Please excuse the lack of pictures in this post… it really has been a shit sort of day and I forgot to take photos of dinner tonight. I almost thought of blowing off NaBloPoMo because I didn’t particularly have anything decent to say to anyone and then dinner came out of the oven and I filled my tummy with comfort food.
Janice over at Knitting w/ Dogs pointed me to the Budget Bytes blog earlier in the week and I was totally impressed by the fact that the recipes are actually budget! I get really tired of these websites that call themselves budget conscious or money saving and you go there and they’re patting themselves on the back for getting through the week on like $100 (groceries only, non food items and eating out are extra) for 2 city dwelling vegetarians. While that’s great for them (and while I’ve got nothing against city dwelling vegetarians..) -it doesn’t really help those of us who for one reason or another aren’t vegetarians and don’t even have the luxury of the sort of weekly budget that they are “challenging” themselves to live on. The other extreme is often menus that are loaded down with mayonnaise filled casseroles and things that are deep fried… two things my family won’t eat.
We here at Chez Mousie live on a very tight grocery budget due to being a single income family and honestly, I’m sort of proud of how much money I can save us each week by shopping wisely and menu planning. Of course I’d love to have more weekly grocery money and be able to buy ‘extras’ like snack foods or better cuts of meat and organic produce but there is a hot meal on the table every night and for that I’m eternally thankful.
Tonight’s meal, the Cheesy Shepherd’s Pie from Budget Bytes was tasty, filling, and even provided some lunch leftovers after the 3 of us gorged ourselves stupid. Because I buy our meat in bulk when its on sale, omitted the cheese, and used bulk instant mashed potatoes instead of fresh I’m pretty sure that I cut down the cost of the recipe (not to mention the prep time) from the site by another few dollars.. making this a keeper for our family recipe book. I’ll even be able to use the open can of tomato paste for homemade spaghetti sauce in tomorrow’s dinner and I’ll freeze the remainder of the beef broth for another meal. The meal was a big hit with hubby and also Munchkin, who usually doesn’t care for the beef stew I used to make because the meat was sometimes tough (using stew meat) or ‘too stringy’ (beef roast) for his 8 year old taste buds.
Everyone in hubby’s family has a May birthday so we’ve been spending a lot of time over at MIL’s house for gatherings. I usually dislike being around the whole in-law clan (because they are all mouthy Conservative Christian Republicans and LOVE to argue politics) but I was in charge of helping hubby’s grandmother (who is the only decent one of the bunch) with the bbq. I’m always into learning how to make kick-ass food and believe me.. this woman can barbecue like nobody’s business!! The food was awesome (mmm.. grilled chicken…) and no one ended up dead, so I consider that a success. I also managed to squeeze the recipe for homemade Challah bread out of my SIL. She married into the Jewish faith and had some awesome ‘sisters’ where she lived who made their own EVERYTHING from scratch.. including challah for Sabbath.
After puttering around the house for a while yesterday I pulled out SIL’s challah recipe and gave it a go. I usually don’t have eggs in the house (which challah uses a few of) but I made brownies for hubby’s birthday last week and still had them in the fridge. I followed the directions and ended up with a whole bowl of sticky, soupy dough that would have just oozed down the counter rather than kneaded. I panicked, called SIL (who didn’t answer her phone), and then proceeded to dump flour into the bowl and stir until the stuff in the bowl resembled dough. When SIL did finally call back.. she was convinced that I had done something “wrong” but had no idea what — since she mostly watched the bread-making and didn’t actually do it herself. DOH! By this point the bread was rising in my “dough bucket” and I figured I would just ride it out and see what happened. I had already “wasted” the ingredients and had the oven pre-heating.
After a few pathetic attempts at a 4 strand braid (admittedly, I had never done a 4 strand braid and should probably try it on something other than giant wads of sticky dough) I gave up and did a simple 3 strand.. let it rise a second time, covered it in an egg wash, and threw it in the oven while silently hoping that it didn’t suck. The results?
It seriously didn’t suck. My husband has eaten over half the gigantic loaf between last night and today.. He usually doesn’t go that crazy for homemade bread but I couldn’t even keep him out of this! Totally a success- and it looks pretty too! The only thing I’ll do differently next time is to add more sugar so its sweeter – more like the Russian Easter bread (or “paska” as its called) I love so much.
(also.. if any bakers out there would like to tell me why the bread “cracked” like that on the top where the braiding crossed over and how I can avoid that next time.. I’d be very grateful. I’m thinking I might have “braided” it too tightly.)
