Polenta Breadsticks

First’s things first, I was getting a bit tired of the scene round here so I made a new banner, changed the colours and modded some of the code. Random banners will probably appear again soon, as I make more. So tell me what you think of the new theme πŸ™‚

The other day, the freezer was defrosted and as stuff was been put back in the freezer, Mum told me, I needed to use up the polenta I had in there. I kept the thought in my mind and the very next morning as I was going through the new headlines in my Feed Reader, I noticed that Baking Sheet had posted a Garlicy Polenta Breadstick recipe. Score!

The recipe and result is quite similar to that of Scones and I think that I can quite easily change the recipe to be Savoury Polenta Scones instead.

Polenta Breasticks
(adapted a LCBO recipe via a Baking Sheet recipe)
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/2 cup polenta
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried dill or rosemary
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground pepper, to taste
4 tbsp butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
1/2 cup milk
2 egg whites

Preheat oven to 220°C. Grease a baking tray or line with baking paper.
In a large bowl, mix together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, sugar, garlic powder, dill/rosemary, salt and pepper. Add butter and rub in with your fingertips or use a dough blender until mixture resembles sand and no large chunks of butter remain.
Combine milk and egg whites in a small bowl, then add to flour mixture, stirring until it forms a dough. Roll dough out on a lightly floured surface until it is approximately 1/4-1/2 inch thick (about 1 cm). Use a floured knife to cut into even strips, roughly 2cm wide.
Transfer strips to baking trayss, leaving room between them.
Bake for 10-12 minutes, until golden brown.
Allow to cool before serving. Leftovers can be wrapped and re-crisped in the oven.

After my sticks had been in the oven for a little while, I gave them a spray of garlic olive oil and returned them to the oven, mine also took a lot longer than 12 minutes to cook. Of course you can change the herbs to suit your tastes, or perhaps sprinkle with some cheese before placing them in the oven.
They are great as a quick snack, just grab a stick and walk out the door πŸ™‚

polenta breadsticks

refined designed

Unless you are reading this by RSS, you will notice the new design. I like my pages to load quickly, to be light on the graphics and be clean and simple. Well I took a dive further into the theme design pool and after much wrangling, came up with this deisgn.  This new design makes it super easy for me to change the header image, and super quick to load πŸ™‚

Happy, Clean, Simple. 

silly helen

when I start writing this it is 4:34am, I should have been in bed 4 hrs ago, but what I have been doing – fixing and re-designing the code for this site. I loaded the site up this evening and the side bar was off, played around and played around and could not find the errror, so I loaded my back-up whilst I did this one. I quite like it, still have to add some code back into the sidebar, but I like it, looking good and different. The fab photo in the header was taken by my Mum, who is going to chide me when she reads this post and probably call me a silly girl πŸ˜€

here we are

Over the last handful of days since purchasing my domain, I have taken a big crash course in css and php. I now have my blog looking fairly well like I want it to, after many reloads of the style sheet, where things where just jumbled. Now after attempt 55ish it looks ok.

The theme is based on the default word press theme, I used this nifty little Kubirck PSD template to make my changes easily, the photo in the header which I love so much, is taken by one of my very dear friends – Barb

resolve

30hrs have now passed since I paid for my domain, I am still waiting for the DNS to resolve, they say it can take up to 72hrs, I want it to resolve now. argh please resolve for me, please.