Basic White Bread

Hi Steiner Staff!

Some of you asked for the recipe for Snakes and for Pizza Rolls.  Well, I don't actually have a recipe for those.  It's pretty much white bread with stuff in it.  So here's the basic bread "recipe" (which is really more like instructions), and I'll give instructions for the specialty stuff at the end.

  First of all, when you make bread, remember this: 

• One cup of liquid (milk, water, broth, juice) will make one loaf of bread or eight to twelve rolls (depending on how big you make the rolls). 
• For every one cup of liquid you need to add one teaspoon of yeast.
• For every one cup of liquid you need to add one teaspoon of salt.
• Oil and sugar depend on your taste.
• NEVER add all the flour at once.  When I first add flour, I generally add one cup more than the liquid I started with (so if you used one cup of water, start with two cups of flour)—and I use heaping cups. Stir that in, then add a cup at a time until the dough seems about right—sticky, but like bread dough.  Any additional flour you need will be spread on the counter/table and kneaded in—again, you'll add a little at a time.

If you remember those guidelines you can make bread all day long without a recipe.

BASIC WHITE BREAD

1 cup warm water (or other liquid)—about like a nice, soothing bath temperature.
2 - 4 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. yeast
1 tsp. salt
2 - 4 Tbsp. oil (cooking oil or butter—I always used butter at camp, and I didn't measure it at all.  I just chucked in a glop of butter.)3 - 5 cups flour

1. Stir warm water, sugar and yeast together in a biggish bowl.  Let yeast proof (this means it will get all foamy and bubbly-looking—it takes about five minutes).
2. Add salt and oil; stir in.
3. Add two heaping cups of flour; stir (use a large mixing spoon or rubber spatula.  I prefer the rubber spatula myself).
4. Continue adding flour about 1/2 cup at a time until the dough is too stiff to stir with a spoon.  (If you're doubling, tripling or making ten times this recipe, add the flour about 1 cup at a time.) 
5. When the dough is too stiff to stir with a spoon, then you start mixing it by hand.
6. Generously dust your table or counter with flour.
7. Dump the dough onto the floury table and begin kneading.  You do this by folding the dough in half, pulling the far edge toward you, then pressing down hard on it to seal it closed (you might even press it a few times).  Turn about a quarter turn and repeat; fold; press; fold, etc. You are finished when the dough is like a smooth ball, and very elastic—this takes me about five to ten minutes; you might take longer at first.
8. Scrape the gunk out of your mixing bowl, oil the bowl lightly and put the dough back into the bowl. Turn it to coat with oil on all sides. 
9. Cover with a damp towel and let rise about an hour, or until it's about doubled in bulk.
10. Spray a bread/loaf pan with cooking spray (PAM, etc.).  Make sure you get the corners.
11. Punch down the dough.
12. Shape dough into a loaf and place in the greased pan.  Let rise 30 to 60 minutes—until it's about doubled.
13. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
14. Bake loaf for about 35 to 40 minutes; remove from oven to a heat-proof surface.
15. Dump the loaf out of the pan and it's ready to eat (although easier to slice if you wait a bit!).

You can easily double, triple, or even octuple this recipe. :-)

YUM!
HAM & CHEESE ROLLS (or Pizza Rolls)

In addition to the basic bread ingredients, you'll need:
grated cheddar cheese and
some diced ham 
or
spaghetti sauce/pizza sauce
grated mozzarella cheese
chopped pepperoni

Follow the bread recipe up to instruction 9. Then:

10. Spray a cookie sheet with cooking spray.
11. Roll the dough out into a large rectangle, about 1/2-inch thick.
12. Sprinkle the dough with grated cheese but leave about a 2-inch space bare, along one of the long edges.
13. Sprinkle ham over the cheese.

14. Starting with the long, cheese-covered edge, roll the whole thing up into a log (cinnamon-roll style). 

15. Pinch the long edge closed.

16. Use a piece of heavy thread or dental floss to slice into 10 to 12 rolls. (You can use a sharp knife, but the thread works beautifully and the rolls look nicer. Just slide a 10 to 15-inch length floss under the roll about one inch. Wrap the ends around the roll, let the ends cross over and keep pulling until the floss has cut all the way through the roll.)
17. Place the rolls onto the greased cookie sheet and let rise until about doubled.
18. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
19. Bake rolls for 25 to 30 minutes.
20. Remove from oven and eat them hot.

