Foodies

After hearing Nancy Pelosi call herself a "foodie" on The Next Food Network Star last week, I have decided that Jason and I qualify also. Urbandictionary.com defines a "foodie" as a person that spends a keen amount of attention on knowing the ingredients of food, the proper preparation of food, and finds great enjoyment in top-notch ingredients and exemplary preparation. Seems to me that we are morphing in to foodies. In our married life so far, we have cooked almost every day and eaten out only on a couple of occasions. I am really enjoying cooking in our kitchen and especially using our excellent dishwasher! This is quite a change from our usual eating out trips. We have really made some very tasty things! For the past few days, I have been wanting a soft pretzel. So, yesterday Jason looked up a recipe for soft pretzels from Food Network's Alton Brown. Today we walked (yes walked!) to the grocery store to buy a couple of needed ingredients to begin our pretzel adventure. The dough was very easy to make, then it had to rise for an hour. When the dough had risen, we shaped it in to nine pretzels. Then, to make the authentic pretzel crust, we boiled each pretzel in a water and baking soda mix for 30 seconds. Jason was the boiler, I was the shaper.

Once all the pretzels were boiled, we brushed them with egg wash and put on the salt. Jason made a cheese sauce while the pretzels were baking. Clearly you must have a scrumptious cheese sauce to go with any pretzel. The pretzels baked to golden perfection! They were so pretty and delicious! I must say, we were quite impressed and already have ideas for things to try on our next pretzel adventure.

Before baking...

After baking...