Since I’ve been feeling dramatically less contagious I decided that I would get back into the kitchen, put on my flour covered apron, and see what I felt like making. People have been talking about Indian breads on the Indian Cooking forum on Ravelry and someone posted that they had tried a good online naan recipe.. so I went to check it out. Realizing that I had everything to make it AND the makings for a chickpea curry.. I set about making myself some garlic naan. A few rises, a fling with the George Foreman Grill (a pan worked much better.. but I saw this on one of the comments to the recipe and figured I’d give it a shot) and setting off every one of the smoke detectors in the house (oops).. I had this :
mmm… garlicky goodness. After I decided that the GFGrill wasn’t big enough and the naan were getting too thick I decided to use a skillet which is when I burned the crap outta the first naan and set off the smoke detectors. Sadly I have no photos of the skillet cooked naan because by that point I was too hungry and ended up just stuffing my face. The recipe made 10 naan (not counting the two I burned the crap out of) and I was only able to eat about 2 pieces before I started bloating. I have a ton left and will be eating leftover chickpea curry & naan for the next day or two… they taste just like the bread I loved from the Nepali restaurant in Colorado.
Sorry about the change of plans in the contest – I had things scheduled that fell through and decided to just extend the contest until I had some time to sit down and write a blog post. Figured it would give a few more people a chance to enter and that’s always a good thing, right? Ok.. on with the winner!
The winner- comment #11 was Lady Euphoria Deathwatch! Congrats – email me and let me know what you like and what your allergies are so that I can make you a gift box!
(BTW.. I did have to edit the comments before doing the Random # Generator because 2 people double commented and I wanted to keep it “one entry per person” so I combined and deleted. )
In other news… RAISIN BREAD!
I used the same KAF cinnamon swirl bread recipe that I had made earlier this month and added raisins into the dough after the first rise but before flattening it out to put the cinnamon topping on. There is a great blog post on the KAF blog about how to add in items into your loaves of bread – I added less than 1/2 cup of raisins into the dough and made sure to poke them down so they didn’t show outside the loaf- otherwise those would have burned while baking. I made sure to measure its first rise until it had doubled in size (which I didn’t do the first time.. ) and also made sure to let it rise the second time over the top of the loaf pan as stated in the directions. For the first rise of my dough I started using an old plastic 2qt. pitcher so that I can track the rise – just like those fancy “dough buckets” they sell on the KAF site. The results were a light and fluffy loaf of bread – nothing like the dense and heavy loaf I made the first time.. and eleven million times as awesome.
Speaking of cinnamon raisin bread… I am going to go slice myself another piece. The photo above was taken yesterday – I believe I’m going to have to make another loaf by the weekend for sure!
Seriously.. I sat here for about the last 10 minutes making myself giggle with possible titles for this post, but instead have decided to let you make your own. Go ahead.. have at it.
So, tomorrow is Easter – and while we don’t celebrate the religious part of it here at Chez Mousie, we do rock the “Look, a giant mutant bunny brought you a basket filled with sugar!!! wheeeeeee!” part of it for Munchkin. The bunny is a little short on cash this year so the basket contains dollar containers of bubble solution, vanilla sugar wafers, dollar chocolate & white chocolate bunnies, and a whole container of Transformers fruit snacks. I always sort of had a feeling that the one year that ‘the bunny’ brought my son a GI. Joe action figure (one of the big ones too.. ) would come back to bite us in the ass (thanks hubby.. I told you so.) eventually.
Along with the visit from Bunzilla we also spend the day with hubby’s family at his grandparent’s house, where we hide eggs for the kids (munchkin is the only kid there this year since ‘the cousins’ have moved to Florida) and I attempt to eat my weight in spiral honey baked ham. As with every family gathering, I’m required to bring a “dish” (which usually ends up being about THREE dishes.. but I’m not upset or anything *fumes*) of assigned food to the meal. Usually its something that my husband hates and that I’m sick of making.. like deviled eggs or rice pilaf. This year (with the fact that I’ve been totally sucked into the Cult of Bread) I decided that I would make homemade yeast dinner rolls because right now I’m having a lot of fun baking bread, and the normal family dinner cooking is usually a miserable chore.
Bread making? It totally rocks. I used this recipe from King Arthur Flour and added Italian dressing seasonings to it to make some kick ass herb rolls… and I even got them finished early enough in the day so that I could take some food-blog worthy macro shots! Two trays worth of dinner rolls (minus the one that Munchkin had to sample.. it was VERY good) that were stupid-simple to make and fun too (not to mention seriously food-model worthy)– what more could someone want? I can’ t wait to eat these tomorrow… I hope no one else wanted any bread. 
