Home Staple: Crackers

I have a toddler. Therefor, crackers are a necessity in our life. Oh does he love his crackers. As far as packaged food goes, there are some decent options as far as these crunchy snacks go. However, they all contain more ingredients than I am comfortable with, and a lot of it comes from corn and soy. Some crackers have hydrogenated cottonseed oil or other oil which means they have trans fats, even if they don't show any on the nutrition facts area. We don't need that. Plus when was the last time you ate a cottonseed? Some have "Natural flavors" which aren't natural at all. It is what give strawberry candy that flavor that tastes nothing like strawberries. Others have soy lecithin, high fructose corn syrup, potassium sorbate, and even red and yellow food colorings - many things that I would not find in my own kitchen.

So, away with the store bought, and in with the homemade. The first recipe I tried earlier this week was a sweet potato toddler cracker. The concept was good - get in a veggie while your kid eats a cracker. I got the recipe off pinterest and it led me here: Sweet Potato Toddler Crackers. Well, after spending a morning cooking sweets potatoes, mixing dough, rolling, and cutting....these were terrible. They were so tough and chewy that even my husband didn't eat them. That is saying a lot for a man that will eat a grilled cheese that is black from me cooking it too long. I realized the recipe had no fat in it. OK, I get that some people are scared of fat, but you need SOME in a cracker! In my opinion, fat is not the enemy. I think fat is essential and beneficial in the human diet. Anyway, not all is lost. Gavyn had fun rolling out dough and our black lab is loving her new treats.

Yick

So I went on to another cracker recipe - the beloved ritz. Oh how I love ritz crackers. Especially with cream cheese. Mmmm. My Mom used to make me a snack of ritz crackers with mozarella cheese melted over the top and and extra sprinkling of salt. Oh my mouth waters just thinking about it! So I had to try and recreate these little gems. I followed the recipe from the Cupcake Project found here: Ritz crackers. I used 1/2 whole wheat flour. Well I'll tell you, these are delicious! They don't exactly taste like ritz crackers. They have a buttery, salty taste, but lack some of the fluffyness and chemical taste of the packaged kind - I love them. So did the family. They went fast. I was 1 for 2. Yay!

Yum!

In the future I probably won't cut out little circles like I did with these. I like to do as little work as possible, and taking a pizza cutter and making squares is just fine by me. Shape doesn't seem to effect taste much.


I'm going to do a seperate post about the graham crackers I made over the weekend, because they are worth their own post.