I stumbled onto this recipe a few months ago: chips or crisps made out of kale.  The leafy superfood is, well, super. Vitamins, good things, protein, and blah blah blah. Read this for more information about the crazy goodness that is kale.

More importantly, it bakes up to a very crispy-crunchy snack with no gluten or starch. Brilliant.

1. Wash and dry oodles of kale. Really dry.

2. Chop the leaves off the hard stem and try to keep the leaves in fairly medium-large pieces.

3. Toss with olive oil and sea salt. Alternatives: add lemon juice, garlic powdered or minced, or other spices. I add enough oil to coat the leaves. I used an extra virgin olive oil that’s flavored Tuscan Herb to add an Italian taste.

4. Arrange on a non-stick cookie sheet (or sheet plus parchment paper). Single layer!

5. Bake at 300 degrees for 10–25 minutes. The time depends on the amount and type of kale. Just poke it and see. If it’s mushy, keep baking. The leaves will shrink up and darken, and if you bake it too long (like I always do, with everything) they turn brown. The flavor just gets a little smokier as it bakes so the brown kale chips are fine.

6. Store in a zip-loc or mason jar. Enjoy!

The Daily Mail has published an article about yet another retro-living woman who has spent a week pretending to live with the resource limitations of another era. We’ve seen women of the 1930s and 1940s, and couples of the 1950s… today, however, we are graced with the attempt by one woman to live in the 1970s of Britain. Not the full range of retro elements, mind you — no bell-bottomed leisure suits for her! Just the cooking.

The woman in question bemoans the loss of her microwave, her bread maker, her coffee maker, her electric scales… and even her food processor. Apparently she’s reliving the very early ‘70s, since they were certainly available later in the decade. But, then, this was pre-Thatcher Britain, and people still ate twigs.

I’ve lived in Bolivia for two years. I cook two meals a day in a world without the benefit of a microwave or prepared goods. Macaroni and Cheese in boxes is considered a serious splurge in our Bolivian household (it does, after all, cost more than making a beef roast stew).

She babbles on about how dreadfully difficult, how mindnumbingly time-consuming, it all is. To listen to her, cooking from scratch would seem to be a miserable all-day task.

She’s right, in a sense. Everything does take longer. The way she whines, however, sounds as if she spent hours slaving away each day for a week only to collapse at the table in exhaustion. Comparing her tales with reality, I can only conclude that she’s just lousy at it.

Bolivia lacks easy fast food, and what exists is just as expensive as it is in the United States. How can one casually go to the one Burger King in town when it costs just as much as going to El Porton, the nicest steakhouse in the city? Processed greasy fast hamburger or Argentine steak? Dilemma.

We do have a microwave and it has worked for a collective six months of the twenty-six months I’ve been here. The microwave has one teensy problem: plug it into the wall and it burns out.

In fairness, we do also have a food processor and a Kitchenaid stand mixer. Each appliance saves at least fifteen minutes off each major project. This is necessary when one has to cook two separate entrees at each meal to cover the needs of eight people, three of whom have violent allergies to the key elements which make food Taste Good.

We do not, though, have a bread maker or an ice cream maker… and I fail to see the use for electric scales in day to day cooking. Or Thanksgivings, for that matter.

We buy sandwich bread, but we bake regularly regardless. Then we’ve the cookies. Why would we buy cookies from the store when we can bake them for half the price? Our Bolivian grocery bills are already the equal of our American grocery bills, thanks to Bolivia’s political mis-leadership.

And yet… unlike the Daily Fail’s frazzled idiot-cook, I still manage to get around town, take grad courses, and, in the case of this past Tuesday, watch seven episodes of Buffy.

I’d like to see the article’s author dropped into my great-grandmother’s world of 1930s-40s coal mining West Virginia. A special room meant for keeping hand-salted meats stored away for the winter, endless days spent canning vegetables in glass jars…

… but, then the universe would collapse in one great big collective whine.

