Spaghetti

When I ran in the Irish Jig this year, one of the things that came in the participant's goodie bag was spaghetti. Carb loading is a thing for serious runners (which is not a set of which I consider myself a member), but it still surprised me that they'd hand out boxes of uncooked spaghetti. Anyway, once I had it, I had to decide what to make with it.

The obvious thing to do is cook up the spaghetti and sauce it, and this I did. Got some Ragu Homestyle meat sauce, which worked nicely.

Seems kind of silly to cook less than half a pound of the spaghetti at a time, so I had basically an entire day of eating nothing else. Wouldn't do it every day, but it's fine as a change of pace. Probably get some meatballs to add in next time, too.

The other half-pound of spaghetti from that box went toward trying out spaghetti au gratin. The recipe was on the box, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It contains large amounts of pasta and cheese, which is highly relevant to my interests. Took about an hour of preparation and cooking time.

The pan I had available was a little larger than recommended, so the result was thinner and crunchier than I'd like. Nothing wrong with the taste, though. Just fine when refrigerated and then warmed up, too, which is important since that pan is about 2 days worth of food for me. Not bad for a first attempt.

All that, and I still have another box of spaghetti to use up. Think I'll wait a couple of weeks before doing something like this again. Much as I like my pasta, several days of basically nothing but spaghetti is a bit of an overload.

Recent Baking

A quick round-up of a few recent baking adventures. Nothing particularly special, just keeping the baked goods population up. For some reason, they disappear awfully fast...

First, some cheese bread. I used this recipe, with the Parmesan cheese substitute. (And regular generic flour, not King Arthur brand. Sorry, King Arthur people.)

I was really pleased with how this turned out. Sliced nicely without crumbling, which made it perfect for making grilled cheese sandwiches. Great with soup, too.

I ran across some cornbread mix on sale at the store, so I decided to try it out. Hadn't used my square pan in a while anyway. 

Turned out pretty well, and also very good with soup. Dried out quickly, though. I can't eat all that in one day (well, I probably could, but not a good idea), and the next day I was not so much eating cornbread as adding cornbread crumble to the soup. Not bad as a change of pace, but I probably won't do it regularly.

And of course, more cookies. 

Specifically, macadamia nut (pictured) and chocolate chip (not pictured). Minimal work on these - just bought some frozen cookie dough and tossed them in the oven. Not quite as good as those made from scratch, but not bad and really easy to do.

Further Adventures in Bread Making

I started out using my bread machine for basic French bread and sandwich bread, which has worked out very well. Those are still my favorites, but I felt the need to branch out for some more bread variety.

I'm sure no one who knows me is surprised to find that I first tried banana bread. It doesn't fit nicely into any of the pre-set mixing-and-cooking programs on the machine, so I followed this recipe and used the dough mix setting, followed by manually setting the bake time. My first attempt didn't completely mix all the ingredients properly, resulting in some small pockets where the dry ingredients had baked into a sort of crumbly mess. Easily remedied on future attempts by using a spatula to assist the machine's stir paddle, making sure everything got mixed up properly.

Bread of bananas.

That turned out nicely, with a bit over an hour of cook time. Slice it up, add butter, great snack or dessert.

Next I attempted a recipe from the bread machine's booklet, honey and almond bread. I'm not a big fan of nuts in bread, but they're OK as long as they're chopped up small enough. That part I was able to handle, but unfortunately the actual bread part didn't work too well. It didn't rise much at all, which in turn meant it didn't cook properly.

Hard to tell by looking, but trust me, that honey-and-almond loaf turned out dense and doughy.

I tried the recipe twice, just in case I screwed it up the first time, but got the same result. I suspect the issue lies with the yeast...either not enough of it, not the right temperature, or the wrong mix of other ingredients for it to activate properly. So I gave up on the honey bread for now. I may try it again someday, but I'll be finding another recipe to use.

Next, I decided on another bread machine booklet recipe, whole wheat bread. It was more similar to the successful recipes than the honey bread one, so I felt fairly confident that it would work. The main difference is using whole wheat flour, and sunflower oil/water rather than milk/eggs. And indeed, it turned out nicely. 

Wheat bread. Very brown.

It doesn't slice quite as easily as the white sandwich bread, so I probably won't make it too often, but it goes really well with soup or stew. Might use it more in the winter when hot soup sounds better than a sandwich.

There are tons of additional recipes out there, so I expect to try more bread types in the future. Already got my eye on a cheddar cheese bread recipe.

Refill Time at the Cookie Jar

Every couple of weeks, I head to the cookie jar and am disappointed.

Poor thing, looks so lonely. Don't worry, it was eaten quickly.

My standard response is a trip to Meijer for some of the basic store-brand sandwich cookies. But occasionally, I'll feel the need for something slightly more interesting. Last time I went shopping, there was some peanut butter cookie mix on sale. Since all three things mentioned there (peanut butter, cookie, sale) are relevant to my interests, the mix came home with me. The empty cookie jar says today was its big day.

Cookie Components

One egg and half a stick of butter didn't seem like a lot of damp stuff to go with all that dry cookie mix. But the people who design these things usually know better than me, and that was the case here. It took a lot of mixing to work all the dry stuff into the dough, but eventually it looked good. Worked out to 29 dough balls for cooking, each of which ended up as a more-or-less-round cookie between 2 and 3 inches across.

On the way out of the oven

Considering these came from a mix, I'm very happy with the taste. A little on the dry side, perhaps, but no significant issues. Quite a bit less work than mixing up all the ingredients separately, mostly since I didn't have to deal with the sticky peanut butter.

27 > 1 (I had to try a couple to make sure they were good!)

The size of the batch is just about right for me; should keep me in cookies for a couple of weeks. All things considered, a successful cookie operation!

Summon Bread!

As most anyone who knows me can attest, I'm not much of a cook. I most definitely like to eat, though, with bread right at the top of my favorite foods list. (Or maybe second. I like cheese a whole lot.) Also, I like tech toys.

Enter the bread machine. This is exactly my kind of cooking. Put ingredients in, set the program, push start, come back in a few hours...bread!

The machine I have is a "T-fal Actibread" that I bought from Amazon.com. It can make up to a 2-lb loaf, but normally that's too much to eat in a few days (even for me), so I usually make the 1.5-lb recipes. That's what causes the weird looking top of the loaf...with the smaller size, there's empty space in the machine so it isn't smooth coming out. No big deal.

There's a ton of different kinds of bread you can make in a bread machine. I've only really done French and normal sandwich bread to this point, but there's another dozen or so recipes in the bread machine's recipe booklet, and a nearly infinite variety on the Internet. Way too many of them are "gluten free," which holds zero interest for me, but those can be ignored easily enough. I'm thinking about trying possibly my favorite bread flavor ever next - banana bread.

With fresh bread available twice a week with almost no effort, it's hard to imagine why I'd ever go back to eating store bread!