Easter snack - Cooks in Training #6
Ideally, I’d plan ahead and make Easter food to feature BEFORE Easter, huh? Well, sigh, that didn’t really happen this time.
I forget where I saw these little rolls… it was online last year sometime. The reason these are called an Easter snack is because they’re meant to symbolize the empty tomb. It’s pretty neat how it works. You wrap a marshmallow inside a crescent roll and while it bakes, the marshmallow melts and lines the inside of the crescent roll, leaving it empty inside!
I don’t have an actual recipe, but my little cooks will show you how it’s done…
Unroll refrigerated crescent rolls and separate into triangles. Butter the trianges.
Put a marshmallow on each crescent roll and sprinkle with cinnamon.
Fold the dough over and around till the marshmallow is all enclosed. Pinch seams to seal.
Bake at 375 for 12 minutes. And this is how they look! A couple of them were open, not sure if it was supposed to be like that or if the seams weren’t pinched shut well enough.
I hope you all had a happy Easter. We did. It started with an outdoor sunrise service at church. It was a perfect Easter morning… clear skies and a beautiful sunrise. The coffee, hot chocolate, donuts, and campfires were a nice addition too. 
He is risen! Hallelujah!
Chili Soup and Fry Bread
When it looks like this outside,
it oughta look like this inside:
“Huh?! Shouldn’t it be chili soup and cornbread?” you say.
Nope.
I do like chili soup with cornbread too. But not nearly as good as chili soup with fry bread!
I grew up with that combo. ‘Chili soup and fry bread’ was like ‘peanut butter and jelly’ or ‘cake and ice cream’ or ‘donuts and coffee’… where one was, it was a given that the other would probably be there too. I wonder if my mom grew up with the chili-soup-and-fry-bread combo too. The reason I wonder that is because my fry bread recipe comes from my aunt Dar. She gave me a little collection of recipes when I got married and this was one of them. Aunt Dar and my mom are twins, complete with rhyming names… Darlene Fay and Marlene Kay (just a little tidbit from my family tree).
Navajo Indian Fry Bread …I’ll bet you’ve got all the ingredients on hand for this.
Printable recipe coming soon
4 cups flour
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 cups warm water
Mix by hand. Set aside in a covered bowl for a few hours. Take out small bowl of soft dough and, with hands, stretch and flatten into shape of a pancake, round and flat. Melt 1 cup of shortening in frying pan. Deep fry at 375 degrees.
When it looks likes this,
flip it over, browning on both sides.
Makes 8 pieces, about 4″ in diameter. This, by the way, is a little saute pan. I only made a half batch of fry bread because they don’t make good leftovers, so I just used a little pan. Another really good thing to do with this fry bread is to coat it with cinnamon sugar as soon as you get it out of the frying pan. Would make a good breakfast side dish or an after school snack. Yum!
HOT Chili Soup …as in spicy. This recipe did not come from a cookbook. This is from my kitchen, exactly how I like chili soup…
Printable recipe coming soon
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 of an onion, chopped
1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp. flour
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup ketchup
1 16 oz can hot chili beans, juice and all, do not drain
2 tsp. chili powder
1/4 cup canned hot jalepenos, chopped
several shakes of Tabasco sauce
Brown beef with onion. Stir in rest of ingredients.
Simmer, covered, for 30 min. Serve with sour cream, shredded cheese, and FRY BREAD. You could adjust the spiciness of this to your liking, maybe you don’t like your nose to run while you’re eating. This isn’t very juicy. Or brothy. Or whatever you call it when it’s chili soup. That’s how I like it. You could always add more diced tomatoes or tomato juice.
Parmesan Breadsticks and what they turned into…
As I was saying in the last post, we had breadsticks with our ham meal that was featured and they went into the ‘don’t make again’ department.
And as I’ve said hit-n-miss in previous posts, me and making yeast breads from scratch don’t go together too well.
I don’t know, do you think those 2 facts had anything to do with each other?
