Pretzels and Smoothies

I feel like I have done nothing but eat for the last three days. I’m not even going to get into the fact that I made red velvet cupcakes yesterday and ate two today. (No. Self. Control. Around. Cake.) When I get done posting this, my husband is going to roll me up the stairs for bed.

On Saturday, after going to the gym and having a revelation, we headed out to Red Lobster to meet my parents for my birthday lunch. (Oh, have I mentioned that it’s my birthday? That will be a theme in this post. I apologize in advance.)  I ❤ Red Lobster, and it didn’t disappoint, but I seriously ate so much. I couldn’t decide among lobster, shrimp, or crab, so I ordered a meal that had them all. And ate most of it.

When we got home, J-Man and I got to work with one of our big weekend projects… homemade soft pretzels. A couple of months ago, we went for a play date at my friend Cindy’s house, and we all made soft pretzels. It wasn’t too hard, so I was pretty optimistic, except Cindy had made the dough ahead of time, so I wasn’t quite sure what that would entail. J and I followed Alton Brown’s recipe, and really, it didn’t seem too complicated. Except that it called for a stand mixer, which I don’t have. Surely my food processor would work? After all, it has a dough blade.

I put the water, sugar, salt, and yeast in the food processor and let it sit for five minutes until it foamed.

Are all the ingredients going to fit in here? Uh oh, I am beginning to have doubts.

We have foam!

At this point, things started to… er… go wrong. I have no photographic evidence because I was trying not to flood my kitchen, but here’s what happened. I added the flour and butter and everything started leaking out of the food processor. Water was leaking out the bottom of the plastic part. I screamed “Oh expletive! Help! Expletive! Help! Gahhhh!!!!!” (A video of this would be nice, but self-videoing with my iPhone didn’t come to mind at the moment.)

Husband rescued me and helped prevent further flooding. At this point, I wanted to just scrap it, but J was so upset at the thought, so I just poured some more water in and hoped for the best. Now it was time to test the kneading capability of the dough blade. I pushed the “dough” button and “on” and this happened…

… which had me in hysterics until the Cuisinart stopped dead in its tracks and my kitchen smelled like burned motor. Instead of 5 minutes, my dough was kneaded (if you can call it that) for about a minute, which would have to do.  So now I had an arbitrary amount of water in my dough, and it wasn’t kneaded long enough. I was really unsure of these pretzels at this point!  Too make a long story short (too late), they worked out okay! They didn’t taste exactly right, but they were not terrible.

J’s pretzels were beautiful, perfectly shaped:

Whereas mine looked like this:

Not as attractive, but just as yummy.

Last night, Husband took me to Vermilion for a romantic dinner. This morning, I needed a smoothie to energize, so I made my current favorite:

Chocolate Banana Strawberry Smoothie (in a bowl)

• 1/2 cup almond milk
• 1/2 cup plain greek yogurt
• 1 TBSP chia seeds
• 2 TBSP chocolate protein powder
• a squirt of agave syrup for sweetness
• 1 frozen banana
• ~ 7 frozen whole strawberries
• ~ 5 ice cubes

Blend all ingredients except the ice cubes. When it’s nice and blended, add the ice cubes and blend until they are all mixed in. This thickens up the smoothie. Pour into a bowl and enjoy.

If it is your birthday, top with sprinkles. Oh shucks, do it even if it isn’t your birthday.

Note: Use a shallower bowl than this so you can lick when done.