Frozen breakfast burritos

As a way to facilitate my new morning gym routine (we'll see how long that actually keeps up), Maki suggested making breakfast burritos that I could freeze and then take into work. So here's my attempt at that.

I used large spinach tortillas at room temperature.

I first fried up a tube of sausage,

8 jumbo eggs, 

and baked about 2/3 a bag of frozen tater rounds for 35 minutes in a 400 deg oven.

I also chopped up a whole bunch of cilantro -- note these photos all show the ingredients after I'd made a few burritos. I brought all ingredients to room temperature before stuffing the burritos and let the sausage rest in a bowl with paper towels to dry it.

Then I filled the tortillas with about 1/4 of cheese and about a half ladle of each ingredient.

I rolled up the burritos using these instructions -- here are five of them completed.

I rolled the ten burritos up in saran wrap and put five in a freezer bag, then into the freezer.








So we'll see how these taste on Wednesday when I go back to the gym.

Here's the price/calorie per unit breakdown:

• 10 Don Pancho large spinach tortillas -- $4/290 calories
• 1 lb mild sausage -- $1.78/95
• 8 jumbo eggs -- $1.37/72
• 2/3 bag of tater rounds -- $0.95/85
• cilantro -- $0.83/0
• 1 bag of WinCo brand monterey jack cheese -- $2.34/110
• 1 jar of salsa -- $1.89/~0

for a total of $13.16 or $1.316/burrito and 652 calories/burrito, giving $0.02/calorie.

Just for comparison, the Jimmy Dean breakfast croissant is 410 calories and $1.25/sandwich, so that's $0.03/calorie.

Buttermilk Biscuits II

 Another attempt at biscuits yesterday. The recipe I used is here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/better-buttermilk-biscuits-recipe.html.


After mixing together the ingredients, I rolled the dough out and folded it over four times. Finally, I rolled it out to 3/4" thick.

Then I cut the biscuits out using the 3.75" cutter. That made five normal biscuits and one gimpy one.

Then I buttered the tops and into a 400 degree oven for 14 minutes. I turned them after 7 minutes, hoping that would brown the tops...

...except that the biscuits didn't brown properly.

But all in all, I was pretty happy with the biscuits. They were delicious, much better than previous attempts -- very dense but a bit crumbly.

Next time, maybe try 3/4 cup of buttermilk, instead of 1/2 cup or a little butter.

Buttermilk Biscuits I

As part of my quest to perfect my breakfast repertoire, I'm trying to reproduce the Bojangles biscuit recipe.

I've made a few batches of buttermilk biscuits over the last few months, but now I'm going to record my efforts via blog.

Today, I made this recipe -- http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/330/Bojangles_Biscuits16768.shtml. I made it a few weeks ago, and it was fairly mediocre. I tried to tweak the recipe a bit today.

Here are my ingredients and tools:

STEP 1: Mix together dry ingredients

STEP 2: Cut in shortening -- I have read in several places that using very cold shortening is a key to good biscuits, so I put it in the freezer for about 15 min; probably wasn't long enough freeze it, though.

STEP 3: Pour in buttermilk -- I bought a quart of buttermilk, and the 1.25 cups required for the recipe used about 1/3 of it. This website says it'll keep for 7-10 days opened, so I can use another 1/3 for next weekend.

STEP 4: Mix together wet and dry ingredients, pour out onto floured counter, and knead a few times

STEP 5: Flatten with rolling pin to about 3/4" -- Unlike previous attempts, I did NOT flatten and fold the dough several times to avoid making layers since Bojangles's biscuits seem not to have any layers.

STEP 6: Cut out biscuits -- I used the 1 3/4" cutter (the fourth largest in Maki's set).

STEP 7: Put biscuits on baking pan -- I forgot to pre-heat the oven, so after cutting out the biscuits and putting them on the pan, I popped them into the freezer while the oven warmed up.

STEP 8: Into a 450 deg oven for 10 minutes

STEP 9: I pulled the biscuits out after 10 minutes (2 minutes early) to baste their tops with butter, then back into the oven for 3 minutes.

STEP 10: Then out for eating.

The tops weren't quite as golden as I wanted:

And the bottoms were a little toastier than I wanted:

So next week, I'll bake them for 6 minutes, pull them out and baste them with butter, then pop them back into the oven for another 6 minutes. In fact, I'll put them in upside down at first.

White House Honey Ale

White House Honey Ale

Yesterday, I made the White House Honey Ale recipe. Things went well, although I eyeballed most of the ingredient amounts because I couldn't find my scale.

 

Steeping the malt grain

Hops in the pot

We carefully transferred the wort to the brew bucket. The recipe called for the wort to be added hot to the bucket, but I wasn't sure my siphon could handle the hot wort. So Maki and I carefully poured the wort into the bucket.

 Here's the wort, ready for the the yeast.

 Yeast pitched

 I forgot to check the specific gravity before adding the yeast, so I checked it after -- OG = 1.061.

 The next morning, the brew seemed to have overflowed the bucket, and some of the brew got into the airlock. Although it was a bit of sticky mess, the bucket still seemed sealed, so hopefully the beer will still turn out. This overflow might have occurred because I added too much malt.













UPDATE: 2013 Jul 30 -- Moved the beer to the carboy to ferment for about 14 days. A lot of hops were clinging to the top of the bucket, but the beer looked good (and smelled good).


















UPDATE: 2013 Aug 13 -- Bottled the beer. Final gravity was 1.02, giving an ABV of about 5%. Unfortunately, my siphon hose had molded, ...

 

 

And so I had to dump the carboy into the bottling bucket. Then, I noticed that the bucket was leaking -- I hadn't screwed in the bottling valve tightly enough. So in a mad dash, I began bottling beer and go halfway through before I realized I had forgotten to add the sugar syrup to perk up the yeast. I added it to the last half and hoped for the best.

 44 bottles of beer on the floor.

---UPDATE: 2013 Dec 18---

I first tried the beer a few weeks after bottling. It exploded and tasted pretty bad.

Today, I've tried another one, and it's decent. A bit too hoppy for honey ale, I think, but drinkable.