Snoverkill: Snowed In, Day 6

It's now Thursday and due to another snow storm making its way through our area yesterday, I am still off of work! The baking continues, with a cranberry-nut bread now under my belt as well as my favorite German dumplings: Hefeklöße!

 

Just pretend you don't see the chips on our crappy Target plates.

"Hefe" means yeast and "Klöße" are dumplings. Every time I would visit our relatives in Germany, I would ask my godmother to make these for me. Therefore, I would only get to eat them once a year - sometimes, once every few years. But now that I am becoming much more confident in creating yeast doughs, I figured that it was finally time to give making Hefeklöße a shot...and I was successful! Woo hoo!

They are most often served with sweet sauces - here the dumpling is shown with a strawberry sauce (frozen strawberries, heavy cream, sugar) and a vanilla sauce (a packet from the German store mixed with milk and sugar). But they can also be served in a savory fashion. For dinner, we each had one of the leftover dumplings with the last of the beef stew that Eric made this past weekend - yummy!

Putting the 'Farmer' Back in Frau Farmer

It seems like a funny thing to do when there's three feet of snow on the ground, but on Tuesday I spent the bulk of my day researching websites to buy our vegetable and herb seeds from. I ended up purchasing it all from Heirloom Seeds.

Item:1 - Qty:1, RED BURGUNDY ONION (Hamburger Onion)
Item:2 - Qty:1, CALIFORNIA WONDER PEPPER
Item:3 - Qty:1, CALABRESE BROCCOLI - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:4 - Qty:1, ROMA TOMATO - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:5 - Qty:1, MARKETMORE 76 CUCUMBER - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:6 - Qty:1, BASIL, SWEET - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:7 - Qty:1, DILL - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:8 - Qty:1, OREGANO, GREEK - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:9 - Qty:1, PARSLEY, ITALIAN - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:10 - Qty:1, THYME, ENGLISH - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:11 - Qty:1, CORIANDER / CILANTRO - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:12 - Qty:2, COTTAGE GARDEN MIX  (A wildflower mix that we're going to sprinkle all around the back yard - I can't wait to see how this turns out!)
Item:13 - Qty:1, WINTER BLOOMSDALE SPINACH - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:14 - Qty:1, YELLOW SWEET SPANISH ONION

We're going to have WAY more seed than we have room for so we're going to share it with a friend of mine who is going to start her very first garden this year!

Now the only other items we need are garlic (which won't be planted until late in the fall), strawberries (which I plan to grow in a pot on our deck), and sweet potatoes.

I had been wondering why it was hard to find sweet potatoes in online seed catalogs and then I found out that they're not grown from seed! We are going to grow our own sweet potato slips from organic sweet potatoes that we're going to buy from the farmers market or Whole Foods. This should be an interesting project...Stay tuned to find out how that goes!

Frau Farmer: Snowpocalypse Edition

This weekend we received close nearly three feet of snow here in the DC area. The storm was predicted to hit on Friday afternoon so on Thursday evening and Friday morning, DC area residents went into Full Freak Out Mode. Eric went to the grocery store at 8 a.m. on Friday and found that all the shopping carts were already being used. They were out of eggs.

But those forecasts were right: the snow came...and kept on coming. According to the Capitol Hill Weather Gang and NOAA: "Snowmageddon will rank number 4 in recorded history for D.C. The storm also brings D.C. to number 3 in the top winter totals on record." 

So what's a girl to do when you're snowed in all weekend? Bake, eat, and drink.

Friday night, I defrosted pumpkin puree from our freezer (courtesy of last summer's garden) and baked a pumpkin bread. Then Eric's friends arrived (one stayed with us all weekend, while the other two live nearby) and we walked to the local Irish pub for dinner and some drinks. Back at home, we kept drinking (Bailey's with caramel!), went in the hot tub, and then I made cupcakes with, apparently, a bit of a buzz going - because this is what they looked like when I got done with them:

 

Just put the knife down...slowly. Now back away from the cupcakes.

On Saturday, I decided to make some pita bread for the first time ever to pair with the hummus that our friend had brought over. The recipe was from my bread baking cookbook and it was super easy. I still can't believe they turned out so perfectly.

After taking a break to walk over to our nearby friends' house, I got back to work in the kitchen by baking rolls for our dinner, a boeuf Bourguignon that Eric was making. I found the recipe on Allrecipes.com, my favorite site for finding good, solid recipes. It was the first time I'd made a yeast dough by letting the yeast mixture sit in a "well" in the flour but it worked perfectly. If you've never made fresh yeast dough with active dry yeast from the grocery store, you should give it a try. It's not hard and it smells amazing. (Just make sure you use a thermometer to make sure your milk isn't too warm or it will kill the yeast.)

The dough felt really nice when I was kneading it and I resisted the urge to add more flour to make it a little less sticky. The end result were a bunch of rolls that were a bit brown on the bottom (I need better pans) but fluffy and great for sopping up the stew. 

After sitting for a day, they became denser, but then I cut the remaining rolls in half and turned them into mini garlic breads to go with the pasta bar we had for dinner on Sunday night. (Choice of sauces: pesto/vodka sauce/tomato sauce - all homemade from our garden! Okay, the vodka wasn't from our garden, but it was from our local ABC store! Ha ha...)

I finished off the "Snow-my-god!" weekend by baking my good old standy cookies, the oatmeal chocolate chip walnut ones, for the Super Bowl. I could care less about football so I baked them some time during the third quarter. 

But the fun isn't over yet! Work was closed today! However, we are so stocked to the gills with leftovers now that I haven't cooked or baked a darn thing today. (Amazing, I know!) 

And guess what?

They're predicting another 5 inches (or more!) of snow to fall tomorrow night! So Eric is at the store right now getting us some more eggs and milk. 

Hey, if I'm stuck inside again on Wednesday, you can bet I'm going to be making more food!

Thank goodness pool season is still a few months away.