Cooking with kids: bread

I'm watching my four year-old niece today. Baking bread is a really good project to do with a little kid. I told her all about yeast, and showed her how it gets foamy when mixed with warm water. Then I had her scoop in flour while I mixed.

When it was time to knead the dough, I gave her a handful to play with. She kept saying it was gross and "made her hands look like a tree frog." But when I offered to knead her dough as well, she refused.

Bread Update

The bread turned out beautifully!

More bread experiments

At this point my kitchen is still made up of somewhat random thrown together tools. I have a bread pan, but no cookie sheet. Two ladles and a plastic spatula, but no good mixing tools. You'd think that this would discourage anyone who wanted to do any real cooking, but the lack of equipment actually seems to breed innovation.

Frozen Peanut Butter Cheesecake

Cheesecake. My roommate and I were a little overzealous. A large portion was already missing by the next morning.

Last week I serendipitously encountered a recipe for peanut butter pie that just didn't sound very good. It involved chopped peanuts, cream cheese, lemon juice, a cup of sugar, vanilla, and a can of sweetened condensed milk. Too sweet for my taste.

I thought to myself, There has to be a way to make this better.

Odin, and Peanut Butter Cookies

Since it's summer and we don't have air conditioning, my roommates have been spending a lot of time sitting outside on our back porch. Almost every day, this cat comes to visit.

We're not sure if he's a stray or just someone's outdoor cat, but we call him Odin. He's really skinny, but his coat is fairly clean and shiny (for a cat who spends so much time outside). As soon as he sees us, Odin comes running. He rubs against my legs and purrs, sometimes even jumping into my lap.  If we're not careful about watching the door, he tries to run into the house (and sometimes succeeds).

He's not allowed in, of course. He doesn't seem to be neutered, and we really don't want him to mark his territory. Today he made a break for the house 3 times, and each time I caught him right before he got in. After the third attempt, he wandered away in a bit of a sulk. He'll be back.

And I'm spending so much time talking about the kitty, because the cookies I made this morning are pretty basic. So basic, in fact, that I'll be really surprised if anyone reading this hasn't tried it already. I'm talking about Three Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies.

Sauerkraut

Today I finally took my sauerkraut out of the fridge, to give it another taste. If you remember, I broke down and poured in some vinegar, to speed the flavor up a bit. That helped immensely. I used about a quarter cup of it for lunch today in a sort of saute (1/2 c sauerkraut, 1 onion cut in semicircle strips, 2 diced potatoes, and 1 teaspoon of caraway seeds cooked in olive oil until it was all soft and smelling lovely. I would have thrown in an apple too, if I had any). The sauerkraut was good, but the flavor is a bit lacking in complexity. So I decided to move it to a bigger jar (it was a little too tightly packed before), stir in a couple teaspoons of caraway seeds, and top it off with vinegar. We'll see what it does.

Brown Chicken Stock

Once or twice a month, I roast a chicken. It's a pretty economical meal, since I can eat the leftovers for 2 or 3 days without getting bored. Then I take the last of the meat off the  carcass and turn it into some other dish (enchiladas, soup, chicken pot pie, etc.) Then finally, I turn the bones into stock.