A Humane Turtle

This year I had my first real Thanksgiving!! I was invited to a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, and it was all-vegan! (And the food was just stunning. my was belly as full as can be…) So, I wanted show that I was thankful for the invitation, and I figured I could make something nice for the kids. And so I spent my pre-Thanksgiving evening making sweet bread bowls

Now, I didn’t make the dough according to any recipe really. I took half a kilo of white flour, the according amount of yeast, warmed up a soy milk and margarine mix, and added Xylitol (the wonder-sugar) until the dough seemed to be sweet enough. Then I took quite small glass bowls and draped strips of dough over it, from the center outwards. Here’s a picture with the almost-done draping:

Once that was done, I cut off the  strips around the edge of the bowl and added one thin twisted strip of dough around the rim. Then it looked like this:

And, after baking, it looked like this:

The bread bowl gets brown on top quite fast, so I had to cover it with baking paper for most of the time. Not sure how long it was baking, maybe around 15-20 minutes? Until it was lightly brown, in any case…

Once the bowl was ready, I rubbed it with a little margarine. Then I took it out of the glass bowl it was baked on (to make sure it wasn’t stuck), cooled down and washed the glass bowl and put it back into the bread bowl. I let it cool down in the form over night, since the bread bowl loses its shape and gets somewhat flat otherwise.

The finished product, filled with organic vegan candy can be found on the Pine Family’s blog.

Bread tends to get old fairly quickly. After one (or a couple of) days, it’s just not fun to eat it any more. And if you’ve bought new bread already, you don’t really want to eat the old left-overs, do you? But throwing away the old bread just because it’s a little hard isn’t an option, is it?

Fortunately, I grew up in a part of Austria that  has a long-standing tradition of using old bread in its cuisine. These recipes that use old bread aren’t just left-over meals though, they are some of my favorite foods!

The probably easiest recipe that includes old bread is milk soup. There’s quite some variations as to how people make it, but the basic idea is that you put semi-hard pieces of bread into warm, sweetened milk. Something like old-style cereals. I loved that as a kid.

Then there is ‘Pofesen’, a variation of French Toast, filled with jam. The layered variant of french toast is  ‘Scheiterhaufen’ (apple-bread casserole): you soak the bread in sweetened milk while you slice up some apples. Then you put alternating layers of bread and apples into a baking tin, and bake it until crispy. I experimented a little with the original Scheiterhaufen and added additional layers of semolina pudding (see picture above). Turned out to be great!

Of course there’s also a whole range of dishes involving bread cubes. They are used for fillings of all sorts. But they also make the basis of one my favorite dishes: ‘Semmelknödel’ (bread dumplings). They are amazingly good, yet incredibly easy to make and very versatile. For example, you can eat them in a soup, or as a side dish, often served with mushroom sauce and (fake) meat. And the coolest thing is: if you have Semmelknödel leftovers, you can slice those and fry them in a pan (with some onions), and you have a great third-hand dish. Unfortunately I never have bread dumpling leftovers..

And what’s more, there is a whole range of dishes that involve breadcrumbs. The crust of a Schnitzel has them. A traditional Austrian apple strudel has sweetened and roasted breadcrumbs (with lots of cinnamon!) in them, and Austrian fruit dumplings are rolled in the same kind of sweetened breadcrumbs. For what it’s worth: ‘Marillenknödel’ (apricot dumplings) are the unbeatable number one of sweet main dishes!

A little while ago, I tried out another old bread recipe: ‘Brotschmarren’ (‘Schmarren’ is something like a chopped pancake). I soaked sliced old bread in sweetened (soy) milk, and then fried it in a pan until it was sort of crispy. With all the whole grain bread I used, I wasn’t sure if that would be any good. It turned out OK. Not my favorite second hand bread dish, but not bad either