Crackers

I tackled Cheez-its/Goldfish and Saltines today. We still have a good supply of Ritz and grahams, so I will have to save those for another day. Which is probably a good thing, because although both of these recipes were decidedly easy, they were also somewhat time consuming, to put it mildly. Now that I've got the hang of it, I'm sure it will go quicker next time. A lot of work, though. The kids LOVE the Cheez-its!!! Apparently that real cheese and real butter is much better than the fake stuff. They begged for more and I had to turn them down. Those babies took me like 6 hours to make--I have to ration them out!! :) Kidding!!

Sort of.

Here is the scoop:

Homemade Saltines (my version)--I doubled it to get the above amount.

1 cup white flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

5 TBSP cold butter, cut up

1/2 to 3/4 cup ice water

1 + tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix flours, baking powder and 1/2 tsp. salt in a bowl. Cut in butter with a pastry cutter until mixture resembles small crumbs. Add ice water and stir gently to incorporate. When mixture will clump together, roll out onto a floured surface. Cut into squares (or any other shape, I guess!) Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Arrange on 2 sprayed baking sheets and put in oven. Cook for 9 minutes, then rotate sheets and cook 9 more minutes. Let cool and enjoy a nice, REAL snack!!

I started off my Cheez-its with the idea of making them cute and little (more like goldfish.) HA. HA. HA. I took the original recipe's suggestion of using baking tips to cut out little circles.

And soon realized that although these might be somewhat cute and charming, it was going to take me until the middle of next week to cut them all out. So I did about 7 like that, then switched to a quicker, easier method. Next time I will probably just use a pizza cutter, because really, they just go straight into your mouth, so who cares what they look like!!

You could also make these bigger, which would speed up the process as well!

Homemade Cheese crackers (a la Lindsay)

8 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

4 TBSP cold butter, cut up

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup steel cut oats

3/4 tsp. salt

2+ TBSP cold water

Pulse everything except water in a food processor until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add water, 1 TBSP at a time. Test to make sure dough will clump together--add more water if necessary. Remove dough from processor and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate for 20 minutes. (Try not to go longer than that--or else you will get quite a work out rolling out the dough. Take my word for it.) Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes. Place on sprayed cookie sheet and bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. Yummy!!

Next time I do these, I want to experiment with using less butter.