living in the woods and making stuff

Part one.

I love frozen pizza. It is one of the few things that I actually like from the freezer. Something happens to the pizza when it is frozen to make it taste, well, like frozen pizza. And then there is the convenience. Go to the store, pick up a pizza, take it home and bake it. Or more simply, open freezer, grab pizza, unwrap, bake.

In theory anyway. I am not the type to have frozen pizzas on hand. If I have them, I eat them, so if I want one, it requires a trip to the store…usually Hy-Vee, usually late at night.

And part two…

A few nights ago I made some pizza from scratch. It was good, but I forgot (since the last time that I made it) that my recipe makes too much dough for my pizza pan. I ended up, again, with a slightly ruffled pizza that had way too much dough on the edges. I wanted to make some pizza, figure out the best size, so that I have it all figured out for the next time I make pizza. The problem is that I don’t really feel like eating more pizza.

So, perfect time for me to make frozen pizzas. Then, some cold lonely night, I can creep down to the basement, open up the freezer door, and pull out a home-made frozen pizza. No more trips to Hy-Vee! (Oh, the things that make my world go around…)

I made a batch of pizza dough, kneaded it until the dough was the consistency of an earlobe (as per directions..). Then let it rise, and shaped it into 3 pizzas. Large enough for one meal (plus leftovers for the next morning). I love to have cold pizza with lime pickle!

The pizzas are simple; tomato sauce, cheese, and a little bit of dried oregano sprinkled over the top. I can always add extra cheese, or toppings before baking.

I cut out some cardboard circles, wrapped them in plastic bags, and put the pizzas on them to freeze. I wanted to make sure that the pizzas froze flat, and then in the morning I will give each pizza its own ziplock bag for extra fresh, airtight storage.

Right before Christmas I stopped by my friend Delores’s house to drop off some fabric, and she sent me out the door with a batch of freshly made buttermilk oat farls (similar to a scone or biscuit). They were delicious, and I have been wanting to make them ever since. They are dense, tangy, and the perfect thing to eat with butter and jam, warm out of the oven.

The rolled oats are soaked in buttermilk overnight, and the farls are very moist and buttermilky as a result. If you love buttermilk and oats, you will probably love these.

The dough is shaped into a circle, and then cut into 4 or 8 pie wedges (Delores shapes her’s into a square, and then into 8 triangles). I made mine round because I used my round cast iron pizza pan, as all my cookie sheets have migrated to my mom’s house. I patted the dough right onto the pan, cut it carefully, and slid the pieces apart. It worked well. I didn’t preheat the pan, so I was a little worried that the biscuits wouldn’t cook as well on the bottom, but they turned out golden on the top as well as on the bottom.

Here is the recipe, pretty much exactly as Delores told it to me.

2 cups rolled oats (not instant!)

1 1/4 – 2 1/4 cups buttermilk

2 1/2 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

Mix oats with 1 1/4 cups buttermilk. Make sure to cover, and let stand overnight.

In the morning. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter baking sheet. Stir flour, salt, and baking soda together in a small mixing bowl. Gradually beat flour mixture into oats to form a soft dough, adding more buttermilk if necessary (it probably will be). Shape dough into flat circle, about 1 inch thick. Cut dough into quarters or eighths, and place on cookie sheet. Bake for 25 minutes, or until golden.

They are best when served warm, and can be kept warm by placing in a dish lined with a teatowel, in a warm oven, or by the stove. They can also be reheated quite easily in a toaster oven or regular oven!

This was my mom’s idea. (And borrowed from an adorable product that we are carrying in the store.) A mouse in a match box. An “easy” way to do the whole ginger bread thing. We made a mistake a few years ago and spent hours and hours on our gingerbread house, and after that decided that we either wouldn’t do one, or plan something simple. For those who don’t know, the first Friday of every month in our town we have an art walk. Somewhere along the line the December art walk (they all have themes) got the theme of ginger bread houses. Now in December every store, restaurant, gallery, etc., has one or more ginger bread houses displayed prominently in the windows. Ours isn’t quite a house, but in my mind sleeping quarters count too.

I kept thinking that I would start the gingerbread experimenting long before the December 5th deadline, but of course I ended up Tuesday afternoon with a batch of chilled dough that behaved like a rock.

I could barely cut it with a knife, and had to toss it out. (For the record, I didn’t do the best job of following the recipe, and heated the butter, sugar, and molasses up too hot. I think!)

Tuesday night I made what was the first of many trips to Hy-Vee for a new jar of molasses. Batch two, on Wednesday worked out much better. I was still afraid of chilling the dough so I just rolled it out warmish, and cooled the pices on a cookie sheet on the porch before baking since it has turned bitterly cold here. I made the design for all the pieces on stiff paper, and then placed the paper directly on the cookie dough, on a cutting board, or directly on the cookie sheet, and cut out the shapes. It is harder to keep the shapes exact when the dough is warm, but I managed ok.

I made a lot of bricks, some logs, a few stockings for the mantle, and the box and fireplace this way. I had a few pieces break as I was removing them from the cookie sheet, but other than that, no major disasters. I kept on changing things around, and needing to bake extra parts. I had a ziplock bag  full of left over dough saved for such emergencies, I would turn on the oven, roll out the part, bake it, and go on to the next part.

Cleaning the flour off of the baked sheets of gingerbread. My vegetable brush worked out to be the best tool for this.

Thursday morning, after another trip to Hy-Vee, this time for junky powdered sugar and egg white powder, I assembled the pieces and stuck them together with royal icing. Royal icing is the best icing for this kind of thing. It is made of sugar, egg whites, and water. It tastes kind of gross, but when it is dry it holds like a ROCK. (When I was in 2nd grade we had a gingerbread house party for my birthday and the person who was in charge of the icing used some other recipe, and we had a night of houses falling all over the place!)

One more trip to Hy-Vee (you would think that I could have made a list and picked up all the ingredients at once…) for marshmallows, and the pillows and quilt were under way. I wanted to make the bedding out of something soft, and marshmallows came to mind. Even though you can’t really see them in the finished product, they create the right shape and feel of cozy bedding. The red candies are really yummy peppermint pillows from the store. They made the perfect topping for a downy satiny quilt.

My mom came over to sculpt the little mouse. I made an attempt, and called her directly to finish it off. She molded the head out of marzipan, and the body is just a padding of marshmallows under the quilt (the old pillow technique). The mouse was finished in stages. First he was placed in bed to check his positioning.

Then he needed a little color. His nose and ears were a little too much marzipan colored. In came my mom with the pink frosting.

We decided at the end of mouse production that we needed to have him wearing a red sleeping cap and red pajamas. We molded the parts with marzipan, and carefully painted them with red icing. We inserted the red shoulders into the box using my size 0 knitting needles. Tricky tricky work. If we got even one drop of red dye on the white pillow we were sunk.

(I can’t decide if I like the peppercorn eyes or the shredded wheat whiskers better here!)

On to the fireplace. I wanted to give it a more “authentic” feel, so I made it three dimensional, and ended up having to brick the inside arch. That was tricky! The hearth ended up working out well.

I made a piece of gingerbread for underneath the bricks, and then glued them all on with the royal icing. The fire was lit up from underneath with a christmas light. I ended up painting some of the logs red later on down the line.

We were a little worried about transportation to the store. My mom brought over a large wooden tray, and we placed each part in a bed of tea towels. The pieces were snugly set in, and the trip was successful. My mom drove, and I held the setup on my lap.

Kathy did an amazing job decorating the tree, and it looked so beautiful in the window! Little mousie got a corner under the tree, and enjoyed the festive atmosphere!