Sunday, March 23, 2008

They're corny looking

This past Sunday was yet another cooking marathon for Gen and me. Sometimes I wished that we could buy more prepared food, but our food standards are too healthy (and we're too frugal) to go that route. So, we're stuck cooking essentially all of our meals.

The last batch of cornbread I made actually went bad after a few days, despite my cookbook's claim that cornbread keeps for a week when tightly covered in plastic wrap. This week, I decided to try to the cornbread muffin route so that the cornbread would be in convenient single serving sizes and could be easily stuffed in a tupperware for freezing. I'm quite pleased with this week's baking experiment, though I have come to realize that our muffin tins totally suck. Apparently, these tins are from the spray-on teflon generation where the teflon doesn't really stay bonded to the tin very well. Gen scraped off the teflon flakes while I proceeded to admire my baking handiwork.

I also baked some more whole wheat flatbread. I think I'm getting the hang of controlling whether I get crackers or flatbread. If I crank the oven up to 450F and roll the dough a little thinner, I get something more cracker-like. If I roll slightly thicker and bake at 400F or lower, I usually get a flatbread type bread. Pretty intuitive, huh? It only took 3 attempts for my engineering skills to figure that one out. Some pieces formed pockets, which leads Gen and I to believe that we can attempt pita bread in the future.

I think I'll probably keep up the flatbread and cracker baking on a regular basis. I might as well be eating my own processed carbs rather than the even more highly refined store bought stuff. My cooking idol Alton Brown says, "I love crackers, and I'm not about to trust their production to anyone (especially elves in hollow trees)." I concur.

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