Soft Baked Honey Wheat Pretzels

We are working hard on our road to financial freedom, so we opted to skip an outing to the ballpark and have baseball night at home, complete with every one's favorite snacks. This was my first time with pretzels, but we will be making many more.

4 tsp yeast
1 tsp honey
1 1/4 cup warm water
2 1/2 whole wheat flour
2 1/2 all-purpose flour
1/2 honey
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 TBSP vegetable oil
1/2 cup baking soda
4 cups hot water
kosher salt or 1/2 stick butter melted and cinnamon sugar blend

In a measuring cup or small bowl, dissolve yeast and 1 tsp honey in warm water and let stand 10 minutes.

In large mixing bowl, combine flours and salt and make a well in the center. Add yeast mixture, honey, and oil into the hole. Mix until well combined and knead for about 5 minutes (low speed). Pour a little oil into the bowl and turn until surface is coated. Let rise is a warm place for an hour. I put mine in the oven, and if its chilly in the house turn it on for 1 minute at 300 to warm it some.

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Combine hot water and baking soda.

On a floured surface, divide dough into 6 pieces for jumbo pretzels, 12 for regular size. Roll each piece into a long rope and twist into a pretzel shape. Dip the pretzel in baking soda solution and place onto a greased baking sheet. For salted pretzels, add salt here before baking .

Bake 8 minutes until well browned. For cinnamon sugar pretzels, brush with butter when you remove from the oven, and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar powder.

The salted pretzels are also delicious dipped in nacho cheese!

Rainbow Cream Cake

This year, my daughter made a very specific request for her birthday cake: this picture below, maybe a little shorter. Now I know she prefers chocolate cake  I know she likes brownie ice cream cake. But otherwise, she doesn't usually get specific on this kind of thing. AND she didn't even know we were having a surprise party. She thought we would just hang out the 4 of us and eat a 4 foot long cake....

 Quite a beast for 4 people, eh? Since we were in fact having a party, I decided to take a stab at it, in smaller scale, in the neighbor's kitchen, so she wouldn't get suspicious on why we had such a large cake for 4 people the day before her birthday.  

 

 

It looks hard. And it sounded hard. But once I had a plan, it was really no problem at all. Here is how it all went down. After a derailment when I snuck to Walmart at 7am for supplies, and my car battery died and left me stranded in the parking lot. Good thing for my neighbor who was up waiting for the baking!

Ingredients:

2 boxes white cake mix

2 boxes instant vanilla pudding mix (optional, this is my box cake secret)

eggs, oil, water that boxes require

food coloring (I did 1 primary and 1 neon)

 

 

Directions:

Spray 5 round layer cake pans with baking spray (cooking spray plus flour). Preheat oven as directed.

Mix batter according to package directions (1 package at a time if using a stand up mixer) adding the pudding mix to the dry ingredients. Separate batter into 5 bowls and repeat process with the other box. Each bowl will be half of each batch which will prevent them from rising differently due to the time they were mixed.

Decide what colors you want your cakes to be. I suggest picking 5 and doing 2 shades of  each. For example: Red and Pink, Orange and Yellow, Lime Green and Bright Green, Light Blue and Bright Blue, Lavender and Violet.

One bowl at a time, start your light shade by adding a few drops of food coloring until you get the desired color. Pour half the batter from that bowl into one side of the pan, and use a rubber spatula to spread it just on one half. Add more coloring to darken the remaining batter in your bowl. For example: 10 drops of pink food coloring made my pink, then 10 more drops of red coloring made the other half red. Once you have tinted and poured out all batter, bake about 20 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cakes cool at least an hour before frosting. For some reason, mine split themselves down the centers. I stacked the halves on top of each other, and ran a knife down the center side to make them even and make the bottom surfaces flat.

My cake had WAY too much whipped cream (a 50/50 cake to cream ratio). Partly because I wanted it to be well covered and partly because I wanted to use up the cream. You can either make your own whipped cream or just do cool whip. I used 2 quarts or cream with a little sugar, but would've make it work with 1 if I worked sparingly.

