Just another day in baker's paradise

I decided to branch out on my bread making. Since getting the Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day book, I'd only tried out one master recipe. So, I decided to give another one a go. This time, I tried the Hearty Whole Wheat Sandwich Loaf. This recipe contained the same primary ingredients as the Soft Whole Wheat, but with a higher wheat ratio and no honey.
Here's the dough rising. It looked a little sad, in my opinion.

And the finished product. I have to say, not wildly impressed. It was too hard on the outside. And the inside was too dense and too crumbly to be good for sandwiches. It was ok as toast, but I'm not going to bake bread specifically to use as toast.

I thought perhaps there had been some error in baking on my part, so when I used the second half of the dough, I skipped the steam portion, and cut the baking time. But same problem. Too hard, too crumbly. Iwon't make this dough again, at least not as sandwich bread. Maybe as garlic knots or some of the other suggestions for the dough. But we'll see. With so many available options, no point in spending too much time on one that doesn't work for me.

The same day as the bread I decided to make chocolate chip cookies. I LOVE chocolate chip cookies. But, I know they're not all that good for you(although also not all that bad if you know what you're putting in them).

As I've mentioned before, we don't use any Nestle products, or any products owned by Nestle(like Gerber, betcha didn't know that one!). But there is something to be said for the Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe. And I have no problem using the recipe so long as I'm not using any of their products. Upon suggestion of another site, I decided to modify the recipe and use half the amount of butter it called for. And, as usual, I skipped the nuts.

Very nice looking cookies! And guess what?! They tasted really good, too!
Now that I've tried with half the butter, I don't intend to go back. The taste was not affected negatively. The cookies were able to bake without overly browning. The other blog(if I remember it, I'll post the link), also suggested using half wheat flour, so I'll try that the next time. Can't hurt!

Tea cookies and muscle fuel

I'm getting back on the baking bandwagon. I didn't get anything done while I wasn't feeling well, so it was a good thing we had enough on hand to get through without taking too desperate of measures.

This week I wanted to make a non-chocolate cookie as I have it in my plans to make peanut butter and chocolate granola bars(probably tomorrow). So I did some internet browsing and came up with a recipe for Swedish Butter Cookies from Taste of Home. Now, I have no idea if there is anything remotely Swedish about these, but that's what they call it.

The nice thing about this recipe is it calls for only very basic ingredients that you're likely to have on hand all the time.

Swedish Butter Cookies Recipe

I started with the ingredients. As I said, very basic. Do notice that I'm still using white sugar and regular white flour. I'm working on using up my more 'conventional' ingredients. I don't want to just throw things out, but I won't be rebuying things like this if I can help it.

He loves to mix. I would almost say that Ansel lives to mix! We did eventually have a melt down when the dough got to the point that he couldn't mix it.

The dough. It was sort of dry, but I packed it down and it got sticky enough.

Dough rolled out. It was sort of like rolling playdough, but not as forgiving. This would be fun for an older child(Kadin would have been ok with, but no way Ansel could have gotten it to stick together).

The cookies baked, cooling, and sugared. I would have taken a picture when it came out of the oven, but one of the tips I read said to cut the cookies immediately, so I made sure to do that.

They're basically crispy, buttery sugar cookies. I think they're good, but I don't know that I'd remake them. Not when there's so many other cookie options. I like that they're small, so I don't feel bad letting Ansel eat one or two here or there.

My husband has a thing for protein bars. His favorite has actually been more of a nutrition bar, namely the Zone Perfect Strawberry Yogurt Bar. I'm now left to wonder.... has he read the ingredients on that? There's actually a couple of things in there that are rather alarming. So, of course, I wanted to make this myself. I think the idea originally occured when I was watching Alton Brown. So, of course, I tried his recipe first.

Alton Brown's Protein Bar Recipe

This is a lot of stuff. I had to go out of my way to buy a couple of things to make this, like oat bran(which I never would have thought to buy) and soy protein powder. And yes, that IS plain old Skippy peanut butter. As I mentioned up above in reference to the cookies... I'm using up some things I have already. I got a heck of a deal on Skippy peanut butter a while back and stocked up. I used the end of this jar making the protein bars, and then I have one more jar. After that, I'll be buying fresh peanut butter from the store I buy most of our food from.

The other interesting thing that happened is that we discovered Ansel likes to eat plain, cold tofu. Who knew?

There was a lot of mixing. Ansel got to help a lot. And I could have taken pictures, but.... the majority of time, it all looked like vomit. And... it was terribly unappetizing. You never would want to try any of this. I even thought about giving up at some point. So here's the dough right before I spread it in the pan. Oh! And here's a picture of the unfiltered apple juice I used. I forgot it in the ingredient shot.

