Foodies - Stuffed Pretzel Bites

Awhile back (Fernandina Beach?), Kyle and I picked up a copy of Gourmet magazine that someone had donated to a boater's lounge.  It was filled with many delicious recipes, but there was one that really caught Kyle's eye.  Homemade stuffed pretzels and some jalapeno dijon mustard...it took me some time to come around to it, but Kyle really likes salty things so today I dove in.  

 I must be losing my touch, because I completely forgot to take photos of the first part.  I made some basic bread dough (this recipe called for brown sugar instead of white, and more milk than water) and let that rise.  Then I divided it into four parts.  Each part was rolled out to about 12"x4" and then I put some chicken, cheese and jalapenos on that and rolled it back up.  Then I cut the stuffed dough log into 12 pieces and sealed the stuffing in.  I did leave one log "unarmed," because Kyle's dad isn't a fan of jalapenos.  

The next step is boiling each pretzel guy in a solution of water and baking soda for about 20 seconds.  You can see how much they puff up in just a few seconds of being in the water.

Next, time to bake!  Fifteen minutes at 400 degrees F, they turn a nice golden brown and start smelling amazing.  Then brush with a little butter and top with some pretzel salt.  I'm not really sure what pretzel salt is, I'm assuming it is just a coarser table salt, so I think coarse sea salt works just fine.

Last but not least, the mustard.  It is just .5 c. dijon mustard (I used whole grain) with 1 jalapeno and a tbs of honey.  Very simple - very spicy.  Since the ratio of jalapeno to mustard is so high, I removed the membranes for the most part (the lighter green stuff inside).  Even so, it still had some decent heat.  Absolutely delicious.  I think it's more like bread than pretzel, but I've never tried making pretzels before.  The pretzel bites with the mustard, however...to die for.  You get the full flavor of all the ingredients, and then the pleasant burn starts to tingle on your tongue.

 In other news, I am now working part time at the ice rink in Chesapeake.  I retrieved my skates from Michigan, so Kyle and I went to go try out the ice a week ago, and while we were there I asked if they needed any help.  To my surprise, I started work on Wednesday.  It's only part time, but I get to skate for free :)  It still seems weird that there are ice rinks in the south though.  I suppose Virginia isn't that far south.  It was much more shocking when I lived down in New Bern.

Green Monsters and Hermit Crabs

Well, I finally took the plunge and started making Green Monster smoothies.  Rachel told me about them a while ago, but a blender takes up a little too much power to justify their use (although we do actually keep one on board).  Oh, plus there was a shortage of ice aboard the Southern Cross.  The thing that makes the monster green is spinach.  In my smoothie, there are an abundance of other healthy things, including coconut milk, a banana, kiwi or blueberry (but blueberries always overpower spinach in coloring the smoothie), and wheat germ or ground flax.  Rachel warned me early on that if I put in more than a handful of spinach, I would hate the smoothie, so I've been going easy on the spinach (the original recipe calls for two cups!).  And in Kyle's effort to eat healthier, he's been joining me in my smoothie consumption.

In addition to making food, we've also been attending various events in the Hampton Roads area (Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk, etc).  I think I can safely say that the weirdest has been the hermit crab races.  Apparently this event is really for kids.  For some reason, I thought all of Virginia Beach would share my enthusiasm for this crazy event and there would be tents of activities everywhere.  Not so...

We arrived a little late and they were already crowning the queen of the beauty contest.  Or dress up contest.  Technically I believe it was a painted shell contest.  At any rate, I never did get to see what the winner was dressed as.  What I had really been curious about was how they were going to make the crabs race.  They started with all the crabs confined to a circle in the middle of the table, then the crabs "raced" (ambled, scampered, scooted, crawled) to the outer ring on the table.  Click the picture below for some hot action shots, I can't believe they're not blurry :P

The winner was Zeus, and Zeus's owner was obnoxiously exuberant.  Come on, man, it's for the kids!  He was pretty excited about his trophy though.

Then later in the day (I'd say about eight minutes later), I was attacked by a giant inflatable crab.  Once those pinchers get around your ankle...I was sure I was a goner.  You can see the extreme terror on my face.

