I Get My Amish From Amish'R'Us

our childhoods (my sister and mine) are filled with memories we have repressed and memories that we couldn't get rid of if we had lobotomies. our parents are what you might call eccentric. or drinkers. either word is appropriate.

i also believe that we have memories so hilarious and off the wall that they are worth writing books about. history books. to be used in classrooms. psychology classrooms.

one year, while driving through amish country in indiana at an ungodly hour of the morning, we saw a few amish families at the rest stop. they were in the bathroom. no big deal, amish people on the road gotta pee too, and i can't imagine quilters and bread makers want "indecent exposure" on their permanent record.

but then they went outside.

and loaded into a conversion van.

now, it's about 6 am. we have been on the road for a solid 2.5 hours. there are 3 children under the age of 13 and one mom.

"mom, why are those amish people driving in a van!? i thought that wasn't allowed??" "where do you think they got the van? how did they make contact with real people? what did they pay with?" "mom, do you think they run the a/c??" "MOM!!! DO YOU THINK THERE ARE ACTUAL HORSES IN THEIR FRONT OF THE VAN INSTEAD OF AN ENGINE!?!!" "WHY ARE THEY IN A VAN?!!?!!?!?!!"

my mother's exhausted response lives in infamy in our family.

"i don't know, they're a different brand of amish!"

a. different. brand.

like from amish mart? or carson pierre amish? tj-mish?

maybe it's not as funny if you aren't in a complete state of delirium. or pre-pubescent.

but the first time i made this bread all i could think about was amish'r'us.

until i tasted it. then all i could think was lkdjfuerb;asdjfnsdmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

it's pretty delicious. and vegan. impressive, eh?

you'll neeeeeeeeeeeed

1/3c white sugar
1c hot water
1 package active yeast (or 2 and 1/4 teaspoons)
2tbl vegetable oil
1tsp salt
3c flour

take your warm water and gently dissolve the sugar into it by stirring slowly and softly-- you don't want to cool the water down too much. if you have a stand mixer, do this in your mixing bowl. once the sugar is dissolved, add the yeast and give it one quick, soft stir to make sure the yeast is mixed into the water. then let it sit.

you're looking for the mixture to get foamy, like this:

  

once that happens, you can turn on your mixer with a dough hook, whip out a hand beater with a dough hook, or grab your trusty spatula/wooden spoon! mix in your veggie oil and salt first, then your flour, a cup at a time.

people will tell you to add flour and mix until your dough is "elastic and sticky". what does that mean? i had no idea and was actually doing it wrong the first few times. whoops!

you want the dough to be moist. if you're adding so much flour that you can pick it up out of the bowl and none of it sticks to you, the bowl, or the counter you're kneading on, you've added too much flour. conversely, if you don't add enough flour, you will have a dough that is simultaneously falling apart and sticking to EVERYTHING. it is gross. you will cry.

so take your dough out to knead it on a lightly floured surface, with floured hands. add more flour or water as needed to make a dough that is firm, slightly elastic, still looks moist, is just a tad sticky, and feels like everything has been well mixed. after making this bread a few times, you will get a feel for what it should be in terms of texture.

the good news is that even if you do end up adding too much or little flour, the flavor won't necessarily be affected. you may end up with a super dense bread (which, again, isn't necessarily bad. it's like a bread shaped bagel) or a bread that doesn't rise very well... sooooo... flatbread that tastes a little watered down. nothing a little cheese on top can't fix!

ok, so your kneaded bread should look similar, but maybe not exactly like, this:

once it does, put it into a well oiled bowl. you can spray a glass or metal (though glass is preferable) bowl with cooking spray, or you can dump about 2 tablespoons of oil into the bottom and use a spatula to spread it out. you want the ENTIRE inside of the bowl covered with oil, and possibly the rim as well. cover it with a dish towel or plastic wrap, put it into a warm place.

warm place recommendations: on top of the refrigerator, a sunny part of your house (if it's warm in your house), on top of a running dryer (but if you do this, be SURE to cover the bowl tightly so that dust doesn't get into your dough. gross), into a warm oven (turn your oven on fur just a few minutes--if the door is too hot for you to touch, then the oven is too hot, let some hot air out for a minute or two), or on a stove next to a simmering pot of chicken stock:

 

you are waiting until your dough rises and at least doubles in size, which could take upward of an hour depending on how warm your warm spot is. check on it after about 20 minutes. if it's not puffing up at all, your definition of warm is wrong. go warmer :)

mine took about 40 minutes to nearly triple in size:

 

now, notice that it's still moist looking, and smooth. that's great. it's also going to be fluffy and airy. so punch it down, take it out, knead it a little, and put it into a WELL OILED/GREASED 9x5 bread pan. cover it again, put it back in your warm place, and let it go until the dough has risen over the edge of your bread pan. then put it into a 350 degree oven for about 25-30 minutes, until you get a nice golden brown color, like this:

you can let it get even darker if you like nice dark crust. i like all of my bread as soft as it can be, so i tend to JUST barely cook bread all the way through.

i also made a double batch of bread in this one and made some rolls to use for sandwiches in my husband's lunch. he loves them. 

go make some too!!! i want to see your brand of amish bread!!!!

