Mad Cow Chronicles

Good morning all, and hey, look at that, I’m not dead! It’s been a busy (read: exhausting) couple of weeks in my little corner of Canuckistan, and, alas, cutting corners in the area of blogging was more socially-acceptable than cutting corners in areas such as, say, personal hygiene.

So here I am, back in the as-it-were saddle of the internet, once again loading my digital cannonry to fire bytes upon bytes of pure chaos in your general direction.

So here we go: First post back, and, as I am gravely indebted to Lady Jess, I took a request: “Blog about pretzels!”

Here, then, I am: Blogging about pretzels.

First, so we can establish what’s going on, an illustrative picture.

Ladies and gentlemen, yours truly in kitchen battle garb:

Let’s begin. You will need (assuming you actually want to make pretzels here) the following:

1 tablespoon yeast;

1 tablespoon maple syrup*

3 cups all-purpose flour*

2 tablespoons margarine or butter, softened*

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup very warm water (but not boiling)

You will also need:

Two cookie sheets, a small or medium saucepan or pot partly full of water, and roughly a tablespoon of baking soda.

Toppings (coarse salt, black pepper, oregano, Montreal Steak Spice, dried crushed chilies, parmesan cheese, etc)*

*All these ingredients can be substituted for an equal amount of a similar ingredient; maple syrup can be replaced with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, or even Pepsi; flour can be replaced with hard whole wheat flour if you prefer it; I tend to use olive or vegetable oils instead of margarine or butter and, of course, toppings are completely at your own discretion.

Let’s Begin:

Place your yeast and your maple syrup into a medium-large bowl as shown below, adding the oil.

Add the salt

And stir it all up well. Then add the water,

one cup of the flour, and mix very well. The mixture will start to bubble; leave it alone for about five minutes.

After about five minutes, stir in the rest of the flour. The dough should be slightly sticky but not too difficult to work with; turn it out on a lightly floured board and knead.

If the dough persists in sticking to your hands or the work surface, work more flour into it as you knead. Knead for approximately five minutes, then return it to the bowl and allow it to rise in a warm place until it doubles in size (or about sixty to eighty minutes).

Remove the dough from the bowl, punch it down, knead it again for about five minutes, and divide it into twelve equal parts. Roll each of these pieces into a pipe between twelve to eighteen inches long. You now have two options:

1: Cut the pipe into three four-to-six-inch pretzel sticks, or

2: Twist each pipe into the traditional pretzel shape. As you can see below, I took this option with my latest batch.

As you’re shaping the pretzels, put the tablespoon of baking soda into your pot of water and bring it to a boil; you should also, at this time, begin pre-heating the oven to 475. You’re going to boil the pretzels for about a minute on each side, remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, allow them to drain for a moment, and put them on your cookie sheet.

You should add your seasonings to the pretzels the moment they come out of the pot; you can either have a dish of seasoning standing by to press the pretzels into gently, or sprinkle the toppings on.

The pretzels, once they are all boiled, bake at 475 for 12-15 minutes, or until they are golden brown, thus:

Enjoy!

Be sure to drop in on Thursday for “Things That Are Cool: LibriVox"!

I am- if it has not become abundantly clear- something of a geek. I am also, if it has not become abundantly clear, a fan of Star Wars. In what might be considered a big way.

Knights of the Old Republic- a game by BioWare, the geniuses behind Neverwinter Nights, Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age: Origins- combines my love of Star Wars, my love of RPGs, and my love of swordfights in one glowing, fast-moving, lightning-chucking telekinetically-choking rumble.

I loved it, if you hadn’t gotten that impression.

Tonight, I was at The Heroes’ Lounge (my local comic shop) and I picked up the first couple issues of Dark Horse Comics’ treatment of Knights of the Old Republic. Will it follow the plot of the game? Will it dance around it, showing the story from secondary characters’ points of view?

I don’t know. But my inner ten-year-old is demanding I get off the internet, forget about being at work tomorrow, baking plans for the weekend, and just about everything else… curl up under the blankets, listen to the thunderstorm*, and read about the Knights of the Old Republic.

Should these comics be excellent, I will no doubt be raving about them soon. (Should they be terrible, the same raving will probably be occur, but it might be labelled more of a ‘rant’.)

*I have hooked up my iPod, with an ambient recording of a thunderstorm, on loop, to the sleep timer on my iPod alarm clock. I love thunderstorms, too.

This post has no real purpose other than to let you know that my second batch of soft pretzels in a week is just crisping gently in the oven. I’m sure you all wanted to know this.

The recipe may make its way up, with photographs, when I next prepare it and photograph the process. Or, it may not.

Okay, now this post has a second purpose: If you have ever played and enjoyed Diablo, or any of its sequels, you need to get at least the demo for Torchlight. It’s great.

Today’s ramble hearkens back to a vow I made after one too many mornings waking up, clutching my heart and sweating, after being forced- one might say jerked wholesale- from my hitherto-peaceful repose, trembling gently; the agent of this change was, as per usual, the strident “BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK” of my green-glowing Sony alarm clock.

There were a few notable flaws in this clock. First, the switch to turn the alarm off required you to navigate past “Radio ON”. If you turned it on and off quickly, you’d just get a loud “SQURK” as you flicked the switch through three positions to Alarm On (or from Alarm On to Off). Second, the radio was… uh… terrible. Unless you wanted to wake up to static, it was Buzzer or Go Home. Third? The buzzer had no volume control- it was always set at max. BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK BEEK…

I swore a terrible vow this summer. “When I get a new job,” I said, “Part of my first paycheque is going into buying a clock that isn’t terrible. A clock with an iPod docking station! Yeah! I’ll have a clock that plays music to wake me up.”

Such a clock I now posess. It is a Memorex iWake Mi4004. In black. It fills several roles now:

1: It is an alarm clock. Dual alarms, in fact, which is… undeniably pleasant. One for work, one for Sundays- and to music, not strident banshee-esque wailing. I don’t need an alarm for my days off, as a rule; typically those are spent allowing my body to, in an almost sponge-like fashion, suck up as much rest as it wants by sleeping until I am awakened by some cut-off switch in my brain that thinks I have reached optimum voltage.

2: It is an iPod dock. This serves a dual purpose- it keeps the iPod charged and makes it easy to locate.

3: It is a set of speakers for the iPod! It even has a tiny little remote. Which I will, no doubt, lose within seconds.

4: It has a Sleep function. I can go to sleep to the sounds of twenty minutes’ measured ambient cricket noises, or perhaps a pre-measured samplet of an audiobook or podcast. (By setting the internal alarm on the iPod to play from a much more… energetic… playlist one minute before the clock alarm goes off, I can have the clock pick up something like the Wilhelm Tell overture instead of, say, the sound of a river running; when I’m tired, that’s not enough to force a twitch out of me, let alone consciousness).

In short: I have a new clock, and it is good.