HBin5: 100% Whole Wheat Bread with Olive Oil

It's time again for the next "Healthy Bread in 5" assignment.  This week's project was a triplet:  100% Whole Wheat Bread with Olive Oil, Aloo Paratha and Southwest Foccacia with Roasted Corn and Goat Cheese.

I decided to keep it simple this week and only bake the 100% Whole Wheat bread.  I wasn't sure if my husband and I would like the other two recipes, so I'll wait and see what the other bloggers say about them.

The 100% Whole Wheat Bread turned out terrific.  It was very easy to mix up, and it rose beautifully after an overnight stay in the refrigerator.  But instead of olive oil, I ended up using grapeseed oil.  Turns out that we ran out of olive oil, and I didn't realize it until I opened up the kitchen cupboards and it was gone.  My husband likes to experiment with different cooking oils, so I gave the grapeseed oil a try. 

I definitely liked the results.  The crust was nice and chewy, and the interior was surprisingly moist for a whole wheat bread.  I'll definitely bake up this loaf again.

Please join me in visiting Big Black Dog to see how the other HBin5 bloggers fared with this week's recipes.  I'm always so impressed by how beautiful their breads turn out.  I'm learning a lot from them!

My first doughnut

I was happy to find one of the many food magazines I subscribe to in the mailbox last weekend.  In it, there was a recipe for doughnuts.  I commented to my husband, "I've sure seen a lot of doughnut recipes lately."  Some of my favorite blogs and magazines have featured their own twist on the classic doughnut.  So my husband said, "Why don't we make them tonight?" 

You see, I've never attempted to make doughnuts at home. But as I was stuck in the house again because of the cold and snow, I was ready to take on another project.  Thankfully, most doughnut recipes call for baking ingredients I already have in my cupboards.  So I didn't have to thaw my pick-up truck and scrape the ice off the windshield to drive to the grocery store.

We picked an old-fashioned cake doughnut recipe from the latest issue of "Taste of Home" magazine.  The recipe reminded me of the "Salvation Army doughnuts" that I first heard about at a visit to our county historical museum. 

According to the museum's WWI display, Salvation Army nurses used to hand out doughnuts and coffee to U.S. troops when they arrived in the train stations in Europe.  The doughnut-coffee pairing became so popular with the soldiers that they requested it when they came back home.  Soon, every little diner and cafe in America offered doughnuts and coffee for breakfast.

On a cold night in February, doughnuts and coffee sounded pretty darn good to my hubby and me.  So I mixed up the dough, refrigerated it for 2 hours as directed and then broke out my handy-dandy doughnut cutter, a nice little kitchen tool I picked up at a local antique fair for $1.

I didn't need to roll out the dough, just press it to a 1/4-inch thickness.  Then I cut out the doughnuts.

It was hard to believe that these flat circles would turn into doughnuts.  But they puffed up the minute they hit the hot oil.

Once again, beginner's luck was on our side, because these turned out so good!  Not quite as sweet as the gas-station doughnuts I grew up with, but they more than made up for it with their tender, cakey texture.  Our only problem was that we didn't fry them quite long enough, so a few doughnut were still a little "doughy" on the inside.  But that's an easy remedy with a little more practice.

They were so easy and fast to make (if you don't count the 2 hour chill time, they took less than 15 minutes to cut and fry), I'm not sure why more people don't make their own doughnuts at home. I'm sure we'll be making these again next time we have overnight guests.

Winter blanket

We received another 3 inches of snow yesterday. It's officially the fourth snowiest winter in central Iowa on record.  We've gone nearly two months with more than 5 inches of snow on the ground, which is also a  new record.  Actually, we have about 1-1/2 feet of snow on the ground.  In some places, the drifts and snow piles are over 6 feet tall.  It truly is an unforgetable winter here in Iowa.

But at least the days are getting longer.  I took a few pictures of our front yard when the sun was setting when I came home from work.  It's tough to show in a two-dimensional picture how deep the snow is.  But I gave it a try.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the giant icicle I keep blogging about, it's still here.  And it's growing!

We're planning to stay inside again this weekend since there is more snow in the forecast.  I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of baking to keep the house warm!