Day 33 - Martha, Watch My Speed!!!!

Some days, I'm really not in the mood to cook, which makes me wonder how things worked when women really did stay home and tend house. Did they just cook badly when they weren't in the mood? Was that when TV dinners became popular? Did they feel comfortable enough calling their husbands and saying. "You're taking me out tonight?" I'm trying to picture my grandmother who cooked for several farmhands and whomever else might "happen" to drop by at mealtimes (she was an excellent cook), walking into the kitchen and saying, "Nope, I just don't feel like doing this." (Those who knew her will find that idea especially humorous--I'm not sure if she was ever evn willing to tolerate canned soup...)

Today we lucked out--I was in the mood to cook, so we have a vaguely Mexican beans & rice thing in the crockpot which will hopefully be dinner (I'm flirting with disaster here--brown rice AND the crockpot. With just one or the other, the results are "iffy." Combining the two....there could be minor explosions), I fixed fresh whole wheat muffins for lunch, and getting a REALLY wild hair,I decided to learn to make pretzels.

The truth is, I miss pretzels--the kind that come in a bag and have zero nutritional value & all of that. Yep, I miss them. So, this was the next best thing.

I got off to a bit of a rough start because the recipe called for fresh yeast measured in ounces. I cook with the yeast in a jar, which I don't think is the same thing, and as the whole jar is only 4 ounces, I don't think it's a one-to-one conversion. After looking in 3 different cookbooks I decided to heck with it and just used my best judgement...which is a fast way to get into trouble while cooking.

Problem number two arose when the recipe omitted a step. The recipe said to mix some of the yeast, some water, and flour into a very wet "sponge" and to set it aside to ferment for 2 hours. Fine and dandy. Then the recipe said to mix some yeast with some milk. Fine and dandy. What it never got around to was when those two were actually combined. I know with things like cakes it can matter in what order one adds things--which gets me into trouble about every time. Still, pretzels seemed pretty harmless, so I just added everything together and started adding flour.

I have long assumed that the idea of boiling dough before baking it was discovered purely by accident, and that the etymology of "bagel" somewhere down the line is "whoops!" I don't actually know what they do to the pretzels in a bag, but this recipe said to poach the pretzels for 1 minutewhich I interpreted as 30 seconds on each side, but that was just a guess. Then you take the pasty, slimy pretzels out of the water and let them drain on a towel(which they will likely stick to, by the way--a fact also not mentioned by this recipe). Then you coat them with a mixture of egg yolk and milk, sprinkle with coarse salt, and voila!

I don't know how close I came to what the recipe actually intended, but they are pretty darn good.

Think I can pass them off as breakfast rolls???????