Thanksgiving Bread

For the past two week, my son has been seeing a song that he's learned at school for their Harvest Festival. The song quickly became an ear worm, and I've found myself singing to myself at various points in the day.

Thanksgiving bread. <clap clap> We make it and we share it. And together as we eat it, let's be tha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-nkful.

When my mother asked if I could bring some bread for Thanksgiving dinner, I thought - why don't we just make it? Clearly the spirit of the song (and holiday!) had gotten to me. But then I realized that whenever I make fresh bread (and we do - often - thanks to the easy to follow book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day) is really is best all warm and delicious straight out of the oven.

I had a feeling that oven space would be limited on Thanksgiving day (and I was right!) so I started thinking about what alternatives I could come up with. I ended up acquiescing and bought some excellent bread from a favorite local bakery, but still wanted to bring some in addition to the butternut squash & pear pie that I made (which, by the way, made an absolutely perfect breakfast this morning!).

I hopped on over to one of my favorite cooking sites - 101 Cookbooks and stumbled across a recipe for buckwheat cheese straws. After a quick trip to the store for some buckwheat flour, I assembled all the ingredients and got to work.

I love when recipes have only a handful of ingredients

I mixed the dough all up and popped it in the freezer as instructed. However, when I took it out a little while later, I was bummed to see that it had somehow gotten all crumbly. It was also hard as a rock and resisted all attempts at being rolled out flat, so I left it alone for a few minutes. When I came back, it still didn't want to be rolled, so I started slicing thin bits off and rolling them into logs.  

Ok. I'm a big cheater. I ended up using pre-shredded cheddar from a bag (hence the "golden" color

Despite the resistant nature of the dough, I ended up getting into a groove of cutting and rolling and the pre-baked logs seemed fine (albeit a little delicate). I baked them as directed and the house ended up smelling deliciously cheesy. When they were done, I couldn't help but snag a warm cheese stick - as a taste test of course.

While the buckwheat flour is a little dense, it worked well within this recipe and complimented the cheese and thyme nicely. Everyone seemed to enjoy them as well, especially my son who got a huge kick out of eating something that looked like a stick.

I'm not sure if the difficulty in rolling out the dough was just something done on my part or what, but we'll definitely be trying this recipe again, so I'll have plenty of opportunities to play around with it and see what happens next time.

So, while we didn't sit around sharing homemade Thanksgiving bread, perhaps we started a new tradition of thanksgiving cheese straws. Either way, there was definitely a lot to be thankful for yesterday, and I'm glad I was able to spend the holiday with my family.