(If you are dieting.. you might want to sit this post out.. it contains gratuitous bread photos)
I’m sure you are probably wondering whether this place is turning into a baking blog.. and I’m starting to believe that the answer is YES. I have to admit that I’m getting pretty into baking bread and that I am finding it to be way more comforting than knitting and easier on my poor back than spinning.
This weekend while my husband was away I hit the King Arthur Flour website and found a recipe for Cinnamon Swirl Bread that looked like it could be fun. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly because we don’t have dry milk (is it the same as powdered milk? I don’t even know..) but I threw in some regular liquid type milk and went on with the recipe as stated, all while hoping for the best.
Obviously I am not an expert baker.. but what I came out with certainly LOOKS like cinnamon bread, it smells divine, and tastes pretty darn good! I did notice that my loaf didn’t rise as high as the one on the website and it is a little “dense” but I’m figuring that was because my liquid ratio was off (because of the dry/wet milk thing) and because my kitchen was cold and I got a little impatient on the second rise because I knew my husband was on his way home and I wanted to get this out for his arrival. Regardless, it tastes awesome and I’m all proud of myself because it has an actual cinnamon swirl inside JUST LIKE THE PHOTO ON THE WEBSITE. One of these days I’m going to learn how to take pretty photos of food just like those food blogger folks.
After making pizza on Monday I decided on Tuesday that I really wanted to make soft pretzels. I looked online and found a recipe which was modified from Martha Stewart… and spent some time making the dough. After dinner I rolled out the pretzels, “poached” them in a baking soda bath, gave them an egg wash, and threw them in the oven. Ten minutes later I had these:
Looked decent- tasted ugly
They looked pretty decent but they tasted like crap. I made a few cinnamon ones (you can see one on this tray in the upper left) which weren’t quite so bad but the plain pretzels were sour. Munchkin declared the pretzels “disgusting” and spat them out.. my husband refused to eat them. I threw them in the trash this morning.
Pretzel dough part 2
I spent part of the morning searching for for “Aunt Annie’s” style pretzels since the family requested “mall pretzels”… and since I clearly had something to prove. No pretzel was going to beat me!! After a few emails with baker & super-mama Faith I had my modified recipes and went into the kitchen to make some dough. After dinner I made more pretzels…
behold the awesome!
I ended up with 7 puffy pretzels (1 met with a terrible disaster in the baking soda bath) 3 plain (shown above) and 4 cinnamon sugar pretzels.
cinnamony sugar coma-y goodness
As you can see… there are only 2 cinnamon sugar coma pretzels left on the tray — that’s because Munchkin and I made ourselves sick on them directly out of the oven. They were SO good- if not a little bit under cooked. The plain pretzels were over-cooked but were still pretty tasty.. all in all a much better turn out than the last batch. If I make these again I will definitely be only making the cinnamon ones since no one in the house seems interested in the plain ones. I’m going to go sit on the couch and bloat now…
Wow, I can’t believe its been so long since I’ve last posted! Sadly, the most exciting thing that happened worth noting around Chez Mousie in the last two weeks was that I accidentally slammed an Exacto knife into my thumb a few nights ago while trying to remove the plastic wrapping off of a bottle of vitamins. Seriously folks, when bodily injury is the best subject you have for a blog post, you might be in trouble.
So, instead of offering up some more bodily injury.. I bring you a post about homemade pizza! (everyone all at once) mmmmmm…. pizza.
(click to embiggen)
I love to cook (nothing fancy- mostly slapped together curries, family favorites, and the occasional tv recipe) and I do like to make easy desserts and those boxed cakes & muffins.. but I would never ever call myself a baker. Truth be told, I’m pretty well terrified of any recipe that involves little yeasty beasties because I have heard all about the things you can do to absolutely ruin a loaf of bread. The only bread I’ve ever “baked” involved a weekend fling with a borrowed bread machine and packaged mixes… and believe me, it ended BADLY.
So, how did I end up with homemade pizza when I’m clearly a bit yeastophobic? I’m blaming my MIL & P*zza H*t – seriously. We don’t have a lot of money so in our house ‘delivery’ pizza (we pick it up to save on cost and always use coupons) is a once a month treat. At our last stop for pizza & movies night (yay Netflix..) my husband ran into ‘Pizza the Hut’ (does anyone else get this reference? ) and came out to tell me that our local PH is in the process of being bought out- and that the new owners will NOT be accepting ANY PH brand coupons even though the name will remain the same!! It was already a stretch for us to get pizza at the coupon price, so this new plan just torched us. We bought a garlic bread frozen pizza from the grocery store next door and went home to cook it.. vowing only to return to ‘the Hut’ for boneless wings, should the late night craving arise.
