Well, Littletractorgal has been working hard on canning and pickling, and doing up huge posts for HER blog about what she does for canning… And I’m starting to feel a bit, um, left out here… So….
I thought, hey, why don’t I start posting some of the amazing recipes I have in MY culinary repertoire?!?! Lets start with my award-winning breakfast croissants (that’s crescent rolls, for you non-French speakers… because, of course, calling them something hard to pronounce makes them yummier!)
Step 1 – Go shopping to the grocery store WITHOUT your wife (or if she’s there, and sees you pulling suspicious things off the pre-made baked goods shelf, tell her you’re going to make her breakfast in bed!). You’re looking for the things that come in the tube that looks like this:
(Well, SORT of like that… I’m not trying to be brand-neutral or anything, I just didn’t think to start taking pictures until after I’d started assembly…)
Step 2 – Open the tube. As these things are vacuum-sealed, this step MAY require safety goggles… It certainly gets your heart-rate up, early in the morning, because there’s no guarantee about what exactly will make that little tube of goodness go -POP!-… I’ve found, over the years, that if I peel the label off and then twist in a diametrically opposed direction on either end, I can USUALLY control the process well enough to prevent too much flying debris. Remove the dough from the tube…
(this is what your tube should look like AFTER removal of the dough… )
Step 1a – find a baking sheet to put the dough on… Experience will teach you to do this step in the proper order…
Step 3 – Assemble the pre-perforated triangles of dough into the rolled up crescent rolls on the baking sheet. Sorry, I don’t have pictures of this crucial assembly step, as, again, I forgot to start taking pictures… But some advice I CAN give you is – Start rolling them from the wide end! This is very important!
ADVANCED STEPS – At this point, once you’ve been through the whole process a couple of times, you can start doing some customization to the rolls. For example, one family favorite is to place grated cheese on top of the raw dough and roll it in, to make CHEESY rolls! IMPORTANT NOTE – the rolls do NOT hold a lot of cheese, so be aware of how much is being added.
Here’s the assembled rolls on the baking sheet, ready to go into the oven:
Step 4 – Bake the rolls in the oven at 375 degrees for 11-13 minutes. The amount of time is a subject of heated debate, as some family members like the rolls a little gooey in the middle and some don’t. Careful trials and experimentation is required to find the perfect baking time. This may also vary by oven, so your mileage may vary.
Step 5 – Remove from oven. This is a VERY IMPORTANT STEP!
Note, it is very important to space the rolls out properly on the baking sheet, in order that traumatic things like THIS don’t happen during the baking process… The rolls tend to expand when cooked…
Viola! (That’s French again…) The finished, delicious product! Enjoy with spreads such as margarine, or (if you’re feeling up-scale) jam!!
(the little green thing is a sprig of basil, apparently… You don’t HAVE to eat it, but LTGal thought it would make things look more, um, Haute Cuisine…)
You forgot step 6: Turn off the oven.
But you really did forget that, I turned it off an hour or so later