A little disappointed by the whole event, Kyle and I started walking around town.  There are an obscene amount of tourist shops, and we went to every one of them.  We found these little gems in a store named "Useless Crap to Burn Your Vacation Money On."  Southern Cross is now an armed craft, pirates beware!

Hurricane Earl's Side Effects

Kyle and I spent all Wednesday night preparing for Earl's Thursday night arrival.  Southern Cross was streamlined; no sails, no boom, no solar panels, and about 8,000 fenders.  Then Earl turned out to be not much more than a whimper.

Of course, the thousands of tourists on the Outer Banks had to prepare for the worst.  And they started preparing right around the time I decided I needed some mushrooms to saute for the poached pike dinner I was planning for the evening.  Look at me bypass all the traffic on the way to the grocery store!  Wheeeeee!

The pike was delicious, poached in a white wine sauce with sauteed vegetables, served with a side of penne topped with stewed tomatoes, fresh basil and lemon zest.  Delicious!

But back to the hurricane....  Earl was maybe a whisper of wind in these parts.  The real issue was the next day when the water dropped three feet.  It is incredible how the geography of the outer banks and sounds allow the wind to have such an effect on the water level.  This picture hurts my heart.

It was not all a loss, however!  This weekend the water came back with a vengeance, rising above normal levels.  So, for the second time since arriving back in this area, we took Southern Cross out for a spin on the bay.  She was soooo happy to be out and about, even boom-less and sail-less.  And frankly, Kyle and I were slightly giddy about being "home" again.  We cleaned her up (on the outside at least).  Sitting under pine trees does her no favors.  I found every single spider web on deck yesterday.

The water is still high so maybe I will talk Kyle into taking her out for a quick jaunt tonight after work.

Day Two of Winemaking

The last post was rather tongue-in-cheek, but if (heaven forbid) you did actually try to start a batch of wine, you're going to need to know what to do on Day Two and onward.

Step 11.  Add some potassium metabisulphite or campden tablets.  These kill all the yeast that naturally is in the berries.  I believe this is done so that the winemaker controls the amount of yeast available.

12.  After giving that a few hours to work, add the yeast and stir it up!

 13.  Day 3+ stir it once a day.  You can see how foamy it gets when stirred.  The little yeast buddies are eating all the sugar and turning it into alcohol.  This process will be 7-10 days, then it will start to settle down again.  That is when you know you're ready for step 14.  All that hot pink juice dripping down the ALE PAIL means that the primary fermenter isn't big enough! 

14.  Rack it into a secondary fermenter (carboy, pictured below).  The work is done!  Now it just needs to be aged, and maybe racked one or two more times to get rid of the sediment.  There are other chemicals to add to the wine to enhance it, but they are not included in this crash course.  You can find some recipes at E. C. Kraus, and if you know where to look, you can even find some pretty good information on wine making.

So that concludes this crash course, unless I am able to find some of the photos I took of bottling wine.  In the meantime, check out my guest post over at Balance and Blueberries!

A Crash Course in Wine-Making

1.  Friends are cheap labor, especially if you spend the first hour picking the wrong kind of berry.

2.  Your brother can help too, even if he's lame.

3.  Beware of the sun bleaching your hair as you pick fistful after fistful of the RIGHT berry - elderberry.

4.  Elderberries come with a lot of stem.  Apparently a little stem is okay but you should get rid of most of it.

5.  Sterilize your ALE PAIL with poison (aka sodium metabisulphite - 1 tbs to 1 gal of water).

6.  Put clean berries into a nylon bag in the ALE PAIL.  If you pretend to help, you can get Mom to do all the work.

7.  Mash the berries with anything but your hand.  They will stain.  It is a known talent of elderberries, in fact.

8.  Dissolve 5 lbs of sugar in 4 gal of water.  (5 gal is ideal but with the bag of berries, it won't fit in the ALE PAIL)

9.  POUR it on the berries when it is still hot.

10.  Check back in a couple days for steps 11 through 96.

Does anyone want any leftover berries?  We picked way too many.

 I know I don't post much anymore.  I'm on vacation from my unemployment - a quick stint up in MI visiting family and friends.  This is how I have been spending some of my time.  I am THIS CLOSE to renaming the blog "Necessity is the Mother of..." because we do so many how-tos here at Of Winds and Water.  I like doing things the old-fashioned way, and I like things to be more all-natural.  I'm a big fan of modern conveniences, but things like wine and cheese are fun to get involved in.  I would really like to make my own cheese once my life is more stable. 

