Ok, time for part two of my Sunday Kitchen-Extravaganza!

I don't know about you, but Kyle and I really enjoy a good, wrapped sandwich.  Whether it be a burrito, curried fish and rice, or even some quesadillas, we really enjoy using wraps.  Ok, I know that traditionally with Mexican food we should be using corn tortillas, but I really like whole wheat, so thats what we use.  Anyways, so as I mentioned yesterday, these wraps are one of the two last bread products we still buy.  But as of yesterday we've stricken it from the grocery list.

Just a quick note that on Sunday I made wraps using KAF Unbleached All Purpose White flour, not whole wheat, just because that was the recipe I came across in my King Arthur Flour Bakers Companion book that I recently bought.  I'm going to try it out with some whole wheat flour next time, I'll let you know how it goes.

Ok, so here we go.  Start off with 1.25 cups of water on the stove and get it boiling.  Once its bubbling away pour it into two cups of your flour.  Mix it all together pretty well with a spoon and then set it aside, covered, for about half an hour (until it cools).

While that's sitting get the rest of your ingredients mixed together:
1 cup of flour
1/4 cup potato flour (or 1/2 cup potato flakes- which I happened to have in the back of the cupboard)
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons oil (the recipe called for veggie oil, we only have EV olive oil at our house...tasted fine to me)

In a small bowl I mixed together 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast with about a quarter cup of warm water.  I let it sit for the thirty minutes while the water/flour mixture cooled.  The recipe actually called for instant yeast, in which case you can just mix it in with the potato flour, salt, etc, but I don't have instant yeast at the house so we use what we've got, right?

Ok, moving on.

Once the flour/water mixture is cool, add the rest of the ingredients to it, stirring it as well as you can, but trust me, you'll have to get in there with your hands to really get it all incorporated.  It'll seem a little hopeless at first, but you'll get there.  After kneading it for a few minutes, form it into a ball, cover it lightly and let it rise in a greased bowl for an hour.  Oh, and I guess its important to use as little flour as possible while kneading, KAF actually recommends using a little bit of oil to keep it from sticking to everything as opposed to flour.  But I didn't read that far ahead so I used flour (not alot, I'm a frugal lady), and trust me, they turned out just fine.

After the initial rising has finished, break the dough up into smaller pieces (I made them a little bigger than a golf ball, which yielded 12 smaller portions), and then let these rest, covered, for another 15-30 minutes.  This is when things start to get a little hectic.

Its hectic because these suckers only take 1-2 minutes per side to fry (over medium/medium-high heat), and this just happens to be the exact about of time it takes for me to roll them out.  I rolled them out to be pretty big, and really thin (we're talking about 9" in diameter and about 1/16" to 1/8" thick).  Once it is all rolled out, carefully pick it up by the edges and lay it down in a dry frying pan (no oil, no butter, nothing). 

Frying them is interesting in that huge bubbles form causing the wrap to balloon-up while you're trying to cook it.  Personally, I popped the bigger bubbles with the tine of a fork to try to get them to cook more evenly (if you go this route BE CAREFUL, hot steam escapes which continually singed my fingers if I wasn't careful).

After each one was done cooking I placed it on a wire rack, stacking them all up to keep them soft until they were all done.  I let them sit for an hour or two until I was ready to finish my day up by making some chicken/bean burritos.  Kyle and I each had two burritos (after baking all day I realized I hadn't had any lunch!) and decided that these home-made wraps were awesome!  After dinner we were left with eight wraps that I bagged and put in the fridge to eat for lunch the next couple of days.

And looky here: I found an online recipe at the King Arthur Flour website for this, so you can print out the recipe and try it yourself!  Let me know how it goes!

Sunday was an incredibly busy day for me.  Kyle was working one more day for his old boss to pay off his new cross-country ski boots (only had to work two days for some wicked nice boots) so I had some time to kill.  He didn't have to be at work until 10:00, so in the morning, we worked together on the new kitchen pantry that Kyle's been working on for the past week.  We're so close to being done, really only need the doors to be made and hung, but our quirky, old house is definitely making things difficult with the slightly slanted ceiling and floors.  Oh well, we're quirky, too, so it all works out.
After Kyle headed out I made myself a quick "to do" list (these things are the only way I can find to keep myself on track) and set a few old movies to play on my laptop while I worked away in the kitchen.

To Do:
Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta?
Make Flour Tortillas (aka, wraps)
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner (we had roasted a week ago, then I made stock a few nights ago)

After a couple weeks of not selling eggs and not seeing any family/friends (therefore not giving away any eggs either) we found our fridge loaded down with too many full egg cartons.  So my first order of business for the day was to make a few quiches for the freezer.  To start things off, I made a double-batch of pie crust:

2.5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup shortening
enough cold water to just bring it all together with some work

You know the drill: cut in the shortening until you have little pea-sized pieces then carefully add water to bring it all together. 

I split the chunk of dough in half, rolled each piece out to about 1/8" thick, pressed them into a couple glass pie plates, and threw them in a 450 degree oven (covered in foil) for 8 minutes, then for another 5 minutes uncovered.

While the pie crust cooled I whipped up 16 eggs with about 2 cups of milk.  Then set 2 cups of chopped mushrooms, a tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper, and a teaspoon or so of dried thyme in a pan to saute.  When that was set I poured it into one crust, topped it with a couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese, and covered the whole thing with about half of the egg mixture.

In the second crust I had about two cups of chopped spinach, and some quartered, canned artichokes that I had on hand.  After adding a handful or so of shredded mozzarella cheese and the rest of the egg mixture I tossed them both in the oven (at 325 degrees) for about an hour (just until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean).

These little beauties came out looking delicious, smelling amazing, and I set them on some wire racks to cool completely (after all, these were for later, last-minute meals, not for a day I had all the time in the world).  Once they cooled, I covered them in two layers of tin foil, then wrapped with plastic wrap before throwing them in the freezer (marked with the date and description of the quiche) with the last of our chickens and apple cider.

After quickly scrubbing all my used bowls, utensils, etc, I threw all the ingredients for my bread dough in the mixer and got it kneading away while I got to work on the rest of my list.

By the end of the day my 'to do' list looked like this:


Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta
Make Flour Tortillas
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner

On top of that I made two apple turnovers for dessert with the leftover pie crust (there's ALWAYS a little leftover when I roll out my crusts) using just a diced up apple, a tiny bit of honey, and a splash of vanilla extract.  I was pretty happy with myself.  Though, I was a little bummed I didn't get to try making pasta, but seeing as I'd never made wraps before I was pretty psyched to have been able to try something new that day.  Wraps and english muffins are the only two bread products we buy anymore.  One down, one more to go.

Tomorrow I'll post how I made the tortillas- because they turned out AMAZING and weren't all that difficult.  I'm hoping to make another batch or two soon so we can have some stored in the freezer.  Have I mentioned how much I love our chest freezer?  Well, I do.