Croissants

Fritz can be most easily convinced to cook (or bake) if you give him a recipe that makes a lot of servings and freezes well.

Most recently, he decided to try croissants. He got the recipe from some friends. Our friends make about 20 huge croissants with the recipe. Fritz figured he could make 40 half-size croissants, and we would all be eating croissants for weeks and weeks.

I've never made croissants before. The process is involved! Basically, you make 2 parts: a yeast dough and big slab of butter.

(That's a big slab of butter wrapped in parchment in the foreground.
Fritz is kneading the yeast dough.)

Then you fold the butter big slab of butter into the yeast dough.

(Wrapping the butter slab in the yeast dough)

Then, it becomes a big blur of rolling, measuring, and folding:

(See the tape measure?)

And refrigerate.

And then you repeat the rolling, measuring, folding, refrigerating until you (theoretically) have many layers of dough and butter that be cut and rolled into what we think of as croissants.

Sometimes, as a special treat, I buy frozen croissants at Trader Joe's. Naturally, we had to have a taste test to see which were better: Fritz's or Joe's?

(Trixie is taking notes)

It was a hard call. Trader Joe's makes some pretty good croissants. Even money-wise, I don't think we saved a lot by making them ourselves. If anything, I suppose you can say ours probably used higher quality ingredients. And it was a fun activity for a snowy weekend.