Mennonite Tuesday - Orange Julius

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

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After a crazy week last week, see next post, I opted to host Mennonite Monday on Tuesday.  To be honest, I do think I cooked anything last week.  I'm pretty sure I ate, but I was so busy I couldn't really tell up from down and I was not organized enough to plan ahead. I decided to whip up a Orange Julius (pg 2W) for something refreshing and it definitely hit the spot.  My mom actually put this recipe in the cookbook and when I asked her about it she said "Oh I put that in there, I made those when we were first married," which is why I never remember having them growing up.  Now I'm kind of wishing we would have had them more because they are really good.  

Orange Julius
1 6 oz can orange juice
1 cup water
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
12 ice cubes
Blend all ingredients in a blender.

It was as simple as that! No explanation needed.  

Mennonite Monday - Caramel Twists

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

~

 This week I went out on a limb and made Caramel Twists (pg 16Y).  To be honest, I was nervous that they would be a flop, but they surprisingly turned out very well and the dough was very easy to work with.  It is not hard to understand why they are so good with all the butter and sugar in them.  

Caramel Twists

Mix together: 

9 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

2 tsp salt

Dissolve: 

2 pkgs of yeast in 1/2 cup water

Add to flour mixture together with:

6 egg yolks beaten and 2 cups warm milk

Mix together until smooth, Cover and refrigerate overnight. 

Caramel coating: 

2 cups margarine

1 cup light corn syrup

3 cups brown sugar

1 cup chopped nuts

When ready to bake Caramel Twists, prepare Caramel coating by melting butter, and sugar and syrup.  Spread in roll pans.  Sprinkle with nuts.  Cut dough into equal parts for easy handling.  Roll each third of dough into rectangle 1/4 inch thick.  Brush center third with soft butter, sprinkle with cinnamon and brown sugar.  Fold one third of rectangle over center third and sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon.  Fold remaining third over 2 layers.  Cut crosswise into strips 1 inch wide. Grasp ends of strips firmly and twist in opposite directions.  Place in pan about 1 inch apart.  Repeat procedure with rest of dough.  Allow to rise 30 minutes.  Bake in oven at 350 degrees about 25 minutes.  Invert pans immediately on large sheets of foil.  

I always let my yeast soak in the container I measure the water in, so I don't have to make more things dirty. 

Butter for the dough. 

I did choose to cut the butter into the flour by hand, but i'm sure you could use your mixer to do the work. 

Adding the egg yokes. 

The dough is pretty dense when it goes into the refrigerator. 

I made the dough in the morning, so that evening I started my caramel topping. 

This is what the dough looked like after setting in the refrigerator.  Since there was a lot of dough, I decided to experiment a little bit, so I made half that night and I let the other half set in the refrigerator for a few days to see if I could still use the dough if it sat in the refrigerator longer than overnight.  Both sets of dough worked the same, so you can let you dough set as long or as little as you want.  

This dough was the easiest to roll out, of all of the doughs I have worked with so far.  It required very little flour and did not stick to the rolling pan. 

Adding butter to the middle third. 

Adding brown sugar and cinnamon. 

Folding one third over the middle. 

Adding more brown sugar and cinnamon. 

I folded the final third over and cut 1 inch strips with a large knife.  

Twisting the dough. 

The twists in the caramel topping. 

When they came out of the oven. 

The final product.  Keep in mind that this was only half the dough, so you would have twice as many twists if you made the entire recipe at once.  

Mennonite Monday - Delicate Fluffy Pancakes

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

~

On Saturday Mike was hungry for pancakes.  Since I had just volunteered our bag of pancake mix to a fund raiser breakfast next week, I decided to use this opportunity to make some pancakes from scratch. So I decided to make Delicate Fluffy Pancakes (pg 35 W).  

Delicate Fluffy Pancakes

3 eggs, separated

1 2/3 cups buttermilk

3 Tbl Soft margarine

1 1/2 cups flour

1 Tbl sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp soda

1/2 tsp salt

Combine all ingredients except egg whites.  Beat the egg yolks and fold stiffly beaten egg whites into mixture.  (my note: I think the last sentence should read: Beat the egg whites then fold stiffly beaten egg whites into mixture.)

 All of the dry ingredients. 

 Adding the egg yolks and buttermilk.  Since I did not have buttermilk, I used a buttermilk substitute.  The combination is 1 cup of milk plus 1 Tbl vinegar.  

 Everything mixed together except the egg whites. 

 To make egg whites stiff, you have to use a mixer because they won't get stiff otherwise.  

 Mixing int he egg whites in. 

 Finished batter. 

Last Week

As I said in my Mennonite Monday post, last week was a little unusual due to a turn of events on Wednesday.

It all started a few weeks ago when Mike began having bad back pain.  We assumed that it was due to harvest lifting and bouncing in the tractor and didn't think too much about it.  The pain didn't go away, so Mike scheduled an appointment at the chiropractor on Friday, Oct. 29.

Last Tuesday (Oct 26) Mike was disking the Wally quarter near our house and wondered if I would bring him supper.  Since I didn't have anything planned, I picked up Subway so we could eat while he drove.  When I got to the field Mike said his back hurt and his stomach was hurting and he just wanted to finish the field and go home and relax.

