A Day in the Kitchen

Today was spent cooking. This was not planned, but certain events made it turn out this way. The only think I had planned on cooking today was chicken and dumplings, but JunkMale called me on his way home from work hinting in a very non-subltle way that he would like some homemade potato chips, please. Since my MIL bought me a very cool mandolin (she got a considerably better deal at a Korean store in our area -- and ours has a bottom compartment to catch the slices, too!), he has been hinting that it would be SO easy to make potato chips... and, well, he decided that today was the day. Note to self: mandolin cuts potatoes thinner than 1/8". Adjust recipe accordingly (at 20 minutes, your potatoes will be charcoal. Six minutes is more like it). Second note to self: do not over-salt homemade potato chips. Third note to self: paper-thin potato slices will go from underdone to burnt in approximately 30 seconds. Do not ignore the timer! (results of ignoring that third note can be seen in the picture below)



Also, we decided today was the day for making strawberry jam. Tammy linked to the recipe JM and I had been searching for ever since I brought home the gallon of hand-picked strawberries. Unfortunately, our pectin didn't seem to want to cooperate with honey, so we used apple juice concentrate (3/4 cup) instead. JunkMale even helped me make the jam -- that is to say, he had great fun mashing up the strawberries and considerably less fun doing the dishes afterwards. :)

And, of course, if we are going to have homemade jam around the house, we must also have bread to spread it on. Today's bread recipe was Buchty, which is a German (or Polish) breakfast roll. My recipe is a bit different from that one (mine is from my bread book). I only used 2 1/4 tsp of yeast, and I didn't dust it with powdered sugar -- and of course I substituted whole wheat flour for half of the white flour. Otherwise, the ingredients are exactly the same as that online recipe.

I was going to post the chicken and dumplings recipe -- it was SO good last time -- but I tried something different with the dumplings this time that wasn't so good. Perhaps next time it will be in its final state and I can share the recipe with the world. :)

Whew. I'm tired just writing all of that. Or maybe I'm just tired from all the time I spent in the kitchen today. ;) But it's OK, because my wonderful husband stopped by the store on the way home from work today and bought me 4 packs of dark chocolate. Mmmmmm.....