War Heads

does anyone else remember these?!?! the super sour candies that ripped your tongue into shreds and rendered you incapable of tasting anything for days? why were they so destructive!?

i used to love sour candy. don't get me wrong, i still enjoy sour punch straws (cherry thank you very much!) and sour patch kids, especially on road trips with an orange soda and a bag of purple skittles.

i eat like crap on road trips.

as i've gotten older and wiser and found out just how much sugar/chemicals goes into making sour candy (that explains the massive stomach aches), i've found myself less attracted to it.

my gallbladder also came out in 2003, so i don't handle candy well or any mass forms of sugar (think soda, juice, cookies, cake, frosting is a big one.... all of that makes me sick. go on, pity me. i deserve it.).

there is, however, one sour thing left in my life that i absolutely love and can eat outrageous quantities of:

sourdough bread.

even as i type the words my heart starts racing and i can feel myself revving up as my salivary glands kick into gear.

I. LOVE. BREAD.

and i've been making a ton of it lately. i'm going to throw a recipe for amish white bread up here in a day or two-- it's vegan and DELICIOUS!!!!!

anywho, i googled sourdough bread and found a great site that really puts things into simple terms. you can find it here.

yesterday i began what will be approximately a week long endeavor that i'm praying will end in the most delicious bread i've ever created.

after i've consumed the entire loaf with some butter, i will post the process and pictures.

i don't think a whole lotta people read this, but if there are in fact hundreds of you and someone wants to follow those directions along with me, i would LOVE to see your results and compare breads in a week!!

Starting the Day Off Right

nutritionists, dietitians, doctors, and high school health teachers alike agree that eating breakfast is extraordinarily good for your health. it curbs appetite, meaning you can eat a little less at lunch--hooray portion control!-- it provides energy that you can burn off through the day, and breakfast has a representative from nearly every category of delicious on the food pyramid: bacon, pancakes, waffles, cereals, oatmeal, eggs, milk, bagels, breads, jellies, berry syrups, peanut butter... that might just be my family...

what better way to kick off my new found focus than with one of my all time favorite breakfast foods- eggs in a basket. they go by lots of names-- i've heard toad in the hold, hole in one, bird's nest, and a host of others. they also have a ton of variations in terms of ingredients depending on where you are in the world.

when i was working full time (which, by the by, i think is a joke. i would kill to be able to only work 40 hours a week now. having a child is full time work. until you have kids, you still get at least some days of the month off, usually entire weekends) i would get up every morning and make one of these for myself and one for my husband.

now E leaves at 4 am, so there are no eggs for him. i'm not a good enough wife to sacrifice three good hours of sleep when he can grab one of the 40 nutragrain bars in our pantry.

jp is pretty self sufficient at eating now, so our morning routine is: i plop him in to his high chair, hand him a homemade muffin (those will be coming up in a week or two, when we run out of what i made earlier this week), and head over to my stove. he eats, i cook, then i eat. he's usually still working on his crumbs when i get done. apparently it's pretty hard to eat with any sense of rapidity when you haven't mastered the pincer grip. go figure.

i'm not actually going to include a legit recipe with this. you need a slice of bread with at least one flat side (any bread, really. bread in a bag, homemade, a biscuit or roll will work too), one egg, butter, and a stove/pan.

heat the pan to medium, then do this:

throw your slice o'bread on, crack the egg into the hole, and let'er'rip!!!!!
when the toast is browned on one side, throw a little more butter into the pan, flip the bread, and let the other side brown.

i like to spread cheese on mine when it's done. deliciooooooouuuuuusssssssss

now, here's the "tricky" part. how do you feel about yolks? if you're a leanne, you like your yolk as runny as it can get while the whites still get cooked all the way through. you know the glory of a broken yolk smeared into your cheese and bread and you are intelligent, refined, and probably really good looking. if you're like E, you want your yolk cooked all the way through, soft but solid, you have few taste buds or taste in general (except bed sheets. if you're like E you can pick out amazingly coordinated bedding), and you are good looking, but not as much as your runny-yolk-loving counterparts.

if you want a runny yolk, my way of doing it (which may not be correct, by the way) is to turn the heat up just a tad (maybe a notch or two on a gas, from a 5 to a 6 on an electric) and let the bread and whites cook a little more quickly (think sear, rather than roast). if you want a more firm yolk, keep it at a medium/5 and just cook the toast until it's a VERY golden brown on both sides.

so there's my first deliberately food-ish post.... here goes nothing!!