When I relayed this story to my mother-in-law, her (rather snide) response was “well.. what are you going to do, make your own pizza??” Yes, yes I am.. and mostly because you just insinuated that I couldn’t. Yesterday, while hubby was out doing odd jobs (boy, this economy SUCKS) I searched the internet for “easy pizza recipes” and hit on one from Hillybilly Housewife which looked like maybe even I could pull it off. The only ingredients I needed from the store were yeast, fresh mushrooms and some shredded mozzarella cheese… the canned tomatoes & tomato paste needed for my stupid-easy homemade sauce and the rest of the crust goodies were already in the pantry. The dough (which I had to set outside in the sun to rise b/c I feared it was too cold in the house for it) ended up getting just right and the family declared homemade Mousie Hut pizza to be a success. It was so much of a success that I ended up baking up the second batch of dough so that we could stuff ourselves stupid.. even Munchkin enjoyed helping. I’m definitely going to be baking our own homemade pizzas from now on.. and I’ve conquered a bit of my yeast bread fear in the process. Next up? Homemade soft pretzels!
This is the part where I distract you with a pretty sky photo because I’ve got nothing even remotely bloggable today. I didn’t get much knitting done (and I’m sure y’all are getting tired of seeing that entrelac scarf by now.. ) because I was at the grocery store for part of the day and cleaning up the wreck formerly known as the kitchen. My only other choice of a post up until my husband pointed out the sky was our dinner.. my odd Americanized version of Indian Samosas. I’m sure you could also call the things Curry Hot-Pockets as well.. because that’s about what they are. Ground beef, cooked potatos, peas, and various indian spices and peppers are wrapped inside dough and put in the oven.. I serve them with plain (natural) yogurt as a dipping sauce. They’re mighty tasty.. and also make great leftovers – tomorrow we’ll put the remaining filling with some saffron rice and toss it with yogurt. Yum.
After reading about it on another blog and remembering having it before.. I got the wild idea to make Monkey bread with munchkin. He loves to cook and bake.. and its something I’d definitely not like to overlook.
I used the recipe found here (thanks Sandy…) because I remembered that it was made easily with store bought biscuit dough (the other recipe was from Martha Stewart and required you to make your own dough and other silly things like that.. ). The one thing that I forgot was that it required a bundt pan but we could pick one up at the grocery store in the baking aisle. Unfortunately we couldn’t spend $11.00 on a bundt pan at the local Publix- so I got all MacGyver in the kitchen with the tin foil.. and created my own bundt pan. Unfortunately I forgot that the real pans are hollow in the center to allow heat to get in and cook whatever is in there.. so our monkey bread had to cook quite a bit longer and required being slopped onto a cookie sheet mid baking.
Regardless.. you can see that it was well enjoyed by the whole family and is going to rate a bundt cake pan coming into our kitchen upon the next available paycheck.
mmm… sugary goodness.
I almost managed to forget that it was Saturday.. when you are sick the days seem to run together. Being sick made me crave comfort food something fierce, and we have had homemade soup for the last few days for dinner. I started out with the intention of making some buttered egg noodles for dinner and somehow ended up making chicken vegetable noodle soup! I used a can of chicken, a bag of egg noodles, bag of carrots from the fridge, half a bag of stew veggies left in the freezer, a can of chicken stock, and a can of tomatos.. also some spices, garlic, and onion flakes. Usually my attempts at homemade soups have been less than stellar – but this one was so good that I didn’t mind eating it for 2 days.. I’m pretty sure it was due to the fresh garlic and all of the seasoning I threw in.. but man, was it good.
I did manage to photograph another Saturday Sky.. this one was taken only about 30 minutes ago as the sun was going down. Hubby left us money for pizza – and we took advantage of the situation and ordered delivery from Pizza Hut for dinner tonight. I was busy chowing down on some mushroom, ham & extra cheese pan pizza with the munchkin while watching Disney Channel and realized that I was going to miss getting a picture for today; so I raced outside and nearly tripped over the cat! She’s been acting rather flakey and territorial since hubby left on Thursday and I’m not looking forward to another week of her being under my feet every two seconds.
