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I was finally able to make the pretzel rolls yesterday & they are wonderful!  Havoc has already declared I need to make them more often. I’ve made them a few times in the past with various recipes none of which thrilled me. This time I used one from Pioneer Woman’s Tasty Kitchen site. This is the printable page http://thepioneerwoman.com/tasty-kitchen/recipes/breads/pretzel-rolls-3/?print=1# But let me tell you a few things about it 1-½ cup Warm Water (110°F) – does it feel warm, but not hot to your finger? yes? then it is fine 1 package (1/4 Oz. Packet) Active Dry Yeast (not Quick Rise Yeast) – this is 2.25 teaspoons if you do yeast in bulk 2 teaspoons Sugar 4-½ cups Unbleached All-purpose Flour  2 teaspoons Kosher Salt 4 Tablespoons Unsalted Butter, melted ¼ cups Baking Soda 1 whole Egg, Lightly Beaten Pretzel Salt, To Sprinkle On Top I used regular sea salt instead of Kosher & large grain sea salt instead of pretzel salt because I ...

This takes the cake. Or, actually, it eliminates the bread. We all know I am a lazy slacker when it come to cleaning out and/or rotating the food in my house Much to my mom’s intense embarrassment I have shared the results of this particular failing numerous times on this blog The freezer The fridge The pantry The surprise Milanos So no one will be  at all shocked to learn I have done it AGAIN! And I outdid myself rather spectacularly this time. You might recall the 3 year’s expired bag of tater tots in the freezer last year, or the 3 year’s expired bag of pasta from the pantry back in January. Pshaw! 3 years? A mere 3? Amateur effort. Ladies & Gentleman I present my greatest find to date 7 years expired yeast! Go me! I switched over to bulk bag yeast around the time this expired & I keep that in the fridge rather than the baking cupboard like the packaged stuff. This must have fallen behind the baking soda or the Karo syrup or something ...

These are so easy to make. Just go get your favorite sugar cookie recipe & make it. (mine is from Joy of Cooking & includes cream cheese which makes a wonderful texture with these)   Then divide it into 4 sections. My cookie dough recipe makes 48 cookies so I divided it into 8 batches. This was a tad excessive. 4 or 5 would have been fine. Get your hands on some gel food coloring. It has to be gel if you want the vibrant colors. The drop kind of food coloring is pretty much useless for this. The colors are pale & it changes the texture slightly. How much gel? Just this much. Dip the toothpick into the container, swirl it around, pull it out, stick it in one of the dough batches, swirl it around and then stir the dough until the color is spread through out. Chill the doughs in plastic wrap in the fridge for a couple hours. Then divide it into small sections with a butter knife Take 3-4 different colors & put them together. You want a lump ...

I have a lot of cookbooks Plus two shelves in the living room, and a second stack of magazines on the other side of the island. That is a lot of meal ideas, and honestly they are pretty much useless to me shut up in those books where I cannot easily flip through the ones I like when I am doing my meal planning. So I have been slowly but surely (since 2004) moving the recipes I do like to my card catalog to save me time. My goal is to have all the books & Cook’s Illustrated in the card catalog and all the other magazine recipes torn out & put in a binder First I mark up the cookbooks Then I go through and copy the basic details to a card And I make notes on the card when I make the recipe. (I grew up with library books. You are absolutely not allowed to write in those & to this day I am afraid to make notes in books I own) Now I have to go through that stack of Cook’s Illustrated magazines (4 years worth) from the second photo & do the same thin...

I really don’t know why I make cookies before Christmas. The only people around are us and while I certainly think we should have cookies, perhaps it would be best to have fewer cookies. Or to just wait until after Christmas. I end up having to make twice as many cookies now. We have a big party on new year’s eve every year, ‘big’ being a relative term of course. Anywhere from 6 adults and 7 kids to 10 adults and 7 kids. Plenty of people to spread the cookie calories around. I made these Friday Cocoa peppermint cookies. There was one left when I went to get one Monday. The boys and I made these Sunday Gingerbread cookies. Trees, stockings, gingerbread men, dinos  & storm troopers. Cuz that’s how we roll. Maybe a quarter of them are left I also made these Saturday Peppermint bark crackers.  About half these are still around because I am the only real fan of peppermint bark in the house. Oh DH will eat them & now that the cocoa cookies are gone ...

We had a mouse problem recently. This meant putting sticky traps all over the cupboards & taking everything out of the cupboards, washing it or checking it for mouse contamination, washing the cupboards themselves & then putting everything back, but in better sealed containers. I should know by now that cleaning anything in my kitchen is bound to provide blog fodder & that I ought to go get my camera for ‘before’ photos before I start. I have no shame. I share my embarrassing bad housekeeping skills with the world willingly because even a bad example is still an example & someone may think to themselves “you know, it has been awhile since I cleaned out my fridge” & be inspired by me. That’s my story & I am sticking to it. My mom, right now, is cursing the day she joined Facebook and gained access to my blog feed. The snack cupboard held no surprises because everything in it is in heavy rotation. It gets emptied & filled regularly & at various...

For the ill prepared. Chocolate crackers 1. Realize you have a lot of graham crackers left over from the cookout. 2. Remember there was a cookie recipe for them in one of those mysteries with the really annoying sleuth that you have been reading & you copied it. Find it. 3. Lay out graham crackers on foil lined pan 4. Start 2 sticks of butter melting 5. Get one cup brown sugar   a. Realize there is no brown sugar in the house because *someone* (I’m looking at you DH) made cookies last week and did not tell you they used all the brown sugar   b. Google ‘brown sugar substitutes’ and find many proportional variations of ‘add molasses to white sugar’. Debate between 2t to 1 cup and .25c to 1 cup   c. Realize you aren’t just making cookies, you are also making blog fodder. Get your camera & channel the Pioneer Woman. 6. Remove 1T butter from pan. Add 1 cup white sugar and 1T molasses. Stir until melted together, bring to a boil and stir c...

(This was originally posted in 2008 but it happened to me again Monday so I am reposting it because it was such deja vu for me) Just a few. All I wanted was to make some breakfast burritos. I needed maybe 6 corn tortillas. Small ones, but knowing how these things go package wise, I accepted I'd probably end up with 12 large ones or 15 small ones & make enchiladas for dinner one night. HA! I was determined to get corn tortillas, not flour. I like corn better, especially for breakfast burritos. I run into Food Lion & scan the 'international food aisle' for tortillas. They only have taco shells and flour tortillas, so I head back to the refrigerated section. There I find corn tortillas. Except....they only come in bags of 100. Yeah 100 tortillas, when I need maybe 6. There are slots for bags of 36 tortillas and bags of 15 large sized tortillas, but the slots are empty. It's 100 tortillas or no tortillas. The boys were very into having breakfast burritos a...

So easy an unorganized ditz could do it. And I’ll prove it to you. Step one - get a quart sized mason jar Step one A – get a step ladder Step two - which probably should have been step one, find your recipe Step three - heat a quart of milk in the microwave to 180-185 degrees F in 2 minute increments, stirring each time. This takes about 6-7 minutes in my microwave. Get distracted by step 4 & fail to photograph step 3 Step four– search for thermometer to check the temp of the yogurt after first 2 minutes Find only cases and the long missing apple corer Step 4a – stick yogurt back in the microwave for another 2 minutes while you tear through every drawer in the kitchen until you come up with one of the thermometers. Step 4b – once yogurt reaches 180 degrees leave it to cool on the counter to 110-115 degrees. This takes about 45 minutes. Do not put the hot glass jar in the fridge! Trust me. Step five – gather your other ingredients (probably this...