Parmesan Breadsticks …recipe from an Easy to Bake Easy to Make recipe card
Printable recipe
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 envelope (.25 oz) quick-rising yeast
3/4 tsp. salt
1 cup warm water (120F - 130F)
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 large egg white, lightly beaten
2 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheese
Combine 1 1/2 cups flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl. Mix water and olive oil in a small bowl; add to flour mixture. Beat w\ an electric mixer on low speed until moistened. Beat on medium speed until well blended, about 2 minutes. Gradually add remaining flour until a soft dough forms. Turn dough onto floured work surface. Knead until smooth and elastic, about 6 minutes.
Cover; let rest 10 minutes. Coat 2 large baking sheets with cooking spray. Divide dough into 16 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a 12″ rope. Place on prepared baking sheets.
Cover; let rise until almost double in size, about 20 minutes. Lightly brush breadsticks with egg white.
Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.
Bake at 400 until lightly browned, about 15 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Makes 16 breadsticks. I made an entire batch of 16 breadsticks and put the other half (unbaked) in the freezer to see if it works to get them out, thaw them, let them rise, put egg white and Parmesan on them and bake them for fresh breadsticks at another meal.
Ah, don’t they look just delicious?! Well, they’re not. They were dry and not very flavorful and you could smell the olive oil.
Soooooo…
After we were done eating, while I was cleaning up, I made the rest into croutons. I think there were 4 or 5 left over out of 8. I cut them up into chunks with a scissors…
then added about 1/2 tsp. of Italian seasoning and a couple shakes of salt to 1/4 cup melted butter and poured it over the bread pieces and tossed it till they were all coated.
Then I baked them at 400 for 10 minutes, turning them over once during baking.
Mmmmm! They were great! Probably the BEST croutons I’ve ever had! Kind of a roundabout way of making them though. Maybe they were so good because I may have gone a little overboard on the butter. And what isn’t good, laden with butter?!
Oh, and by the way, those extra breadsticks I put in the freezer, you know, the other half of the batch? Someday, I’ll get them out, thaw them, let them rise, put egg white and Parmesan cheese on them, bake them, chunk them up, drown them in butter and Italian sesoning, and eat them on a salad or in soup. Or just plain.
Italian Breadsticks
I keep up with about 45 blogs via my Google Reader, but I’m slipping behind now and there are 73 unread posts. They keep faithfully updating (as opposed to me) and I only check them now and then. I do keep up with Pioneer Woman though, no matter how busy I am. And no, it’s not just so I don’t miss when she’s giving away a big beautiful KitchenAid mixer in the Cooking part of her blog!
Thanks for all your tips on the whoopie pie filling and I’m glad to know that a few others make more filling than the recipe calls for. I wasn’t sure if you’d agree when I said that’s what I’m going to do from now on or if you’d have fits at all the extra fattening unnecessary filling that would make.
Also, Lorinda (Hi!, by the way. Glad to see you on here!), you said you’re experimenting with homemade pizza and wondered if I have any recipes on here. I do have one recipe on here: Saturday Night Pizza. The crust is homemade and is just tops! One thing I don’t do (yet) is make my own pizza sauce. I have a friend Linda who is known for her good pizza sauce, so maybe I’ll ask her for her recipe and start with that one, then try a few others. So far, I’m just buying Ragu pizza sauce from the grocery store.
Now, for the breadsticks. This is one of those recipes that I made awhile ago, featured here, and didn’t like it how it was and said, “Next time, I’m going to…”. So, here is ‘next time’ and the breadsticks were much better AND easier and faster! These are the breadsticks I had pictured with the glazed baby carrots and the zesty mozzarella chicken.
Italian Breadsticks
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella or Italian blend cheese
Italian seasoning
1 can (11 oz) refrigerated breadstick dough
1 egg
1 Tbsp. water
Preheat oven to 375. Spray baking sheet with cooking spray. Unroll dough; separate breadsticks. Cut each strip in half crosswise. On a lightly floured surface, with floured fingertips, twist the 2 halves together. Put the breadsticks on the baking sheet and press down on the ends to prevent unraveling.
Beat egg w\ water. Lightly brush tops of breadsticks with egg mixture.
Yeah, I know, the picture is crooked. That’s because I was holding the camera with one hand and brushing with the other hand.
Sprinkle with cheese and Italian seasoning.
Bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Serve warm.
I was just thinking, I wonder how it would work to put melted butter on in place of the egg and water. Would be easier and seems like it would taste at least as good. I’ll have to try some of each like that next time and compare them.
