Some Yummy Stuff I've Been Eating Lately

Since I'm not in the mood to write my Easter blog post yet, I thought I'd share a couple of delicious recipes I've recently discovered. Because I'm sure that everyone who reads this only cares about what I eat. But anyway...

As you may have read, mid-March ended up being pretty cold. So I was in a "soup" mood for much of the time during my parent's visit! I made two huge  pots of soup; the first was an interesting Chinese-themed soup, complete with pot stickers floating inside!!

It's mostly based on this Rachael Ray recipe (called "Moo Shu Stoup" on her website); it also has chicken, mushrooms, Savoy cabbage, garlic, carrots, onions, & eggs all stirred together (along with some soy sauce, of course!).

Mmmm...delicious!

For you Olive Garden lovers out there, this next soup should look familiar...

 ...it's a copycat version of the "zuppa toscana" that's served there. Basically, it's a creamy soup filled with potatoes, sausage, bacon, onions, and kale. The original recipe calls for a cup of heavy whipping cream; I cheated and used fat-free half and half and it still tasted great! It was perfect for a cold, rainy night, especially with some warm French bread. Plus...sooo easy to throw together!!

But here's my favorite recent culinary experiment; our homemade pretzels! We received this recipe from a friend in the ward; she claims it's a copycat recipe from the Pretzel Factory franchise. Wherever it's from, it's darn tasty...probably because of all the brown sugar! Here are the ingredients:

1 1/2 cups warm water

1 pkg yeast (1 T - 2 T)

1/2 cup brown sugar

4 1/2 cups flour

Whew! Only four ingredients! Not so difficult, right? First, we dissolved the brown sugar in the warm water, then added the yeast so the whole mixture would puff up nicely after a few minutes. Then, you add the flour and mix it all together. Cover the bowl with a towel and let the dough rise until it doubles in size (this could take an hour or two)...

At this point, you preheat your oven to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit), then spray your baking sheets with non-stick spray.

 Then it's time to roll out your dough and get to work!

You can use cookie cutters to cut out specific shapes, but we wanted to make little dough-snakes instead...

...and then form them into whatever shapes we wanted!

Once we formed all our shapes, we dipped each one into a mixture of 1 cup of water and 2 tablespoons of baking soda. This mixture is the key to "browning" the pretzels. After that, we sprinkled coarse salt all over the shapes...because what's a pretzel without salt??

Finally, it was time to put our pretzels in the oven...they cook for about 10 - 12 minutes. Here's how they looked:

Nice and browned!

Mmmm...they were incredibly good!

So there you have it...delicious, yummy pretzels in no time at all! (Well, actually a couple of hours, but anyway...worth the wait!). I will blog about my cooking again when I have more time to cook :)