Spoke with Kitchenaid this morning

A replacement for our new refurbished mixer is on the way. Should be the same color (and we will keep the name "My Mixtress").

Sarah, in customer service was so helpful and polite, it warm fuzzies me about that KA company.

I'm sure glad I fixed the original mixer this weekend "old Blue".

Iffy, but I can't blame Ethan (his help was invaluable)

Ad Lib Bread. It's for dinner!

I'll first, stipulate, that this has yet to be tasted. Suffice to say though, when you are too lazy to separate an egg white and brush it on top of the bread, and decide to use olive oil instead... the results are somewhat different.

Only two cups of flour, one package of yeast, some garlic powder, a bit of salt and seasoning salt, a tad of sugar with the 1 cup of warm water (to help out the yeast) and a smidge of olive oil in the dough. Make a mess with a bit more flour (the boy loved that part). Let rise for 40 minutes, punch down and divide in four. Then roll out in your hands, cut the stupid little slots in the top (they look cool when the egg white trick is "actually" used) and drizzle a bit of olive oil on top. (they are, at this point, residing

on a cookie sheet on top of some corn meal)

While waiting twenty minutes for them to rise again, wave the magic wand and get that oven pre-heated to 450 and slide them in for twelve minutes.

After dinner, I'll let you know how they were. (they sure look weird). Would have been worse but for the help. Thanks Ethan!

And now pretzels

I may be able to upload the video later, but I made pretzels for my wife and the kids to welcome them home. I used the recipe for mall pretzels from allrecipes.com to do this. To scratch the creativity itch, I wrote their names in pretzel dough. It went over well.

This photo was taken after the extras were nearly consumed and Mom had eaten the bridge between the O and M in hers.

There was a little more ice cream batter to freeze up, so I had the kids help me. I'm glad I fixed the broken mixer, because the "Refurbished" new one we had delivered this week is now just making noise but not turning. Argh. A call to Kitchenaid customer service in the morning. I'm sure it will get fixed.

Thats all for now. Back to work tomorrow!

While the Family is Away, Dad Will Play

Bagels and Ice Cream, thanks to Kitchenaid!
















Those are some of the bagels anyway.

I got the recipe for these NY style bagels from cdkitchen.com.

I wanted to try a dough recipe that included malt. We did not have malt syrup, so I used malt flour from a brew supply place (thanks to my lovely wife for getting it).

Two of them have already been eaten.

As for the ice cream, allrecipes.com has a chocolate malted crunch recipe that sounds very close to the Thrifty brand ice-cream of my youth (double choc malted crunch). First batch with the Kitchenaid adapter yielded overly airy confection (I think the freezybowlthingy was not quite cold enough. The results are very edible, but is more like a frozen Wendy's frosty.

More later (working on special, Welcome Home pretzels right now).