 Granny smith apples (if you prefer, try a spicy apple such as a Mcintosh.  This does NOT lend itself well to soft or sweet apples like red delicious, although some people would argue with me)
Cinnamon
Brown sugar
Butter

1) Core the apples.  Score the peel with a paring knife down the sides in quarters and across the middle.

Bad drawing, but act like you were going to cut the apple in quarters and then in half across the middle, but only just score the peel.  It will  allow the juices to get out a little and make the apple easier to eat later.

Place them in an 8x8 baking dish.  If the bottoms are not flat on the bottom of the baking dish, cut a small slice off to make them sit flat.  This will keep the yumminess from leaking out.
2)  In the center of each apple, put 1T of brown sugar, about 1/4t cinnamon and 1T of butter.
3)  Put in 350 degree oven.  After 15-20 minutes of baking, check the apples.  They should have released some juices in the bottom of the pan.  Baste the apples with their juices and continue to bake, basting occasionally until apples are tender but not mushy, about one hour total depending on the size of your apples.
4) Cool the apples for about 5 minutes.  Using a spoon or solid spatula so you don't loose all the goodies inside, scoop the apples into a bowl.  Enjoy!

There are lots of variations - baking the apples in a little bit (1c or so) of OJ (add more sugar to this one or they will come out tart - granulated sugar works well), adding raisins or other dried fruit and various nuts to the mix, adding spices like nutmeg... Explore what you like and what your family likes.  You can serve them as is, with ice cream, whipped cream, or in just about any iteration.  This is so simple and will heat up your kitchen nicely for the cool evenings.  Its also a great way to make your house SMELL fantastic! :-)