Pretzel Bites

Did I mention our oven broke?  That happened right after I was saying how great it is that we don't have to repair anything since we're only renting....
Well both the oven and stove went out before I had made my recipe of the week.  And as it always happens, all the recipes I wanted to try required either the stove or oven (or both).

This week my sister is here visiting, which makes cooking way more fun.  Being the resourceful girls we are, we put the toaster oven to good use since the oven is out of commission.  On the menu: pretzel bites.

Mini Pretzel Bites
Adapted from here

Ingredients
3/4 cups warm water
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/8 tsp active dry yeast
3 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1 1/4 tsp kosher salt
2-2.5 cups all-purpose flour
Vegetable oil
1.5 quarts water for boiling
1/4 cup baking soda
butter for brushing on top
Coarse sea salt

Instructions

Combine the warm water, sugar, yeast, and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with the dough hook until combined. Let sit for 5 minutes.

Add the salt and 2 cups of flour, and mix on low speed until combined. Increase the speed to medium and continue kneading until the dough is smooth and begins to pull away from the side of the bowl, about 3 to 4 minutes. If the dough appears too wet, add additional flour, 1 tablespoon at a time. Remove the dough from the bowl, place on a flat surface and roll into a ball with your hands.

Oil the mixing bowl with a little bit of vegetable oil, add the dough and turn to coat with the oil. Cover with a clean towel and place in a warm spot until the dough doubles in size, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Boil 1.5 quarts of water and add the baking soda.

While the water boils, divide the dough into 8 equal pieces.  Roll each piece into a long rope, about a foot long. Cut the dough into one inch pieces to make the pretzel bites.  Keep in mind they will plump up upon boiling.

Boil the pretzel bites in the water solution in batches for about 30 seconds. Remove with a large slotted spoon. Place pretzel bites on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with cooking spray. Make sure they are not touching. Brush the tops with the melted butter and season liberally with the salt.

 

Bake for 7.5 minutes, or until golden.  (At least this is how long it took in the toaster oven.  The original recipe said 15-18 min!)
Serve with an assortment of mustards.

These would be great finger food for a party!

Update: two workers are currently here installing a new oven/stove unit.  It looks like this is the only make-shift recipe we will have to make in the toaster-oven :)

And for an update on my resolution, I have made 60 new recipes this year.  The only missing weeks were during our Italy trip and cross-country move, which isn't too bad.  Only two more weeks in 2011, and I have two really tasty recipes to try.  I'll write a more lengthy review of the recipes I tried, and especially the ones that were big hits, in the new year!

Ceiling Leak

Now that we are no longer owning, but rather renting our home, I appreciate the fact that if something goes wrong, you just call the landlord and it gets taken care of.

With that being said, the timing wasn't working in my favor, because at 4:50pm on a Friday several weeks back, I noticed water dripping from the ceiling right near the dining room table.  It was raining, so I attributed it to that, but I knew my chances of getting it fixed a few minutes before "closing time" were slim.

The hole in the ceiling was made after they came to investigate.

The dripping stopped when the rain did too, but it picked back up a few days later when it was sunny outside.  I made another call to the landlord to politely remind him of our leak, though this time I had a feeling we were getting some sewage leaking into the apartment rather than rain.  Sharing with him that lovely detail seemed to get the handyman moving, and the next day 3 gallons of roof cement were applied and this pipe was removed and replaced with one a bit more...solid.  Ahh, old houses.

We still had this pretty wall adornment though:

Well, you know how the saying goes: if you want something done, you'd better do it yourself.  Two weeks later, everything seemed properly repaired and dry.  After a bit more urging, they finally patched the drywall in the ceiling.  But by 3pm on Friday (the day before our housewarming party) with only primer covering the patch-job, I had a feeling our repairman was not going to come back to complete any touch-up painting before our guests arrived.

So I grabbed my paint-brush and left-over paint and put my old home-owning skills to work.  Much better now.

I guess it's nice that I don't have to do home repairs, but my absent-minded landlords don't seem to mind, either, when I take things into my own hands.

Edited to add: our oven and stove just died.  Ironic.  Time for a phone call.

   

Christmas Decorations

In October I documented the impressive and elaborate Halloween decorations around my neighborhood in San Francisco, and I mentioned I was excited to see what the Christmas decorations would be like.  Well, I don't know if I've been jogging on the wrong streets or if the professional light-hanging truck is just so back-logged with work, but the Christmas decorations have been a bit underwhelming so far.  There are certainly some pretty lights around town, but I think I am going to give those light-hanging cranes a few more days to work their magic (and make their big bucks) before I take any photos.