He was only home about 15 minutes before he started vomiting.  This lasted, on and off,  for the next 3-4 hours.  If throwing up wasn't bad enough, Mike could not find any place where he was comfortable due to the back and stomach pain.  I called a few people, one being the hospital, and tried to get some advice about what we should do.  At one point I asked Mike if he would consider a bath and he said he had actually been thinking about it.  Mike hasn't taken a bath in a long time, probably long before we were even married or dating.  The bath seemed to help relieve the pain and pressure, which helped and after his second time in the bathtub, the pain in his back had almost disappeared.  This made it possible to sleep through the night.

In the morning, I offered make an appointment at the clinic since they had a 9:30 opening, but Mike thought the pain was better and decided to pass up the appointment. At 9:32 (it's funny the details I remember) he called me at work wanting me to schedule an appointment that day.

At 1:15 we met with Dr. Ohrt to discuss what was going on.  Dr. Ohrt confirmed our thoughts that it may be a kidney stone or his appendix, so in order to be sure he wanted a blood and urine test.  The urine test was clean, so we knew it wasn't kidney stones.  However, his white blood count was slightly elevated, so it was possible that his appendix was causing the problems.  The next step to know if it was the appendix for sure, was a CT scan, but with the cost of a CT scan being rather high, Dr. Ohrt suggested that Mike wait a couple hours.  If the pain weakened we would not do the scan, but if it stayed the same or got worse, we would have the scan done.

At 4:15 we headed back to the clinic for the CT scan.  It took about an hour to have the CT scan done by the time we did the paper work, got the iv and had the scan.  Then the scan was emailed to Grand Island to be read.  We waited in the CT room for a long time before we decided to move to the waiting room.  As we came out of the CT room, Dr. Ohrt was already on the phone and the first words out of his mouth were "your having surgery." Mikes appendix was raging and had grown from the size of your pinky finger to the size of a hot dog, so it needed to come out as soon as possible.  At 6 pm we found out that Mike would be having surgery at 7:30 pm, so we made a few calls and sent a few texts to let our family know and then Mike was busy for the next hour and a half getting ready for surgery. When he went back to surgery it was 7:50 and they said surgery would take 30 minutes to 2 hours.  Since his back had been hurting so long, they were worried that the appendix had be smoldering back there and it may have exploded, which would have been bad making surgery longer.  We were lucky, his appendix had not exploded and surgery lasted a little over an hour.

When Mike came out of surgery he was not in a good mood.  Rightfully so.  His main frustrations were his scratchy throat because he couldn't have any water to drink that soon after surgery and the things on his legs that reduced the chance of blood clots because they were hot and itchy.  While I knew Mike was in pretty bad pain, I knew he would be okay when he asked for his phone less than 10 minutes after being moved into his room.

Mike stayed in the hospital until  Friday morning and has made large strides healing ever since.

While you never want to have a reason to stay in the hospital, it was a good experience for me.  Since I do the marketing for the facility, it was good to see the facility and how it worked and I was very very impressed by all of the employees, the service and the wonderful care we received.

I don't have any pictures of Mike in the hospital.  To be honest, there were several times when I was looking at Mike in the hospital bed thinking I should probably take a picture of this for my blog, but it never felt appropriate, especially during the times he was in a lot of pain.

If anyone is still reading and this point, I want to thank you for reading this long long blog post, because you must really care about Mike and I, or you have nothing better to do.  But on a serious note,  thank you to everyone who stopped by at the hospital, called, sent a cards or gifts, or visited us at home.  It was amazing to see the community of support that we have.      

Mennonite Monday - Baked Macaroni and Cheese with Ham

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

~

We had some crazy events (I'll post more about that later)last week, which changed my plans for Mennonite Monday so instead of Cinnamon Twists I made the Baked Macaroni and Cheese with Ham (pg 154W).  This was a great quick recipe to throw together for a week night meal. 

Baked Macaroni and Cheese with Ham 

1 1/2 cup cooked macaroni

1 egg, slightly beaten 

6 oz. cubed cheese

1 Tbl melted margarine 

1 1/2 cup milk 

8 oz. diced ham 

2 Tbl bread crumbs

 Scald milk, add cheese and stir until melted.  Add ham and then add eggs carefully to hot liquid, stirring constantly.  Place macaroni in greased baking dish and pour ham and cheese mixture over the macaroni.  Sprinkle with a mixture of crumbs and margarine.  Bake 30 minutes at 375 degrees.  

 I used a cup of noodles, which cooked to be more than a cup and a half of cooked noodles in the end.  

 I had some cubed ham in the freezer that was perfect for making this recipe. 

 I'm still not sure if I scald milk right, but when I see little bubbles on the edge of the pot I figure it must be close enough. 

 Whenever you put Velveta in a pot, you must stir continuously because it will stick to the bottom of your pot.  I should have learned this when I made the Broccoli Soup, but I guess I still need a few reminders once in a while. 

 I didn't have bread crumbs, so I used corn flake crumbs instead, which seemed to do fine. 

 Draining the noodles. 

 Adding the ham. 

 Adding the egg. 

 Bottom layer noodles. 

 Second layer of cheese and ham mixture. 

 Top layer. 

After it had cooked for 30 minutes.