Once you have your cake surface ready (a cake board and fancy foil shown, but a cutting board and tin foil is fine), spread a line of cream down the center. Working from the center out, spread cream between two of the half circles like a sandwich and place on the cream line on the board. One at a time, spread cream on the sides of the half circle shaped cakes and add them to the cake on the board. Use the remaining cream to cover the top and sides.

Decorate the top with the sprinkles or fanciness of your choice. For full effect, use rainbow candles. This was nearly a fire hazard with 14 of them!

Sweet and Sour Kielbasa

2 lbs kielbasa
1 can pineapple chunks and juice
1 large onion
1 green bell pepper
1 spicy pepper (your choice, I used poblano)
1 cup cherry pie filling (I buy the sugar-free)
2 TBSP cornstarch
2 TBSP vinegar ( I used apple cider)
1 TBSP soy sauce
2 TBSP brown sugar

Cut kielbasa into 1/4" slices, and onions and peppers into bite-sized chunks. Add them to the crock pot with the pineapple chunks setting the juice aside.

Mix pineapple juice, pie filling, cornstarch, vinegar, soy sauce and brown sugar. Pour into the crock pot over kielbasa and veggies and cook 4-6 hours on low.

If you don't have cherry pie filling ( I was just using up some that was leftover), just use a 1/2 cup of maraschino cherries and increase brown sugar to 1/4 cup.

If you opened a can of pie filling and have the rest to use up, put it on ice cream, pancakes, mix it into plain yogurt, or use it in a parfait with vanilla pudding and vanilla wafers.

MDP's Confused Chowdah

I call this confused because when I was a kid, chowder came from Rocky Point and was red (Manhanttan style), or maybe white (New England style). But this batch was more of an orange because I can never decide between creamy or with tomatoes. And when I did a little research, I found there were tons of styles, but this wasn't  one of those either. If you have any interest, check out the Wiki run down for regional chowder characteristics HERE.

2 strips thick sliced bacon (or 3 regular sliced)

1 TBSP olive oil

2 TBSP butter

1 extra large onion, chopped (about 3 cups)

4 inside celery stalks (w/ leaves), thin chopped (about 1.5 cups)

4 small potatoes, diced 1/2" size (about 3 cups)

2 dried or fresh bay leaves

1 tsp dried thyme

2 small cans chopped clams with juice
4 cups stock (ham is excellent here if its on hand, if not any)
2 cups fresh diced tomatoes, 1 cup canned with juice
1 cup light cream or half and half
Salt and pepper, to taste

Heat a large pot on medium high-heat. Add oil and cook bacon until browned. Add butter, onions, celery, potatoes, bay leaf, and thyme and saute about 5 minutes. Once vegetables have begun to soften, add clams and juice, stock and tomatoes.

Cook about 15 minutes over high heat until potatoes are cooked completely. Add cream and stir well to combine before serving.

Estimated Nutrition Info
300 calories
32g carbs
13g protein
4g fiber
5g sugar
437 mg sodium

To get it on the table quicker, I use my Tupperware Quick Chef™ to chop up the onions and tomatoes. You could also do the celery, but I prefer the knife to make clean slices. If you can only find whole clams, you can through them through.

Whatever leftovers we have go into CrystalWave® Soup Mugs so we can grab them and go. Not that they last long!

Taco Pasta Salad

I make this salad all the time to go along with any meat cooking in the crockpot. It makes it a breeze to get dinner together when you are short on time.

1/2 lb tri-color spirals or other short cut pasta
1/4 cup ranch dressing
1 TBSP taco sauce
1/2 cup corn
1 roma tomato diced
1/4 cup chopped green onions
1 cup black beans

Cook pasta according to package directions, drain, and rinse with cold water. Mix with ranch and taco sauce and refrigerate (at least an hour). When you are ready to serve, add the corn, tomato, onions, and black beans. If it seems a little dry, add a little more ranch dressing.