These looked pretty good coming out. That's all fruit, not chocolate, by the way.

And cut and wrapped up. I actually cut it into sixteen servings. I froze some of them since there's no way my husband will eat sixteen in a week. And I'd really rather my kids not get too used to meal replacement items. They have the time to eat "real" food, and I'm the one who has to prepare it for them anyway. So why the heck not?

And that's it for that! I did actually manage to also make dinner on this day. We had steak, baked potatoes, and salad. Very imaginative, don't you think?

Getting started with snacks

Ordinarily Monday is my grocery shopping day. But this past Monday was a very rainy day, and there wasn't anything I was in dire need of, so, I decided to bake instead. First items.... granola bars and cookies.

Ansel has a real 'thing' for granola bars. He requests "bars" with a strong Jersey-like accent which is tremendously endearing and makes it very hard to say no. If you DO say no, his new go-to line is, "But I'm SO hungry," and shoots you this sad, puppy dog look and you just can't say no. So the least I could do was make a healthy, affordable bar option for him. And heck, for the rest of us! I saw Alton Brown make granola bars on his show once, and ever since then I've had it in the back of my head to try his recipe. So that's what I did.

Alton Brown's Granola Bar Recipe


Now, one must always(in my opinion) start with a tidy kitchen. My smallest helper was happy to pitch in.

All of the dry ingredients have to be toasted. This was great because Ansel was able to help with all of it, and he had a blast spreading it on the cookie sheet. This is oats, raw sunflower seeds, wheat germ, and almonds. The recipe called for sliced, but we had slivered. Close enough!
I should have taken a picture of this sooner, but you mix the sugars and wet ingredients and combine on the stove. It only took a minute or two and smelled really good! I used a berry mix for fruit. I think it would be easy to sub in chocolate chips, but things might get a little gooey.

Everything gets spread into a pan(recipe called for 9x9 but I had 8x8) and baked.

And while things bake, you start to clean up!

Finished product! Basically, you let the granola cool after you pull it out of the oven. It took several hours to no longer be warm. Then cut into bars. This made a dozen generous sized bars for us.

I was still feeling like baking, and since the kitchen was already a bit messy, we decided to launch straight into cookies. Oatmeal chocolate chip was our first undertaking. I have a fair bit of cookie making experience. Oatmeal has always been a favorite, and I try to justify that it's almost, sort of, a little bit like eating oatmal. Somewhere deep down, right? But we also have a lot of oats we've had a while that I want to use so I don't have to worry about them going bad. I followed the basic Quaker oatmeal recipe.

Quaker Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Mmmm.... butter! I love butter, and I am not afraid of it. I don't go out of my way to consume it in huge quantities, but I don't avoid it. I never use margarine. And I almost always use salted butter, unless a recipe specifically calls for unsalted butter.

Cookie dough well on its way. I used a full cup of milk chocolate chips. Note: I use Hershey's chocolate chips, not Nestle. I do not use any Nestle products of any kind(unless I slip up and don't realize that a product is owned by Nestle. I'll get into that eventually.).

I have a thing for parchment paper. It's not 'green' and I know that. But.... it makes everything come out better. And sometimes it saves my food from being burned or sticking, so it reduces food waste? Maybe? But you'll notice lots of parchment paper. (Also see granola cooling to the right).

Cookies in the oven. I don't know if baking on two tiers like this is exactly correct, but I do it because I'm impatient.

My dogs were not happy that they were being terribly neglected while I baked and baked and baked. Their crates are in the area that should be a breakfast room, except it's much too small to be a breakfast room, and putting a table in the place it should go(under the light) would obstruct traffic from getting out the back door or into the master bedroom. Can you say poor planning?
This is Ellie, our husky mix, shooting me pathetic looks.

And Teddy, our mastiff/St. Bernard mix puppy was so perturbed he couldn't even bother himself to move when I got down in his face with the camera.

He is ever so excited about the finished product. I mean, seriously, he is THRILLED!

And this is how much one batch is. I would, generally, give each kid two cookies at a time for a snack or dessert. And this would last us a week. Except, I ended up sending some with the husband to work for something they were doing there, so I may be making cookies again over the weekend. Only time will tell!

I store cookies in a glass cookie jar on the counter, back out of easy reach of small hands. If I bake up a batch and it's just a ridiculous amount, I freeze some in freezer Ziploc bags. Most cookies freeze and thaw very well.