A ridiculous amount of time has been spent baking this week. Breads with and without yeast (with is superior, apparently), plain breads, flavored breads, sweet breads. I’ve stumbled upon a great crispy olive-oily bread twice now, and I can’t replicate it. Bolivian ovens are just plain bonkers. The temperature never regulates, the heating is irregular, and quite frankly I can’t even figure out if the listed numbers are in Fahrenheit or Celsius. I’m guessing Celsius. Not that it really matters, of course, since it LIES. Add to that the fact that I live in a valley bowl surrounded by mountains 8500 feet above sea level. The rainy season has just begun, which means that this time last month it was 0% humidity and right now it’s 0.0273% humidity. I probably didn’t pick the best spot in the world to try to figure out how to bake breads. I’ll return to the States — and subsequently a location with more water and more oxygen — bake a bread, and find that it’s exploded all over my kitchen.

Right, so, yesterday I went with a Monkey Bread. Sweet, gooey, etc. The monkey bread turned out reasonably in that the flavor was there but, going right back to the temperature issue, the middle was too doughy. Still, the sugary doughy results were sufficient to send the household into a carbohydrate-induced foggy haze.

I’ve had to alter the water measurements significantly… about double that of all of the recipes I’ve found online. I don’t know if this is due to the flour available here, the lack of humidity, the altitude, or a combination thereof. I just mix the lot until it looks how it’s supposed to look.

This may have something to do with my exceedingly irregular results.

Ingredients:
(note: this was to feed 7 people plus possibly a few tea-guests.)

Dough:
7 cups Flour
2 Tbsp Yeast
1 Tbsp Salt
6.5 cups Water

Cinnamon Sugar:
5 cups Sugar
4 Tbsp Cinnamon

Glazey Stuff:
1 cup Butter
Arbitrary amount of Honey

Tools:
Monster-Sized Baking Dish to hold it all (greased)
Small baking dish
1 big mixing bowl
1 medium mixing bowl

I mixed the dry dough ingredients — flour, yeast, and salt — together in the big mixing bowl. and, um, I do mean big. Thanksgiving Turkey Big. Texas Big.

I then mixed in the water 1 cup at a time until the dough was sufficiently fluid. Very sticky and gooey. Mine is much clumpier than the recipes I’ve found for this dough mix tend to indicate online. It’d be smoother if I were using a mixer, but that would involve tracking down a transformer to ensure I don’t burn out my mother’s American current KitchenAid.

The dough was then left to rise for an hour. I covered it with a well-floured cloth (handful of flour on the cloth, rubbed the flour in, lightly shook off the flour) during that time.

After an hour, the dough had risen significantly. Bubbles were evident on top. Incidentally, this dough works as any general extra-yeasty bread dough. I’ve added more flour to make it bake like a normal bread, kept it flat and baked it in olive oil for a crispy rich bread, etc.

Meanwhile, the sugar and cinnamon were mixed in the medium sized bowl. Very cinnamon heavy. The monster-sized (still thinking Texas Big) baking dish was thoroughly greased with shortening and then floured.

I took fist-sized dollops of the dough and rolled/tossed/shook it in the cinnasugar mix until thoroughly coated. Those dollops were laid out comfortably in the baking dish until the dish bottom was covered. Poured butter and drizzled honey on top. I then layered more dollops on top, added butter and honey. I kept layering until I ran out of feasible space in the dish. Extra butter and honey on top with the remaining cinnasugar.

The monkey bread went on the top rack in the oven. Again, I live in crazy-high Cochabamba, Bolivia, South America, so I filled a small baking dish with water and put it on the bottom rack. That helps keep the oven humid. Or it would, were the air not so dry that it sucks every bit of moisture out of everything. Y’know.

Baked it for 30–45 minutes-ish at I-Haven’t-the-Foggiest temperature. It just looked right. With the unevenness of our oven, I should have turned it at least halfway through the process.

and, of course, the finished Monkey Bread of sugary foggy brains.