It's just my subconscious screwing with me. I think that it feels slighted that I am retired. Not as much worrying now. It's pining for the good old days -- ah, where have all the mid-terms and finals gone?
To brush off the cobwebs left by the dream. I set out to make pretzels. One of my fond memories from my youth in Pittsburgh is the the soft pretzels I used to get from a street vendor down on the "Souseside," an area that is now the trendy South Side Flats neighborhood. My parents grew up there, Dad worked there, and although we had moved just up the hill to Allentown, it remained a place that my Mother liked to go to shop. I loved those pretzels. In later life when I would try one of the pretzels from the places that sprang up in the shopping malls, they just didn't taste the same. I wasn't sure if I was just imagining how good the old ones were. So, rummaging around on the web, I learned that the old pretzels used to be boiled in water laced with lye. That's right, lye. Probably they were killing us all, but I don't remember anybody complaining.
Sometime this past year, Sand bought a magazine of bread recipes. In it was a recipe for pretzels. Instead of lye, baking soda was used. So, figuring that I was already feeling inadequate and lost because of the dream and failing at something else wouldn't make matters any worse, I set out to make pretzels.
MMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm. Although I have a few minor adjustments to make in the process to keep the pretzel skin from splitting (which had no negative effect on taste BTW), this recipe was a real winner. These pretzels are very, very close to what I remember as a kid. And if I needed any confirmation. my granddaughter and her friend gave them two thumbs up. In fact, Mei-mei volunteered that these pretzels were far better that the ones she had at Great America this past summer.
So what if I've never been to class. I aced the mid-term!
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