Pinterest and Pretzel Rolls

So, Pinterest.  I joined about a month ago (maybe. it's hard to keep track of time in pin-land.)  The peer pressure finally got to me.  Normally, I run away from things that are super popular.  Don't know why, I just can't stand to be a part of the hype.  Still haven't seen Harry Potter, read (or watched) Twilight or the Hunger Games, and I am one of a very few people who never went to see Avatar.  I know, it's lame, but I just have NO interest in things that are receiving such hype and attention.  So I was very surprised to find myself sucked into Pinterest.

I think it came down to practicality.  My bookmarks list was a mile long with different folders for different rooms in my house - 'dining room', 'living room', and now 'nursery'.  It was so disorganized and hard to find things.  Then there were the blogs.  I love visiting other people's blogs and getting ideas and inspiration from them.  But bookmarking different pages or keeping different tabs open in my browser window just wasn't practical.  So ... Pinterest.

I love it, and I hate it.  I think that's a pretty common opinion.  It's super handy for organizing and sharing ideas and finding inspiration that I may never have seen before.  But it takes up so much time!  I got so sucked into looking at recipes one day that I forgot to do my hair before I had to leave for work.  Not good.    The day that I told my parents and sister that we were expecting, we literally spent half the day on Pinterest looking at anything labelled 'baby'.  Fun, but time consuming.

And then there's the disappointments.  So far, I have tried only recipes because it's silly to try and do crafts or home improvement things in a house that you know you will be moving out of in the next few months.  Some of the recipes have turned out GREAT!  Like the calzone I made for dinner the other night.  Yum.  But then sometimes things just don't turn out like you think they will.  Thursday, I was teaching lessons, so I needed a good crockpot meal.  I found a recipe for Meatball and Tortellini Soup, which sounded divine.  Unfortunately, it wasn't.  I couldn't handle how it smelled and only ate the tortellini part.  Andy, bless his heart, ate his whole bowl and said that it was good, but maybe only a once-in-a-while meal.  I don't know if I messed it up or if it was just not a food that we liked, but either way, we won't be trying that again.

So today I'm going old school and making something out of a COOK BOOK!  My former church put one together a few years ago and everyone contributed, so I have a good feeling that this recipe has been tried and has been known to work.  I hope.  It's a recipe for Auntie Anne's Soft Pretzels.  Pretzels are Andy's favorite food.  Not favorite snack food, favorite food.  My favorite sandwich is Turkey and Swiss on a Pretzel Roll.  So I'm making us both happy and making some pretzel rolls today.  I hope.

The very first thing I did (after getting the cook book out, of course) was dump flour all over myself.  Good! At least now I look like I've been baking!  Then 4 cups of it went into the mixing bowl.  After that, I chiseled away at my brown sugar until I got 1/4 cup's worth and combined with a packet of active dry yeast and 1 1/4 cups lukewarm water (not too hot, you don't want to burn your yeast!)  Gave it all a good stir and let it dissolve.  Then I waited until it looked like the yeast had bloomed (don't panic, it's just a living organism going into your food, you'll be fine.) and dumped it in with the flour.  Using my dough hook, I mixed it.  Uh-Oh.  The recipe doesn't say to use an electric mixer, but it also doesn't say you can't.  Either way, something went wrong.  I kneaded it by hand to try and get some of the loose pieces back together and then put it back in the mixer with a few drops more warm water.  That seemed to do the trick.  Now it is a 'stiff dough', which is exactly what the recipe wants.  Crisis averted.  I hope.  Then I cover and let it rise for 20 minutes. Please rise.  Pretty please?  

During this time, I tried to clean up the kitchen a bit (I am SUCH a messy cook!), work on some laundry, and get the next steps ready for the pretzels.  I may or may not have forgotten what I was doing a few times, gotten distracted by Pinterest, and let the dough rise for more than 20 minutes.  Oops.

Well, it didn't really rise.  So I rolled it out and cut it up the best that I could.  I've got a bad feeling about this.  It didn't really want to roll out, so I only got 5 usable strips out of it.  The rest I made into smaller sized pretzels and pretzel bites.  At some point I remembered to turn on the oven to 450 degrees, but it didn't get preheated in time so the pretzels had to go in anyway.  Before going in the oven, they get dunked in a mixture of 4 T. (which I've always read as tablespoons) baking soda and 1 c. (cup, right?) cold water.  Well I did that and the baking soda didn't completely dissolve, it just kind of settled to the bottom of the bowl.  They go in the oven for 10 minutes and then get dunked (or basted) with melted butter when they come out.  Then, if you're making regular pretzels you sprinkle on the coarse salt or dip in a cinnamon/sugar mixture, but skip the salt for the rolls.

None of them came out worthy of rolls, so they all got butter and salt.  They didn't rise any more in the oven and they were practically burnt by the time I took them out.  They taste ok, kind of like hard pretzels do, but with a soft center.  Andy has deemed them edible, but I'm still calling it a fail.  Maybe next time I'll just go to the grocery store and spend the $5 for the kit.  We did that once before and it turned out GREAT.  I like to make my own food so I know what's in it, but I also like not wasting an entire morning and lots of ingredients on food that wont get eaten.

So I guess today's lesson is that cookbooks are just as fallible as Pinterest.  Or maybe it's just me...