Dulse crackers

I really wanted crackers last night. I scoured my apartment, but didn't have any besan/garbanzo flour. (And I discovered that my spelt flour had new inhabitants -- weevils! Argh!) So, lacking besan, to make the crackers more exciting, I used seaweed gomasio and dulse flakes.
(You can buy the dulse flakes on amazon and the gomasio at eden if you can't find them at a local store.)

Ingredients
1 cup organic white flour
1 cup organic whole wheat pastry flour
3/4-1 cup nutritional yeast
1 tsp sea salt
4T red/purple dulse flakes
2T seaweed gomasio
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 Earth Balance (1 stick)
1/2 cup organic original hemp milk
some GF AP flour for rolling (why? b/c it's what I had available)

What to do
Preheat oven to 385 (which is probably 365F).
Mix the dry ingredients together.
Cut in the Earth Balance until the mix is mealy.
Then add the hemp milk and mix together with your fingers.
When everything is well combined (you have a nice not-tacky ball of dough), get your rolling surface ready.
Spread a little flour down and on your rolling pin. Roll out small portions (as thick or thin as you'd like your crackers) and cut into the shapes you want for your crackers.
Place crackers on a cookie tray.
Bake for 10-12 minutes (less time for thinner crackers).
Cool.
Eat.

Verdict: needs more salt without the besan. But still good. :) I ate a bunch for dessert last night and left the rest for the girls to munch on this week.

More besan crackers

We found a natural food store (Sunflower) up here in Vermont, so I was able to buy some nutritional yeast and make crackers!

Last night's crackers:
--all measurements are approximate because measuring things are missing here --
2 cups besan
3/4 cup nutritional yeast (from Sunflower)
2 tsp sea salt (also from Sunflower)
1 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 cup crisco (I know, I know, but I didn't have anything else!)
2/3 cup vanilla soy milk

I ended up baking these for 20 minutes together (two sheets) and then another 14 minutes each sheet. The dough was a little wet, so I couldn't spread them out as thin as I would have liked. And I'm not sure that the oven really was 350F even though it said it was.

Tasty crackers resulted, so not much to complain about!

Crackers in January

Not that I had time tonight, but I really needed to cook or bake or something to improve my mood. I got home late, to a waking baby, put her back to sleep, did a little work (forwent working out), put the other child back to sleep, started doing more work, and realized that I really needed something else.

So I made crackers!

Here's what I used tonight:
1 cup besan
1 cup organic all-purpose flour
3/4 cup nutritional yeast
2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 cup Earth Balance (stick)
1/2 cup + 1T original organic soy milk

Here's what I did:
Combine the besan, AP flour, nutritional yeast, salt, and pepper.
Cut in the Earth Balance with pastry cutter.
Add the soy milk (1/2 cup first) and mix with hands (take off wedding ring first!). Add the 1T if needed (I needed it). The dough should make a nice ball, and not be too sticky. Tacky is ok, but not sticky.
Let the dough sit for a few minutes, while preparing the oven (365F), the pan (tonight I used a round pizza pan because it's all I could find) with parchment paper, and finding the cutter (really, it's for getting dough off surfaces, but it works really well as my cutter for crackers).
Press the dough out onto the parchment paper on the pan; try to spread it evenly. It will fill the pan.
Cut it into half, then quarters, then smaller pieces. I made rectangles tonight. And, because I couldn't find my larger cookie sheet, I didn't separate the rectangles.
Put in the oven and bake for 18 minutes.

We'll see how these turn out, unseparated. They are starting the smell pretty cheezy....mmmm...and yes, it is after 1am and I'm still working. But I got to make my crackers, so I feel much better. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself. Back to work...

Besan Crackers

I based this recipe on the quackers crackers recipe from Have Cake Will Travel that I've made before. I wanted to try it with besan and also wanted to see about making them gluten-free and more protein-packed. We had crackers with vegan cheese and wax beans for dinner tonight.

