36/365

36/365, originally uploaded by britrosewhite.

I woke up today intending to blog about a whole nother thing that I made this weekend. But a random tweet by the lovely Danielle about pretzel salt made me remember a recent recipe I'd added to my favorites bar. I often come across recipes that I like to save for a rainy day, and even though today is not rainy, it is cold again. So I cancelled my run and decided to indulge in some carbs instead!

I don't remember how I came across this blog, but it's a new favorite: The Lunchbox Bunch. And I'm pretty sure she's vegan, but that doesn't scare me. Her sinus clearing juice is a miracle worker!

I'm not quite sure why this caught my eye because I am not a pretzel lover, but soft pretzels...I can go for those. And whole wheat, I can go for that. I moderated the recipe a bit - honey for agave nectar (wish I had some!) and added 4 tsp of wheat gluten to avoid heavy and accomplish light. I also used the Kitchen Aid - why wouldn't I?! And no herbs. No thanks, herbs.

I'm pulling a slight Pioneer Woman with the photos, but I'll leave the descriptive how-to's for you to look up.

Here is is: Giant Soft Pretzels

Okay, that's another thing I changed. I made them not so giant. Instead of 5-9 I made 12. I'm into all this nutrition info, so I figured a 200 cal whole wheat pretzel was a good snack. Also, everyone knows that the more the dough meets, the softer and yummier it is! I wanted the dough to meet in every crevice.


Here is the pretty dough after rising for an hour.

And here I am punching that sucker down!

Knuckle prints.

Then you knead it for about two minutes with your big ol' hands...

And you'll end up here.

This is where I tried to divide it into 12 equal pieces.

Not all pretzels are created equal.

By the way, remember when I said I'd stop using the iPhone pictures so much? Well, not only am I using my camera, I shot these (and the last few days) on automatic. I still don't quite understand WHAT I'm doing, and if the dough jiggled even a little, it'd be all out of focus, but I'm pretty happy to have made that small step.

Okay, this is where you roll it out. Here, I played like it was play dough like it was dough.

Then you twist it around until you remember what a pretzel looks like.

Then brush a combination of olive oil and lemon juice on top (I don't think she did this on accident - she wants you to feel like you're being bad and using melted butter).

Look at these fatties! This is after 15 minutes in the oven. I brushed more olive oil and lemon juice on top and added salt to this bunch. Then popped them in for another 5 minutes.

And these babies got the sweet treatment. Cinnamon and sugar just like at the mall.

Yum.

Six savory, six sweet.

Not a hard guess which one I went in for.