Sheila's Page » Food

Bread Making – with Machine or Without

sheila — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:17:00 +0000

So something I’ve been doing more and more, lately, is more cooking and baking. I have a page over at RecipeZaar.com. There you can see my recipes and reviews and photos and so on.

So bread making is one of the big things I’ve been trying lately. I’ve actually made yeast bread four times now. And we’ve even eaten the results! I do not have a bread machines or stand mixer with a dough hook, so I have to make them completely by hand…

One thing I do find is a lot of recipes that call for a bread machine, and do not give alternate directions for making the recipe by hand. Today on the RecipeZaar forums duonyte gave me some general guidelines for converting any bread machine recipe to a “by hand” recipe. Here they are posted below, for reference. Thanks duonyte!

The bread machine is just a method for mixing – any recipe can be converted to and from. I am not sure whether you really mean make totally by hand or whether you mean to use a stand mixer, so I’ll try to cover both.

First, soften the yeast in a bit of water with a pinch of sugar and a tsp of flour. Mix and put in warm place until it foams up. In the meantime, stir together all the dry ingredients. When the yeast foams up, mix it together with the wet ingredients.

Place about 1/3 of your dry ingredients in the bowl, add half the liquid, and stir hard or mix with mixer. Add another third of the dry and remaining wet, and continue mixing. Change to dough hook if you are using machine, add the remaining dry ingredients. If doing by hand, you will probably turn out and knead in the remaining dry. Knead for 10 minutes of so until the dough is silky in texture.

Place in greased bowl, turn to grease top, cover and let rise. This generally takes an hour or so, but depends on warmth of kitchen, etc. Gently punch down and shape as desired. Let rise again. Bake at 375 deg. for about 40 minutes. Exact time depends in part on the shape. If you have a digital thermometer, check the internal temp. It should be between 195 deg. and 205 deg Farenheit.

Let cool before slicing.

The next yeast recipe I’m planning to try is duonyte’s Oat Potato Sandwich Bread

Roasting Fingerling Potatoes

sheila — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:33:56 +0000

Recently at the Farmers Market in Claremont on Sunday, I bought a small 1-pound bag of fingerling potatoes. (There is a small booth there that seems to specialize in these.) So, now I had to find a good way to cook them…

My idea was to roast these little potatoes. I found a few interesting recipes for roasting the pototoes:

Roasted Fingerling Potatoes – by Rachel Ray of the FoodNetwork. Some complaints in the reviews about 500 degrees being too hot…
Fingerling Potatoe Recipes by Mountain King – a list of serveral recipes, including “Herb Roasted Fingerling Potatoes” and others.
How to Roast Potatoes – a general how-to on roasting potatoes

In the end, I came up with my own idea. It seemed 425 F degrees was a good temperature, especially since the Oven Fried Chicken recipe that I was making from EatingWell.com also called for the same temp, and I have only one oven.

I also thought that 30 minutes should be enough to roast these little potatoes. So, I put them in a medium bowl, drizzled them with about a tablespoon or two of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Sprinkled with salt, pepper, garlic powder and a generous tablespoon or so of fresh chopped rosemary. Tossed to coat and then roasted them for 30 minutes in the oven, alongside the chicken.

These came out very well, if I do say so myself, and I will make them again. Yum!

Oatmeal Complete Pancake Recipe

sheila — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 17:36:54 +0000

OK, these are at least healthier than your typical Bisquick pancakes (which is what we always USED to make in our house….)

It uses ingredients that are from Trader Joe’s…their brand of Instant Complete Oatmeal and their Multigrain Baking & Pancake Mix. I’m sure you could use any instant oatmeal packet and other brand of whole grain baking mix, but the Nutrition Facts, shown below, would of course not apply.

I “created” this recipe this morning while trying to copy something that had been posted in the MyFoodDiary.com forums a while back…I ended up adding too much water and had to “save” the recipe somehow. Here is the result…which my daughter and I both liked. We will make these again.

Complete Oatmeal Pancakes

2 eggs (I use the brown, omega-3 free-range eggs)
1 packet Trader Joe’s Complete Oatmeal (instant, plain)
3 tablespoons Trader Joe’s Multigrain Baking & Pancake Mix
1 tablespoon ground flax seed meal (I used Bob’s Red Mill brand…you might prefer to grind your own fresh)

Beat the two eggs well, and add enough water to make 2/3 cup (or maybe a little more…you can always add a bit more water later if you need to, to adjust batter to desired consistency).
Stir in oatmeal packet.
Add baking mix 1 tablespoon at a time, and stir in.
Add and fold in/stir flax seed meal.

Bake on a heated griddle. Makes 4 pancakes.

2 pancakes make a “serving size” and are just over 200 calories. Very filling and yummy. I served mine with Quark (German style fresh/soft cheese) and sliced peaches on top. If not Quark, I’d use plain, Greek-style yogurt and fresh fruit of the season. You could try other things…applesauce or nut butter… Of course, my daughter ate hers with syrup.

My daughter tried them and said they were very yummy. She said she “could taste the oatmeal part a little bit but the rest tasted like regular pancakes”.

Nutrition Facts for 1 pancake:

Calories: 107
Total Fat: 4.1g
Saturated Fat: 0.9g
Cholesterol: 108mg
Sodium: 114mg
Carbohydrate: 12.2g
Dietary Fiber: 1.8g
Sugars: 0.8g
Protein: 5.7g
Vitamin A: 8%
Vitamin C: 0%
Calcium: 10%
Iron: 14%