Ingredients
2 cups besan (chickpea flour) (got a large bag at Desi Bazaar in MD last week)
2/3 cup nutritional yeast
1/4 tsp black pepper (should have used more)
2 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) Earth Balance
1/2 cup + 1 T soy milk

What To Do
Help J measure and combine besan, nutritional yeast (sprinkles!), pepper, and salt in large bowl. Let J mix and get besan on table. Clean up.
Let J add the Earth Balance stick, then cut it into the besan mixture with a pastry cutter. J tried to help with the cutting-in too, but it didn't work so well...I ended up finishing it up. It's ready for the next ingredient when it looks like coarse meal.
Then, add the soy milk and combine until dough forms. We started off mixing it with a wooden spoon and quickly turned to my hands instead.
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Split dough into two pieces. Roll out the first piece of dough on a parchment paper. I made this one pretty thin as I wanted crunchy crackers. I cut everything with my pastry slider thing into square and rombuses/rombi?, then transferred them all to a cookie sheet and baked for 18 minutes. J helped me spread them all out and added her finger prints. :P Roll out the second piece of dough while the first set of crackers is baking. The second I made thicker, and J helped me roll it out and cut. This set had lots of J fingerprints in it. We also made five large oval/circle-shaped crackers. I baked this set for 15 minutes. I also added some extra pepper on top of 1/3 of the crackers when they were baking (after eating the toasty first set and thinking, man these need more pepper!).

Quackers part 2

Saturday night when I got home from work...Saturday night after I got home from work and put the girls to bed, I made another batch of the quacker crackers.

This time, I used my organic vegetable shortening and half the pepper. I also cut the crackers smaller.

I cut the shortening into the flour/nutritional yeast mixture using my pastry cutter and then my hands. I also used soy milk instead of water this time. (I used shortening this time because I was out of Earth Balance, and used water last time because I was out of soy milk!)

I still just used my hands to press the dough out on my parchment paper instead of rolling with my pin. I like the texture. :) I cut the dough into tons of small diamonds and baked at 365 for 15 minutes. I would have left them in for a few more minutes, but A had woken up, so I was nursing her and had asked D to check them when the 15 minute-timer went off, telling him that they might need more time. He ignored that direction, and just took them out. So, they weren't as toasty as I would have liked them. BUT....

J loved them! She just kept eating them up on Sunday. Even when she wouldn't eat anything else, she would eat the crackers with vegan (follow your heart) mozzarella cheeze. Yay! She calls them quackers, and then starts qacking and making her little arms into duck wings. haha!

Cheezy Crackers

To calm myself last night after spending two hours trying to get J & A to sleep, I made crackers. The recipe is from Have Cake Will Travel.


They were quick and easy to make, and baked right up in my oven (365 b/c the temp is off for some reason). The apartment smelled very cheezy as the time approached to take them out (18 minutes -- I checked at 15, but they weren't ready yet).

They are spicy -- or as I kept saying to D, peppa, peppa, peppa! Next time, I will not use nearly as much peppa. J tried one this morning, chewed it up, and promptly spat it out on the kitchen floor, getting some on her hot pink tutu (thanks to tata and gramma for the tutu). She has been wearing the tutu every day this week because she wants to be pretty and spin pretty. (Today she wanted to be pretty and spin pretty and small.) She said they were too spicy, but then asked for another when D, J, and A walked me to the subway this morning. That one promptly ended up on the sidewalk, so we left it for the pigeons, and I gave her another from my stash. She clutched it and wouldn't hold my or D's hand with that hand, instead using her key-holding hand to hold hands as we crossed streets. We'll see if she ever ate it or just clutched it (or dropped it). The rest are at work with me (and being quickly consumed), so if she dropepd it, she's not getting another from this batch!

I might eat them all today. I've been snacking on them all morning, and they were basically dinner last night too...Fortunately, they are EASY and QUICK to make, so I can make them again in less than 30 minutes.

Too bad I didn't have any cute cookie cutters to use for them. I just used a pastry scrapper and cut them into diamonds, as you can see above. Also, I didn't roll out the dough, I just pressed it down with my fingers, which resulted in an uneven surface. Didn't hurt the taste at all, and meant less for me to clean up later, so I plan on not using a rolling pin unless ABSOLUTELY necessary (like if I find super cute tiny cookie cutters). I will, however, cut them smaller next time. The larger diamonds are a little soft in the middle (still taste good), but I find that I like the crunchiness of the smaller ones. They also got a little toasty on the edges, bringing out the cheezy flavor even more!