Pi Day 2008

We celebrated Pi Day 2008 (3/14, in case you forgot) with a homemade pizza (using this recipe for the crust and adding spices to spaghetti sauce for the sauce--I'm still not satisfied with this method, so if anyone has a good pizza sauce recipe, we'd love to learn it from you!)

and what we have decided to call "Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens Pie." This name is Ryan's fault--he asked me what kind of pie I was making and I called it "Rebekah's Favorite Things Pie," so he started singing. Realizing that it does not contain all of my favorite things, we went with just the first two in the song. The pie is based on some Kraft Food and Family recipes, but I, of course, did not actually follow them (I think it's an attention span issue--you have to pay so much more attention to follow a recipe than to just go with your general idea of the recipe). Instead, I made an Oreo crust, melted some chocolate chips and put a very thin layer of melted chocolate in the bottom of the crust, then mixed about 4 oz. of cream cheese with 2 Tbsp of sugar, folded into that mixture somewhere between 1/2 cup and 1 cup of whipped cream (real whipped cream--as in, made from whipping cream; no sugar) and then stirred in the rest of the melted chocolate chips (probably melted about 1/3 cup chocolate chips overall) and spread that on top of the melted chocolate in the cooled Oreo crust. I put the pie-in-progress in the refrigerator. While the bottom layer was setting a bit, I mixed 1/2 cup (about) creamy peanut butter with 2-2.5 cups of milk, then beat in two vanilla pudding mixes for 1-2 minutes and let it sit for about 5 minutes. For the final step, I poured the peanut butter pudding on top of the rest of the pie and adorned it with a chocolate chip π.

It was pretty good, but next time I would only use one pudding mix and 1 cup of milk and add some whipped cream to the pudding. We froze two pieces of it and liked it much better that way.

Pita

We bought a big thing of hummus at Costco (yes, we are now Costco members--milk is significantly cheaper there--so significantly, it makes the $50/year membership fee more than worth it right now), but we neglected to buy pitas. Hence, we made pitas using this recipe with 1 cup of wheat flour and 2 cups of bread flour but cooking them on top of the stove. Oh, yeah, we also added about 1 teaspoon of honey. They were/are tasty. Most of them puffed the whole way, but if we're just eating them with hummus, we don't care. However, we are going to use them for our sandwiches for our traditional Easter picnic tomorrow, so it's good that we have at least two sandwich-worthy puffed ones.

Aunt Kathy's Bread

My Aunt Kathy makes excellent bread, so I finally got around to asking her for her recipe (hoping that she did, in fact, have some idea of a recipe--I've watched her make bread and it didn't seem to involve a lot of measuring...). She sent me a much more detailed recipe than I was expecting (still a bit sketchy, but I could work with it), but seeing as she makes three loaves at a time and our bread machine can only handle one (she uses a Kitchen Aid mixer), I had to cut the recipe to a third of its size (which only makes sense since our family is a third the size of hers). I also substituted some wheat flour for some of the bread flour because we always have wheat flour and I wanted to see if it would make much difference. I've now made the bread (okay, I've put the ingredients in the bread machine, taken them out when the machine has nicely made dough for me, shaped said dough into a loaf, let the loaf rise, and baked it in the oven--I'm not sure everyone would call that "making" bread) many times and I'm a big fan. Ryan seems to like it, too (but, as Aunt Kathy says, you can feed anyone bread fresh out of the oven and they'll think it's amazing). It makes great sandwiches and toast. Thus, I will now share my version of Aunt Kathy's recipe with the world:

1 cup 7-grain flakes (we buy these in bulk at the Good Food Store--like Whole Foods)
1 cup wheat flour
1 1/2 -2 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 2/3 cups very warm water
1 heaping teaspoon yeast

Put all ingredients in bread machine in order directed by manufacturer (that's my favorite line in bread machine recipes--clearly something bad will happen if I put the flour below the water! If you're going to delay the start of the machine, I suppose it could, but if you're just using the dough cycle--which is all I ever use--nothing bad will happen if you deviate). Let machine make dough. Punch down, roll into a rectangle (I confess, I press instead of rolling), roll the rectangle up into a nice loaf, tuck the ends under, put in bread pan, and let rise in warm place until double. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.