Let’s make dinner rolls in different shapes and sizes!
Are Mondays crazy for you, too? They always are for me and I’m not sure why. Extra cleaning up from the weekend, more laundry, lack of energy? Anyway, today was one of them days and so the post I wanted to post this morning is happening now instead.
Speaking of Mondays, my family rarely gets anything special for supper on Monday evenings. In fact, I almost always make the same thing… fried chicken breasts and veggies and bread to go with it. That meal can be made from chicken-still-in-the-freezer to eating in under a half hour. That timing fits in well with my Monday schedule. Or lack of schedule… I don’t want to give the wrong impression here.
Last Friday evening, we tried something new. My sister was here and my mom and dad were coming for supper, so we decided to get fancy with the rolls. And if they didn’t turn out, it didn’t really matter because our extra people for supper were comfy guests. And my mom always likes kitchen experiments anyway. I took 2 loaves of thawed frozen bread dough (does ‘thawed frozen’ make sense?) and split each loaf in half, making 4 equal 4ths (I think my English is having a Monday, too. 4 equal 4ths sounds weird).
4th #1: Divide it into 4ths. Divide each 4th into 3rds. Put 3 3rds each into 4 ’holes’ of a muffin tin. Did you at all get that? It should look like this:
Should’ve rolled each ball a bit longer to get them more smooth, but they looked better in real life. At least I didn’t notice the roughness.
4th #2: This was the easiest one. Divide it into 4 balls. They seemed too big, so I pinched some off of each ball and gave it to Lexi to play with. So, now that the 4 balls are the right size, put them in the muffin tin. Then take a scissors and snip it almost the whole way thro’, first one way, then the other way. It should look like this:
4th #3: You’ll need a bit of help from 4th #4 for this one, so don’t save it till last! Put the 2 together and roll into a 12″ circle. With a pizza cutter, cut it in half. Cut the one half into 4 or 6 triangles, then roll each one up starting at the wide end. Should look like this:
4th #4: Roll it out into a rectangle about 6″ x 6″ and butter it. With a pizza cutter, cut it into 4 strips. Then stack the strips on top of each other and cut the other way, making 4 square stacks. Lay each stack sideways into a muffin cup. Should look like this:
And now, you should have a total of something like this:
Then, let them raise for about 45 min…
Bake them for 25 min at 350.
And you’ve got yourselves a fine assortment of rolls to pick from! Those stacked ones separated while baking, must’ve been because of the butter. Next time I’d skip the buttering. Lexi and Tiffany made the crescent rolls. The reason there are 6 crescent rolls and only 4 of the other kinds is not a thought-thro’ culinary reason. It’s simply because I’d have run out of room in the muffin tin and I only have one. They would’ve been a better size divided into 6ths instead of 4ths though. Some of them got pretty big.
They were fun to make. And it added more character to the meal. Ok, that may have bumped it up a level, saying a meal had character. The rest of the meal was glazed meatloaf, twice-baked potatoes in a casserole dish (instead of putting the potato mixture back into the shells), and peas. Our dessert was chocolate peanut butter milkshakes later in the evening.
Off-the-subject tidbits:
I’m still going to do ‘Out of my Comfort Zone’ posts, but they’ll be more hit-n-miss now instead of weekly. Also, I figured out a way (um, after talking to my tech support husband… maybe that should say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’) to do printable recipes now, so one of these days, I’ll start adding one to each post. And eventually making one for each recipe all the way back to the beginning. That last sentence makes me want to run and hide. Just kidding. It’s fun.
About Me
Hi! Welcome to my kitchen! My name is Kay. I'm from central Ohio. I love cooking and baking. Especially baking. It's thereapeudic for me. I'm not a professional or gourmet cook by any means. I'm a Christian homemaker who happens to take pictures of some of the food I make. I have 2 little 'helpers'... Lexi (7) and Tiffany (3), who are young cooks in training. I don't do anything on the grill... that's where my husband Shannon comes in! He grills quite a bit, especially in the summer. So, sit back and enjoy browsing thro' the recipes. If you try some of them, I'd love to hear feedback on how you liked them! If you want to contact me, my email address is kaylouann@gmail.com
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