Instead, I have uploaded photos of our own Christmas decorations, specifically our tree this year.  I'm partial to live trees, due in part to my family's tradition growing up of buying a real tree (and bringing our cat, who helped us select the tree), but also a tradition I began after leaving the house, when my college roommate and I bought a live 5-foot tree for our dorm room freshman year.  I don't think it had many decorations aside from lights and candy-cane reindeer*, but I assure you, we were the talk of the dorm, and we had lots of visitors around Christmas to admire the tree.  After our hand-strung garland of real leaves at the onset of Fall the month before, I admit some of our visitors were probably there more to roll their eyes and see what Martha Stewart Olivia and I had gotten ourselves into this time.

Anyway, with only one or two exceptions, I have coerced my roommates over the years, and now my husband, that we need a live tree, and that the sooner after Thanksgiving we select it, the better.
This year we drove outside the city for a bit better selection, and we came home with a 7 foot Douglass fir tree.  I'm not necessarily into changing up the decorations to abide by a theme, so our ornaments are the same as last year's and the year's before, with a few additions.  It makes it fun to decorate each year, when you pull out ornaments and say, "Oh I forgot about this one--it's so cute/pretty/reminds me of ____!"  So we turned on some Christmas music last weekend and oo'ed and ah'ed over ornaments from our first Christmases (our parents have now handed them down to us), from our wedding, from trips we have taken, and crocheted and tatted ornaments from Grandma.  We have a San Francisco street car with 2011 to commemorate our move this year.  There's even a pickle ornament.

In our relatively small apartment, the tree and the two garlands on the back doors really light up the room and give off a pretty glow.  And the reflection of the tree in both windows is so pretty!

So no professionals with their lights-hanging crane for us this year, but I will let you know if those professionally-decorated houses live up to my expectations.


*Another kinda-dorky craft (at least to still be making past the age of 12), but tradition nonetheless!

Pumpkin Bread

I don't know if it's too far past Halloween and Thanksgiving for another recipe with pumpkin in it, but this one is too good not to make again.  Plus I still have one remaining can of pumpkin puree in my pantry, so why not?

The recipe is from here, a site that has become one of my go-to sources for recipe inspiration or instruction.  I have been making this bread for a couple years now though, and now I have it down pat in my head.

 Pumpkin Bread
Slightly adapted from Simply Recipes

Serves 1 hungry baker  Makes 1 loaf

Preheat oven to 350°

1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup water
2 eggs
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon nutmeg*
3/4 teaspoon allspice*

*You can substitute pumpkin pie spice for the nutmeg and allspice

Mix together the flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda.
Stir together the puree, oil, water, eggs, and spices.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, but do not overmix.

Pour into a greased 9x5x3" loaf pan.

Bake 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean.

This bread normally doesn't last too long when I bake it, so enjoy a slice or two before it's gone.

Home Sweet Home

I wrote about the sale of our old house a couple weeks ago.  Well, this past weekend we had a housewarming party in our new apartment, so I guess we can consider ourselves settled into the new place now.

We're lucky to have a number of high school, college, and grad school friends already here in San Francisco.  So it was just a matter of getting moved in and sending out an evite.

Saturday night brought together lots of friends from different times in our lives, and we had a great time introducing them to each other and catching up with everyone.

Several friends asked for a tour, which seemed funny to me.  As opposed to our old house with two stories and several bedrooms, a den, dining room and office, here in our new apartment, you can pretty much see each corner without moving around too much.  So my first instinct was to tell them, what tour?  Can't you see everything?

After some practice, I figured out how to stretch the tour into a minute-long segment, which seemed to satisfy the curious guests.  Here's a virtual tour:

The bedroom with funky sliding doors

The dining nook next to the deck

The already-shared funky red kitchen.  Funky is the theme.

The deck!  I love this feature.

Living room, fireplace, built-in bookshelves, and the second patio outside those windows

I left most the prep and baking to my friend, Trader Joe, but we did bake our favorite cookie recipe, which seemed to go over well.  The other two things that went over well were:

My birthday present (which I declared had to be installed before any housewarming party could occur!):

Wall-mounted bottle opener

And our State cheese boards.  California is from my sister-in-law when we found out about the job offer and our move.  North Carolina is from my wonderful coworker, as a way to remember my old stomping ground and our friends there.

States on the left/front end of the table

It was a fun evening, and now we are officially settled in!
Home Sweet Home.