Anyway, it is actually my mother that is making the wine, so when I write the second part of this post, it will probably be sans photos.  Wine is far less complicated than it sounds, if you want it to be.

A Further Tale of Blueberries

Alright, so I know you're all dying to know what I did with all the gathered berries.  Here's the quick and dirty on how I have become a housewife without even being married.  I made some pie crust and whipped it into tart shells using my handy all-in-one rolling pin/cookie cutter.  A tool with dual functions is twice as useful to keep around.  Actually, I can think of many more uses for this tool.

They baked marvelously despite me having no idea how long to keep them in the oven.  Add some melted chocolate chips/heavy cream (aka truffle filling, which I learned during last winter's truffle experiment), chill, then add blackberries on top.

Don't those look tasty?  Chocolate and fresh blackberries, mmmmmm....

Blackberry angle.

I made more than six.

Then, blueberry muffins.  I had two for breakfast this morning.  I used a recipe for blueberry coffeecake, because I foolishly forgot that muffins would probably be found in a different section of the cookbook.  There are so many blueberries in these muffins that they stay together mostly by fear.





And with about half of my blueberry crop, I used Kelly's tip about freezing blueberries.  If you freeze them on a cookie sheet, they won't clump up in a freezer bag.  Just put it in the freezer for an hour or so then bag!  Voila - next time you want a singular blueberry pancake for breakfast, you can choose the exact number of berries you want, and your cakes won't turn purple because you had to saw through a mass of berries to extract what you needed.

Of course, I left some fresh berries for smoothies and munching.  Oh, that reminds me, I was thinking about making blueberry pie and I don't have enough fresh berries left.  I'll have to thaw some.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

Fresh Berries and Paper Shorts

Today, Kyle let me borrow his truck while he's off at work.  Woot!  This means I can a) leave the house, b) talk to actual people instead of the five animals that keep me company during the day, and c) run some much-needed errands.  Although it turned out my first two 'errands' weren't open yet after I dropped Kyle off at work.  I knew for a fact that the berry patch was open, though.  I went to Pungo Blueberries, Etc, and if we're around in the fall I'm definitely going to find a farm and get some pecans.  For ten bucks, I got four pounds of blueberries and one pound of blackberries!  I am still deciding what to do with them all - it depends on how much Kyle's family wants me to leave fresh, then the rest will be frozen.  Muffins, definitely, and possibly a pie or tarts.  I think the blackberries will just be eaten with ice cream or as a smoothie.

I got a nice bucket to pick blueberries in, but for the blackberries they gave me a stupid box which was prone to spilling (I didn't spill it, but I came close about eight times).  Just to spite them I ate some extra blackberries.  Okay, that's not true.  I ate the extra blackberries because I accidentally picked more than I wanted to take home...

The goods!  Aren't you jealous?

Kyle's dad has a subscription to Money magazine, which I've been reading avidly because I don't know much about investing and I feel it's something I should be semi-expert on before doing.  I also got a free trial subscription to Investor's Business Daily when I signed up for an account with Morningstar.com, where I have a practice portfolio I can track for a while before I actually have money to invest.

Mac-Mac tried on Rev 2 for me.

Anyway, the IBD subscription isn't doing me much good without a job, so I've been designing a pattern so I can sew myself some shorts.  Rev 3 was actually wearable, so I think I'm almost ready to switch over to real fabric :)  Making clothes out of newspaper makes me feel pretty homeless.  Oh wait, I AM pretty homeless (Kyle and I have been leeches lately, living off the goodness and generosity of Kyle's father and stepmom).

So that's been my favorite diversion lately.  Otherwise, the job search continues.  Next weekend I'm heading up to Michigan for a while to pick up a car of my own so I don't have to be confined to the house all day.  Being unemployed is surprisingly taxing mentally.  There just isn't a whole lot of validation in my life anymore.  Most of my time is allotted to job search or learning, neither of which have any tangible rewards.  Making clothing does, but I don't really want to spend the money on something that I can't wear so I'm hesitant to buy fabric.  I think in about a year or so I'll be ready for Project Runway...

Mac-Mac, contortionist extraordinaire.