New Directions

this blog will have nothing to do with glee, but my unnecessary love for the show makes me giddy and light headed at my ability to use the team name as my title for a post. also, i sincerely hope that lea michele reads this because it 100% pertains to her.  kind of.

i've decided that this blog needs more direction than "write something funny". it's too vague and it often turns into me ranting and complaining about something not worth complaining about. my husband can tell you (behind my back) that i already whine far too much, so i think it's time to turn this ship around and be funny yet PRODUCTIVE!!!!

a dear friend of mine suggested that i pull a julie and julia this summer when i was missing my husband, living with my parents, and in a general funk. unfortunately, the funk strongly resembled the blob and i was rendered immobile, stuck to the ceiling in someone's office, hands unable to fit the pages of a cookbook between my sludge-filled fingers.

but now my son and i are back with my husband, my kitchen aid mixer is out on my counter, and we are slowly reuniting ourselves with our normal food staples.

now, to turn this around on me for a moment! i eat primarily vegetarian-- lacto ovo, which means i eat dairy products and eggs. i also occasionally eat fish and very rarely eat other kinds of meat. i am by no means an animal activist. i can't even think about what happens in processing plants long enough to become offended. i made the choice to eat less meat years ago because it was slightly more cost effective and significantly healthier. meat became a regular part of my diet again when i was pregnant because i had lost so much weight i simply began consuming everything i could stomach to try to gain weight.

we're back to a primarily vegetarian diet now, for ethical, health, and monetary reasons.

for monetary and health reasons, i also make a lot of things from scratch now. i want to use this blog to share recipes, trials, and errors with you. battleofthebulger will be a battle against bulge-- bulging tummies, bulging debts, and bulging.... lack of ethics? that doesn't really make sense, but you get the idea.

i have no credentials and no experience, and most of what i find is on the internet!! but i do have a lot of heart, a lot of humor, and a lot of time on my hands to cook. oh, and i have a bad-ass camera that i can take sweet pictures with, so that might be worth tuning in for!!!

i hope this shift isn't too boring for anyone. however, if it is... reconsider your friendship with me, because my life basically consists of 2 things: my boys and taking care of them. you're getting the method behind the latter, so technically, this blog will center around half of my life. if you find the blog boring, you'll totally hate me!! :)

love you guys

last night i had a dream that i took 8 pregnancy tests. they all came out positive and all had a number on them designating how much HCG was in my body. the first test said .7, the last 4.0. it appeared on the pee stick in cursive.

first of all, once i figure out what i ate before bed last night, it's getting tossed.

after that, me and my dream self are gonna have a little chat about her spending. the  chances of getting a false positive once are slim. but to get 2 in the same cycle? pretty much impossible. she could have easily stopped with two. does she realize who's paying for all those pee sticks!?!

it's not her, because every time she waits tables, she gets sat with 5 sets of 8 tops all at once and gets into the weeds so bad that nobody is tipping her. i know it for a fact. usually she just ends up breaking down in the dish pit. i have never seen her work a job successfully.

oh, and her medical bills are piling high from all of her teeth crumbling or falling out. i swear her molars grow back like hydras, 3 in the place of the last one. maybe that's how. maybe she's doing a circus act when i'm awake, pulling her own teeth out and letting people watch the newbs grow in. i bet she charges $5 a head.

i wouldn't pay to see that, but the people in my dreams are a bit off, so i wouldn't put it past them.

if you happen to see dream-leanne, can you please let her know that all this pregnancy test nonsense is out of control, and that she owes me rent?

Cat Lovers, Beware

by now you already know that i am brazenly offensive. but thanks to modern day labels, i can call it a disease. i have no idea WHAT disease it is, but i can definitely work my way into the description of at least one.

that one disease, however, is not hoarding.

i've been watching a hoarders marathon all day. up until this point i had only seen parts of a handful of these shows. today i have seen over a half a dozen.

there are obvious common themes. inabilities to cope, tragic beginnings to bad behaviors, denial, defeat.

and cats.

here's the thing: i hate cats and they hate me likewise. i firmly believe this is because they can sense my discomfort and they react. initially they made me ill at ease because i am mildly allergic. that uneasiness led to multiple bites which consequently led to hatred.

cats are demanding, solitary, condescending, and entirely delusional. what other 7-15 pound living thing do you know of that believes it is in control of 160 pound human beings? babies. but babies are cute, so they get a pass.

probably close to 75% of the hoarders have cats. hoarders tend to be demanding, solitary, and entirely delusional, so i think the relationship makes sense.

