Tt is for Turtle Bread

I am a cook.

Maybe it's the cider we've been drinking or maybe it's excitement from the start of the holidays, but I have been cooking a lot of new recipes lately, attempting some semi-healthy recipes and even making some things from scratch! The other day I was rearranging our cookbooks that are overflowing our kitchen shelves and found an ABC cookbook for kids with the perfect recipe. It's called Turtle Bread. Let me back up.

My strategy for cooking usually goes like this:

1. Find ingredients in fridge that definitely need to be used up or items in the cupboards that are bugging me because I never use them (in this case, it was yeast).

2. Find a recipe that will use up the ingredient without having to go shopping for other ingredients in the recipe and/or one that does not add more miscellaneous ingredients to my fridge that will then need to be used up. (See the cute Turtle Bread recipe that will use up my yeast. Feel surpise that I have all the ingredients.)

3. Decide if I really feel like cooking or not. (Xavier wanted to cook and I didn't mind. Ok, then!)

4. Make the recipe following the directions exactly (until I realize I missed a step) OR give up and don't cook at all. (Turtle Bread was so easy and so fast with our Kitchenaid that I would make it again and again. It came out well even though I did the recipe a little bit wrong! And letting the bread sit only took ten minutes, which Xavier didn't mind because I told him the turtle was "hiding" until the timer went off. After making Turtle Bread I even told Joe we should make our own bread every time! Thinking back on my cooking history, I don't know about that idea, but ohhhh, it was tasty!)

Here's the recipe that I did which is slightly (accidentally) different from the Alpha-Bakery Children's Cookbook by Gold Medal if you want to try it:

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 pkg quick-acting active dry yeast (I couldn't tell if that's the kind I had...)

1 Tbls sugar

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup water

1/3 cup milk

1 Tbls margarine or butter

1 egg

2 raisins (I would say these are optional)

Directions:

1. Let your kids help put the flour, yeast, sugar and salt into your Kitchenaid mixing bowl. Mix.

2. Heat water, milk and margarine in the microwave to so-hot-the-butter-melts (recipe says 125-130 degrees but I had no idea how to measure that); stir into Kitchenaid mixture. Stir in egg.

3. Sprinkle a surface lightly with flour. Turn the dough onto the surface; take turns kneading the bread a few times with your child. Cover with a kitchen towel, set a timer for 10 minutes, and let the dough rest. Lightly grease a cookie sheet.

4. Think of something to do with your child for the last 8 minutes of the wait.

5. Turn off timer.

6. Shape a 2-inch piece of dough into a ball for the head. Shape 4 pieces into balls for feet. Make a tail. Shape remaining dough into a ball for the body; place on cookie sheet and flatten slightly. Attach head, feet and tail. Press raisins into head for eyes (or just gouge two little holes with a knife).

7. Cover and let rise 20 minutes. (What?! I never saw this step until now! That's embarrassing. This is not the step I already did "wrong".)

8. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

9. Make crisscross cuts in body, 1/4 inch deep, to look like a turtle's shell.

10. Bake until golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes.

Makes 1 turtle.