UH-002 Recipes (cookies & bread)

UH - 002 - Recipes and Web Sites
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Heya!

I've gotten some requests for recipes and web sites. First, the web sites:

www.squarefootgardening.com - GREAT site. I have the book. We did a little bit of this while living in Arden, NC.

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/wolcott61.html? - This site offers some great tips on gardening in a small space. Some of the products mentioned aren't available anymore, but still some really good advice.

http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/ - One of my inspirations! This family (last year alone) raised 6,000 lbs of produce on 1/10th of an acre!

http://www.christysclipart.com/wwwroot/oamc2.html - This is my big sis' Once-a-Month cooking site. Her clipart is awesome too!

Here are some recipes friends have asked me to share:

Laundry soap: Mix equal parts Borax, baking soda, and non-iodized salt. Use 2 tablespoons per load. Because I like the smell of Gain, I mixed some of that in there, too. (Borax comes in 4-lb boxes.) This will last a REALLY long time and is friendly to the environment (sans the Gain).

Fabric Softener: Place 1 lb baking soda into a large container (I use an old fabric softener container for this). SLOWLY add 1 cup white vinegar, waiting for the reaction to die down before adding more. After all the vinegar is added, swish it around a little to make sure all the baking soda is mixed in. Add enough water to make 1 quart. I like to add a few drops of essential oils to it, too. About 3 drops each of Lavender, Eucalyptus, Tea Tree, and Cedar. They help kill germs, repel fleas, and just plain old smell nice. Use about 1/8 cup in your rinse water.

The BEST chocolate chip cookies EVER! This is a variation on a recipe found on the back of a Hershey's Baking Chips bag:

Mix together well in a large mixing bowl:

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 bag chocolate chips
1 cup walnuts - FINELY chopped... almost to a powder.

Mix this well with your hands to the chips get coated and also so you can make sure there aren't too many chunks of brown sugar.

Whisk together 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract. Pour this on top of your dry stuff but don't mix yet.

Finally, take 1 stick of room-temperature butter and plop that on the top. Now mix it all together as well as you can with a spoon. Don't get too far, do you? Now use your hands. (Kids are great for this!) Make sure you get all the dry stuff from the bottom of the bowl. It's almost like you're kneading bread dough, right?

Now grab two big spoons (not serving spoons... like your soup spoons) and drop some golf ball sized cookies into your greased muffin tin. Yes, your muffin tin. Bake those babies at 350 for around 11 or 12 minutes. Yes, they'll look under done. When you take them out of the oven, let the stay in the muffin tins with a towel placed over them for about 3 minutes, THEN take them out.

MMMM.... gooey.... and soft....... MMMMM.......


White Bread:

This is my variation on a recipe from Betty Crocker's Best of Baking.

This batch will make 4 loaves or 2 loaves and boogobs of rolls.

Take 4 1/5 cups hot water and dissolve into it 6 tablespoons sugar and 4 tablespoons of shortening. (If the shortening doesn't complete dissolve that's OK.)

Add 4 tablespoons (or 4 packets) of yeast and give it a little stir. Now leave it alone and let the yeast activate and get all bubbly.

In your ginormous kneading bowl... wait... don't know what that is? It's simply a ginormous bowl (I have a big ol' tupperware bowl) that's large enough to hold a big ol' glob of dough and let it rise but not so big you can't somehow manage to hold it on your knees (or at least on your coffee table... it'll make sense in a minute).

Anyhoo, in your ginormous kneading bowl place about 10 cups of all purpose flour and 2 tablespoons of salt and mix that together really nicely. Make a little "well", and add that lovely yeasty bubbly mess you mixed together earlier...

Gently mix it together until it starts forming a dough. If it's too sticky and looking more like monstrously-overly-thick-pancake-mix, add more flour. You may get close to using your entire 5 lb bag of flour. Add a little at at time while you stir it and get it into a malleable glob that's not sticking to the sides and everything else.

Now comes the fun part... kneading! I like to take my kneading bowl into the family room, sit my fanny on the couch and the bowl on the coffee table, and knead away for about 8 minutes while watching a movie, talking on the phone (headset of course) or listening to the radio.

When the kneading part is over, cover your bowl with a towel that's been drenched with hot water and then rung out. Put it in a warm, draft-free place to rise.

Go do something more interesting than kneading bread dough.

Come back and punch that thing down before it swallows up your bowl and your counter top. Do that hot towel thing again and let it rise. When it swells, punch it again, and then start playing with it like it's playdough.

Now's the time to form it into loaves, make rolls, do whatever you want, just make sure that whatever you're cooking it in/on has been well lubed up with Pam or something, k?

Once panned/loaved/loathed, whatever, brush some melted butter on the top of it (or if you're lazy like I am, just spray some butter-flavored Pam on it... BOY that stuff is handy!). Use a sharp knife to split the tops of your goodies so they have room to continue rising.

And yes, let them rise again. And yes, do the hot towel thing again, but you may need more towels....

Now that they're getting hugemongous, G E N T L Y remove the towels. Respray with Pam (or if you're nifty keen more melted butter) and gently score the tops of your goodies again.

Bake your creations at 350 degrees until lightly golden brown and "hollow" sounding. (Whatever that means.)

Personally, I flip my bread out of the pans in 5 minutes or less coming out of the oven and then put them on towels to cool. This keeps them from getting soggy on the bottom.

Be prepared for at least one loaf to be sacrificed to the insane urges that cause one to incoherently slice into the hot bread, smother it with butter, and then devour it before it cools.

The rest of the stuff (excepting rolls, of course) really ought to cool completely (like overnight completely) before slicing. Makes it much easier to slice that way.

Hope you like the recipes!

(My fingers are tired, so you're going to have to wait on the canning of cheeses, butter, etc. for later today or tomorrow.)