This week's lunch: Concha Roll, Grilled Chicken, Snap Peas, Strawberries and Pineapple.
Okay this might not be the most nutritious lunch. I made Mexican Concha rolls for my art class for Cinco de Mayo so I had to make them for my kids as well. Conchas are a sweet bread roll (like Portuguese bread) but topped with a sugar/flour/butter mixture. When we used to go to Mexico when I was younger, (& lived in Arizona) these rolls were in all the bakeries we went to. The bread is light and fluffy and the topping sugary and crumbly. They are called conchas because the designs bakers put on them resemble seashells. They use a metal stamp to stamp the design into the dough. I of course did not have one of these tools so I ended up using an apple slicer/corer which made more of a sun design on top of the rolls. The crumbly dough should have covered the whole roll, but the recipe I used did not make enough, so I had to skimp on each one. Oh well.
Here's a tiny history of the conchas rolls also called Pan Dulce. Apparently the tradition of baking sweet breads was kept from the French Conquerors who were the very ones fought in the Battle on May 5th 1862.
This is the recipe I used. http://www.food.com/recipe/conchas-mexican-sweet-topped-buns-119586
from food.com. I followed it exactly, but I would make extra of the topping. I ran out and it is better to have too much than too little. It calls for scalded milk which I had never needed before so I looked it up and you just have to heat up your milk right to the tip of boiling on med/med high heat while stirring constantly. The recipe says to let it cool which I took as just a couple of minutes in the fridge to get the high heat out of it. It was still warm when I used it. The recipe takes 3 hours total but it is not hard: the rolls just need to rise twice.
I also watched some videos including this one that really showed the texture needed on the cookie topping. It also shows the stamps they use for the designs, but like I said, I used an apple slicer and it worked pretty well!
I would have like to add some tortillas into their lunch to eat the chicken in, but I felt like the extra large sweet bread roll took up the whole grain percentage (and then some) of the meal.
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
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