it's interesting to me how upset these people get when their cats are taken by animal control, or when the cat runs away once it finds an open door, or how sad people are that their cats started killing each other when there were simply too many in too cramped of an environment. a logical person would say "if you loved the cats so much, why wouldn't you clean up so you could keep your house/not have your animals taken away for neglect/not end up finding cats mummified into the floor boards/not be burying shoe boxes full of cat bones that were found on your kitchen counter?"

but, back to the delusional thing. i'm sure they don't even notice if the cats are there, until they are taken away.

but there's something even MORE interesting to me. the cats.

i understand that the hoarders themselves are mentally ill.

but the cats... LEAVE!!! it doesn't seem that difficult to me! the people whose house you're staying in wouldn't even notice if you were gone! seriously, just slip outside while they're busy catching falling items from the 8 foot tall stack of pitted olive jars. chances are they didn't adopt you from a shelter, they took you in when you kept showing up because they had an abundance of food to offer you (mostly olives) and they were lonelier than jabba the hut (seriously, do you really think he had friends at the end of the day? no way. he ate them all).

sooooo... if you are eating cat food that has insect eggs in it, being attacked by the persian cat army, sleeping in a rusted cage, and twisting your tiny kitty ankles with every step, hit the streets. you obviously already know how to scavenge.

and that leads me here: is it possible that cats have mental disorders as well? not cat in its right mind would willingly live in those situations.

and if cats CAN have mental disorders...

sweet mother of pearl, i'll take a dog please.

and a personal organizer. my piles of laundry are starting to upset me.

Double Standards, Something Like Ice Cream, and A Video

this is going to go in a few different directions before it comes to a glorious culmination of awesome.

there's a double standard in parenting. who's shocked? anyone? 

i'm sure the double standard you're thinking of is not the one i'm going to talk about, which leads me to this conclusion: parenting should never, ever work, yet somehow we keep managing to make it happen, and in some instances, make it work. 

tim gunn would be a great dad. "well daddy, i was thinking about making a model of planet earth out of lead, mercury, and asbestos as a commentary on our society's lack of vision and concern for future generations." "ok, i'm a little concerned that this is going to be tasteless. these materials, if not handled properly, could be a total disaster. your sketch is promising, and i love the color palette, but it's going to take a lot of precision. make it work." 

back to the double standard. dads are almost invariably the parental unit to introduce kids to soda, doritos, pixie sticks, and the host of other terrible foods and drinks that result in children who never sleep and mothers who turn gray by the age of 28. and when dads do these things, we giggle and roll our eyes and say things like "father-son/daughter bonding" or "aw, a dad's rite of passage" or "YOU'RE GOING TO BE THE ONE WHO STAYS UP WITH JACK WHEN HE'S BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS AT 2 AM!!!!!!!" 

but when you see a mom giving her child a sip of her diet pepsi, your jaw drops. "omg becky, did you see that? doesn't she know what's in sodas!? i bet her kid has no teeth from bottle rot and she probably does heroine in their living room. oh, and they're on welfare and she's pregnant right now. with twins from two different men. we'll see her on maury in a year."

next on the agenda!

i am white. my husband is white. i'm not talking ethnicity. i would say caucasian in that instance, to be PC. not the computer. i'm a mac. just wanted to clarify that.

when i say we are white i am almost exclusively talking about our dance moves. my husband will tell you that his wrestling background formed him into a smooth operator with excellent hip control, thus forming him into an exceptional dancer.

do not listen to him. he is a very good looking, delusional liar.

vanilla ice should be a hero for people like me. first of all, his stage name alone represents everything we stand for. it sort of sounds hard, but when you really look at it, it doesn't make any sense. vanilla ice. ok, white=vanilla. ice=cold. so he's a tall iced latte no whip? or is he gelato? 

for the record, i've never heard a news report stating that both the driver and passengers of a drive-by were sipping starbucks or enjoying a creamy baskin robbins creation while gunning down some bloods who were on the wrong side of town. 

he couldn't even come up with his own beat. and he found a legal way to get away with it. remember the interview? "well, ours is dumdumdumdadadumdum-dum-dumdumdumdadadumdum, theirs is dumdumdumdadadumdum-dumdumdumdadadumdum. it's the 'dum'".

you're right vanilly (that's his hood name), it is in the dum(b).

people like me act tough. we want the outside world to think we pose some kind of threat, that we could beat down anyone who messed with us. the truth of the matter is that we would probably just get a lawyer to bury you in paperwork.

i've only held a gun once, and i cried. however, i shot santa right between the eyes when i finally conjured up the courage to pull the trigger. i still have nightmares.

ready for the culmination?

here is my response to the daddy double standard, a result of my horrible whiteness, and why you should never be scared of me or anyone in my family.

tim gun would be so proud.