Soft Pretzel Recipe, Felt Breakfast & Eating Steak on Food Stamps--X-Treme Food Stamp Challenge

Yesterday for breakfast, we ate the blueberry bread that had been my blueberry bagel fail with cream cheese.  Not super exciting or delicious, definitely not something I'll make again, but edible and at least fairly nutritious.

For an afternoon snack, I made soft pretzels from scratch.  I initially put cinnamon & sugar on them, but everyone except my daughter decided they were better plain with mustard instead.  Either way, they were a lot healthier than anything you could buy at the store and they were a lot lower sodium!  The kids had milk with their pretzels and I had my second Diet Coke of the day.

Soft Pretzels

1 package yeast

1 1/2 cups warm water

1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp honey
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 egg, beaten
cinnamon & sugar for topping (optional)
pretzel salt for topping (optional)

Preheat oven to 425.  Mix yeast, water, sugar, salt, and honey in a large mixing bowl.  Add the flour and stir in completely.  Sprinkle a small amount of flour on a clean surface and knead dough 5-10 minutes, or until smooth.  Divide dough and form into desired pieces (letters or numbers would probably be fun for small children).  Place shapes on greased baking sheet.  Brush with beaten egg and add any additional toppings you desire.  Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.  Let cool slightly before serving.  They can be frozen and reheated in the microwave.

We couldn't end up having pasties for dinner as I had planned because we were almost completely out of butter, so we ended up having a steak dinner instead.  People always rail against people on food stamps eating steak dinners, but, let me tell you, this was a super cheap thing for us to be eating.  First off, the steak was venison that my husband had killed himself.  We did end up paying to have it professionally processed (because he was still working at the time and didn't have time to do it, or a good place, since around the time he shot it was when they were supposed to be remodeling the garage), but even that works out to be about $0.70 a pound and we only ate a pound of meat for dinner between all of us.  The bulk of the dinner consisted of a deluxe baked potato.  The potatoes were the last couple of a 10# bag I had gotten at a farmers market this fall for $3, which was more like $1.50 for the bag with the Double Up Food Bucks program (or free, depending on how you look at it, since they were grown in Michigan and purchased with the free tokens because of that).  The broccoli was some that I'd gotten free from the Broccoli Lady, a person that offered up a bunch of broccoli on Freecycle that I was happy to receive from her.  The cheese sauce was made with the fat drippings of the steak, a little flour, a little milk, and a couple ounces of cheese (so about $0.40 worth at what I paid for it).  So all in all, with the sour cream and steak sauce thrown in there, we paid probably less than $1.50 for all of us for that dinner!  The kids and I had milk for dinner, which might have put us over that $1.50 mark, but it was covered by WIC.

A bit after dinner, my husband asked if I could bring him some chocolate chips.  I told him I didn't think we had any, but he said we did because he had gotten into some the night before.  Sure enough, I looked and he had found the chocolate chips I'd hidden in case of a chocolate emergency.  *sigh*  So he and the kids had chocolate chips for dessert.

Late at night, to celebrate the completion of my first piece of felt bread, my husband and I had a bit of ice cream with homemade chocolate syrup on top.  That turned out to be a bit of a mistake though, since then I was shivering like crazy as I worked on the second piece of bread.  I got it done though, so now mt felt food totals are 2 eggs, 4 pieces of bacon, and 2 pieces of bread/toast.

Great Aunt Marguarite's Johnnie Cake

My johnnie cakes (aka cornbread) had a greenish tinge to them since I used cornmeal made from the green dent corn of my garden.

I'm considering undertaking a project of archiving family recipes on here.  Some of them will be in the handwriting of the person that I got them from, but this is not one of those recipes.  It is a family recipe (Great Aunt Marguarite was my grandpa's sister), but I'm copying this from a typed up (by me) version of the original.  When I make it, I use whole wheat flour in place of the white flour and sea salt instead of "regular" salt (because that's how I roll) and I use milk and butter, rather than the buttermilk and shortening option, but in the interest of preserving family history, I'm copying the recipe exactly as it appears on my copy (where ever I got it from.  I'm not even sure where I got my copy from!).

Great Aunt Marguarite's Johnnie Cake

1 cup freshly ground corn meal

1 cup white flour

1/4 -1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp salt

4 tsp baking powder

1 egg

1 cup milk or buttermilk

1/4 cup soft shortening or 1/2 cup butter

Heat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease 8" pan or muffin pan.  Beat together cornmeal, flour, sugar, and salt until just mixed.  Beat in baking powder, egg, milk, and shortening until just mixed.  Pour into pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

Acorn Pound Cake--acorns have never tasted better!

I'm so excited that I learned that sprouted acorns are still good to eat the other day, especially since all the acorns around the wonderful tree I found were sprouted.  From my quicky research, it looked like some experts actually prefer sprouted acorns since they are less likely to be buggy (one thing I saw said they flat out weren't buggy, but I found some that were, so that isn't necessarily true!), sweeter, and actually more nutritious once they are sprouted.  I discovered when shelling them that they are also a lot easier to get out of the shell when sprouted, since it is basically already started for you!

I made my first batch of acorn meal for the year last night.  I was quite pleased to discover that the acorns I collected were very low in tannic acid and it didn't take long at all to flush the tannic acid out and move on to other things.  (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll want to read my earlier post on acorns.)

Anyway, as I've been promising, here is the first of the acorn recipes I have available to share (which I'll be sharing as I make them).  It is a long time favorite, as I can remember helping my mom gather acorns as a kid so she could make a version of this (I added whole wheat flour and changed the seasoning) and I'd take small loaves of it to school for my teachers, who had strangely never eaten acorns in any form before.  The two loaves pictured above is actually a double batch.  The recipe makes one loaf.

Acorn Pound Cake

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup acorn meal
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a loaf pan and flour the bottom of it; set aside. Mix together oil, sugar, eggs, and acorn meal in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, combine flours, salt, cream of tartar, and baking soda.  Slowly mix the flour mixture into the acorn mixture, alternating with the milk.  Add vanilla and cinnamon and beat well.  Pour into the prepared loaf pan.  Bake for 1 hour.  Let cool before removing from pan.