Lunch Roundup #10

Pretzel-dog carrots, string cheese, strawberries and watermelon. 

Lunch Roundup # 10! For people new to our blog, and especially our new Paleo followers, this blog is written by my sister Melissa and I. Melissa is the Paleo poster, and while I try to not eat to eat too many grains in a week/day, my family and I don't follow Paleo. I will often make Paleo like meals and gluten-free ones mainly because I think the American diet has too many excuses to eat breads and grains, but my school lunch roundup usually has some sort of whole grain in it. 

I had to try my hand at making real pretzels (instead of breadsticks that resemble pretzels like last time). The difference is just boiling them for 30 seconds in water and baking soda, which seemed scarier than it ended up being. For the lunches I wrapped the dough around chicken sausage to make pretzel-dogs and with the rest of the dough I experimented with different shapes and sizes of pretzels. 

There are so many recipes on the web for pretzels to choose from. I used this recipe  from cdkitchen  that uses half whole wheat flour, and a bit of honey and they turned out great. 

For the dogs I used the recipe above (because I wanted a whole wheat recipe) but followed the directions on Joy The Baker for how to wrap the sausages. I started with cutting my sausage in half and rolling a long snake of dough around the sausage making sure that the seams get pressed closed. Take a look at Joy the Baker's post to see how that is done.  Getting it water tight is important because after you put the dough on them, they will need to be boiled for 30 seconds in a bath of water and baking soda. I used a large skillet filled with water as high as it could go without spilling when boiled, and added 4 tbs baking soda. Then I put the wrapped dog in the boiling water for 30 seconds on each side since it was not fully immersed. 

After boiling them, place them on a greased cookie sheet and brush them with egg yolk and water. Sprinkle with salt. Bake at 400 until they get a nice dark pretzel color. You will be tempted to take them out early - but don't! Wait until they LOOK like a pretzel! Believe me I took way too many out too soon including the one in the photo. The ones where I forgot about them in the oven (oops) turned out the best!

The pretzel dogs have about 200 calories, 2 g fiber,3 g fat from my estimation on Livestrong.com 

We did make plain pretzels too for a snack and I will be doing them again soon with some spelt flour expeiments!

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