Made from Scratch

I have had the urge to make things from scratch lately.  I have a bread machine, I use it a lot, but I found I was only making the same things over and over.  So, I decided, since I have the time, to do something different, something that we normally buy in the store.  Isn’t it healthier to make it from scratch?  Then you can pronounce all the ingredients that went in it.  Tim asked for French bread, to go with a meal he was making, so I made that, but I had done that many times before.  Then I had an urge to make pretzels.  That was one of the things we made in grade 8 family studies class, and I had a craving.  In class, we didn’t do the boiling stage, but I was up for a challenge, so I thought I would try it.  No, that’s not true.  I had already had the dough in the machine, then read the recipe, and to my shock, this one had boiling as a step, so I thought I would try it and see what happened.  It went pretty well.  I’m glad I had all day, because it took forever, boiling them, then baking them. 

Then, the next day, I decided to make bagels.  That is something that we normally buy, so why not make them from scratch?  I had already conquered the boiling thing, so why not.  The dough was different from the pretzel dough.  It puffed up way more than the pretzels did.  With the recipe I was following you make the dough in the bread machine, then roll them into the bagel shape.  Then you broil them in the oven for a few minutes, to set them?  They were not supposed to brown at this point, but one of my batches did before I caught it.  Then you boil them in sugared water.  I just did this in a pot on the stove, I suppose to make things go faster, I should have done two pots.  The boiling made the bagels rise significantly, I was not expecting this.  To the point where I had too many bagels in the pot, so instead of round bagels, I had triangles.  The next step is to bake them.  Some of my bagels didn’t get long enough at one of the steps along the way, so they didn’t get cooked all the way through.  I think they might have absorbed the water in the boiling stage too, so they did not look like bagels are supposed to.  Then, I didn’t weigh each bagel to make sure I had the same size, I thought I could just eye ball it, but no, I had some super huge bagels, then some mini bagels.  All in all, a learning experience. Tim asked for time to eat the baking before more baking occurred, so I had to move on to something else. 

We just happened to be out of ice cream, since I was on this make stuff from scratch kick, I thought we should make some.  Tim was involved with this one, we used his Kitchen Aid with the ice cream making frozen bowl.  We still had left over wedding cake, so we thought it would be a good idea to add it in to the vanilla ice cream.  I added the sprinkles. 

It turned out really well!  Ice cream takes a while to prepare, you have to cook and mix up the ingredients the day before and let it refrigerate overnight, then it has to freeze, which takes about a day. 

I used to make ice cream all the time with my family out in our back yard with an ice cream maker that was one step up from a hand crank machine, this one was electric, but same principal.  There was a big wooden tub that we filled with snow and a small canister where the ice cream ingredients went.  We plugged it in to the outlet outside and it churned and churned.  Our job as kids was to keep adding the snow around the canister.   If I remember right, this took a few hours, then it went into the freezer and we would have ice cream for Sunday night dessert.  The churning in our Kitchen Aid for Tim and I was only about half an hour, how times have changed.

All this making from scratch makes me think of a time where that’s all there was, no one bought anything premade from the grocery store.  I think of all the preservatives we consume now, and I would like to make more things from scratch, things that we eat every day.  I would like to think this makes them healthier, even if what I’m making is bread and ice cream.  I’m not sure how I could keep this up with a full time job, I’m not sure if I would have 3 hours to make fresh, homemade bagels.  It does make one appreciate the convenience of the grocery store for the modern way of life, where things are moving so fast, working is such a big part of everyone’s day.  It’s nice to slow things down every once and a while to appreciate simple things like food more.