For Pizza Rolls, spread sauce, then mozzarella cheese, then pepperoni over the rolled out dough.  Be sure to leave the 2-inch blank space or the dough won't stick closed. Rise and bake as for ham & cheese rolls.



SNAKES!

This is easy.  Use the same ingredients as for Ham & Cheese Rolls, or Pizza Rolls.  OR I've also done sliced beef with barbecue sauce & Swiss cheese, or turkey with whatever cheese sounds good at the moment.  Just choose whatever sounds good in a hot sandwich.
Plus you'll need a couple eggs and some food coloring.

Make the bread just like basic bread dough—one whole snake takes about six times the recipe (6 cups water, 6 tsp. yeast, etc.).  After the first rising, divide the dough into three semi-equal pieces and roll each piece into a rectangle about 10-inches by 16 to 20-inches. Put the filling on each rolled-out piece just like for Ham & Cheese Rolls, and roll it up but do not slice it.   Pinch the ends closed, too.  Put the roll onto the greased cookie sheet and shape it kind of like an S. (Make sure all three pieces bend in the same direction.)

For every color you want to paint onto your snake you need to mix:
1 egg
1 Tbsp. water
food coloring

Use these colored egg mixtures to paint your snake pieces in stripes or whatever strikes your fancy.  Stripes are easiest.
Poke two fingers down into the dough on the head end, where you want to put the eyes.  Stick a couple of olive slices in the eye sockets you just made.

Bake each snake section at 350 for about 25 to 30 minutes.  Generally my snakes explode in the oven and some of their innards ooze out.  That's OK.  Just cut off the leaked-out stuff before you remove the snake section from it's baking sheet.

Lay the snake pieces out so they're touching, and look like a big, long snake.

Enjoy!

Marble Cake (and other food legends)

You may think I’m making up these stories, but I swear I heard them directly from Mom and Dad!

When my Mom, Maria Dolores de Faria Paes (Johnson), was growing up, she never had to cook for herself and so she never learned to cook much. She tells us a story of when she and my Dad were first married and living in Germany: Dad had often told her how much he liked marble cake; so one day she decided to surprise him with a marble cake, and asked a good friend of theirs (apparently a jokester) how to make it. The instructions seemed a little strange, but she made it and Dad was so surprised! The cake had marbles in it!

My Grandma Johnson wasn't too excited about my parents getting married at first, but she and my mom turned out to be good friends. Mom loved Grandma a lot. Well, Mom learned her canning skills from Grandma Johnson. Mom tells about when they were canning whole tomatoes; she watched as Grandma squished the tomatoes into the jars. Grandma was very strict about making her canned goods look nice, so Mom was determined to make hers look even better than Grandma’s. She arranged the tomatoes in the jars so they looked very pretty—and not smashed up. Well, after they were processed Grandma had nice bottles full of plump, whole tomatoes, but Mom’s “pretty” jars were full of water with just a few tomatoes floating in them. [That's a picture of my Grandma and Grandpa Johnson—and me!]

Another time, much later, Mom was making some bread but it had risen too long. She went ahead and baked the bread anyway, but when it got hot it collapsed and the loaves came out heavy and hard, with swirlies on the top. (Actually by this time she was already a good cook—this incident was just a fluke.) But, being creative, she told her kids it was “dinosaur bread,” and they loved it and asked for it many times after that.

Mom had some other housekeeping catastrophes—like the time she knitted a cute baby outfit of soft woolen yarn for Peter to wear when he was blessed in church. She wanted it to be really nice and soft, so she boiled it to wash it. She says it came out the size of doll clothes, and she and Dad spent all of Saturday looking for an outfit for Peter to wear the next day. Or the time she decided she wanted a new fur coat, so she cut up her old one to make clothes for Peter and ruined the fur. And she still didn’t get that new fur coat! Or the time she was giving Peter a bath (he’s the oldest, so he got all the really neat experiments!) and he was so slippery that she didn’t know how to get him out of the bath water. So she sat there, holding him in the water and waiting for Dad to come home (singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”) to rescue her and the baby—both of them crying over the now cold bath.

Mom turned out to be a good housekeeper and seamstress and a terrific cook—making lots of family favorites like really great spaghetti (it was our family’s spaghetti that attracted Bruce to me! Well, partly.) And Feijão (Brasilian beans) and Gnocchi—all of which she just figured out how to make by herself. And her love of good food and her skills as a cook rubbed off on her eight kids!

And we all survived those early, learning years!