English Muffins!

I go through food phases. I find one thing I enjoy eating, and then I eat that thing for many meals at a time. It's probably not very healthy, but it is convenient when you're only feeding yourself and always have leftovers. They get eaten.

Lately my food phase has been whole wheat english muffins. In case you don't buy english muffins, they're almost $4 for a pack. I didn't buy them for a very long time because that was just more than I was willing to splurge on bread. However, I saw them on sale for buy one get one free recently, and for the first time it occurred to me that "no, I can't eat all those before they get stale, but I can freeze them!". (Little did I know that no, actually, I can eat them all before they go stale.)

I decided that making english muffins would probably be cheaper than buying them. (Okay you got me, I ran out of english muffins and was too lazy to drive to the store. Only I would think that mixing dough and letting yeast rise and spending two hours making english muffins is "more lazy" than driving half a mile to Publix.) I looked for recipes on the internet, and the internet delivered.

I used this recipe because her blog (I'm assuming it's a her, but maybe it's a him) looked legit and the pictures looked delicious. I didn't have high hopes of mine turning out actually looking like english muffins, but I figured I would be happy with just some homemade bread. However, I followed all the instructions and MINE LOOK LIKE ENGLISH MUFFINS!

I can't find my camera, and my phone isn't connecting to my computer, but just take my word for it. They look like actual english muffins.

And they are delicious.

I made half the recipe and wound up with 7 of them. This should last me a day or two.

Slice of Life: Day 72

I think this is kind of turning into a food blog.  I post a lot about food.

In reality, it's not because I know a lot about food, just because my life really is that uneventful where I have nothing else to write about.

Keeping that in mind, this is my second favorite purchase from Whole Foods on Wednesday.

I've made cookies using whole wheat flour before and they turned out rather flat, possibly because of the denser flour (is it really denser? I'm just assuming.).  I got really excited about this flour.

So on day 72 I made some cookie dough with this flour.  It was delicious.  I would tell you if it made a difference in the cookies, except I didn't bake any of it.  I just made cookie dough to keep in the fridge and snack on.

Go ahead and judge me, but haven't you ever made cookies and eaten the dough and thought "it's too bad we have to bake this"?  I'm an adult and I don't have to bake it if I don't want to!! So freeing.  And delicious.  (And to save my from myself, I only made 1/6 of the recipe.  Tiny bowl of cookie dough.  And there's still a lot left.)

Slice of life: day 26.

I made pumpkin bread today!  Healthy pumpkin bread.  I like to pretend that means I can eat as much of it as I want without consequences.  I should keep the recipe for this one (which I did write down, just in case it turned out well).  It's not sweet bread, so for sweet bread add way more sugar.

Healthy Pumpkin Bread!
2 eggs
1 banana
1 c sugar (in some combo: 1/2c dark brown, 1/4c honey, 1/4c white)
1 c applesauce
1 15oz can of pumpkin
1.5 t salt
2 t baking soda
3 c whole wheat flour
lots of pumpkin pie spice until it tastes good.

Bake at 375 until it's done.  (For a long time, like an hour.)

Slice of life: day 18.

Today I made cookies!  "Healthy" cookies.  They were "healthy" because I used whole wheat flour.  I assumed they would be gross because otherwise whole wheat cookies would be insanely popular, but they're actually delicious.  I also substituted honey for the white sugar, just for fun.  This is how the first batch I baked turned out:

Very flat and kind of chewy/cakey.  The dough was rather runny, so I refrigerated the very end of the bowl and made three more (almost chocolatechipless).  Here's how they turned out:

Okay so they're still flat and it didn't do much.  I did learn that they turn out a lot prettier when you give them sufficient room on the cookie sheet though.

Slice of life: day 15.

Sometimes chocolate is the only right thing about your day.  Wednesday was one of those days.  Thank you brownies, for being so delicious.

Slice of life: day 6.

Have you noticed that most of my pictures are of food? It's true. I love food.  Particularly carbs, and today I made whole wheat bread.

That's the dough.  As you can see, I grossly underestimated what size bowl I would need.  Especially if you consider that the dough you see is wayyyy too sticky because there is probably about half the amount of flour there should be.  The end result was fantastic, and my burned thumb is totally worth it.

Why are carbs so delicious?

Slice of life: day 4.

For anyone who was curious about those cookies, they were even more delicious when baked.

More cake-like than crispy or chewy, but who's going to complain when chocolate chip cookies are involved in any form?

Not me. Especially since I made up the recipe as I went.

Things I love: Baking

Well, I really love to eat baked goods.  And the dough stage of baked goods.  And the final, fresh from the oven product.  So I suppose baking is just a secondary love to all of that.

I made cookies today! Chocolate chip, my absolute favorite:

To let you in on a little secret, here's how I bake:

1. Start craving cookies.

2. Find an acceptable looking recipe online.

3. Wash all of the dishes that you need (because really, why would they be clean already?).

4. Begin to get out ingredients.

5. Search the fridge in depth for that butter you know you have somewhere in there.

6. Clean out all of the old food from the fridge because it's gross and crowded.

7. Find the applesauce you were going to use as oil, and then throw it away because it's gone bad.

8. Resign yourself to not baking anything, because you don't have what you need and it's better for you this way anyway.

9. Get antsy and decide to make it work.

10. Start putting ingredients into the bowl, in approximately the right proportions that the recipe says.

11. Use substitutions that may or may not work (shortening for oil? sure they're the same).

12. Get tired of using measuring devices and start just eyeballing it.  

13. Change the type of flour and sugar because it'll taste so much better that way! (Or more realistically, because you're out of normal flour.  Self rising is fine as long as i don't add the baking powder, right?)

14. Just keep adding things until it looks about the right consistency.

15. Take the bowl out of the mixing stand and bring it to the couch.  Eat it while writing about how delicious it is.

Oh, you want to know how the cookies actually baked?  I'll let you know when I bake them.