Eat your heart out Auntie Annie's!

I love nights off with the fiance, especially nights off when it's just the two of us being together. Usually we end up cooking something on said nights, and then curling up to watch a movie/or play the Wii. Saturday night was just such a night. We made Chicken scallopini with a spinach, ricotta and Canadian bacon (it's what we had) filling. We served it over whole wheat angel hair with a homemade zucchini-tomato pasta sauce. Then we took a nap. THEN the fun started.

In an attempt to make something dessert-like, I suggested making the box of pretzel mix that had been gifted to us for Christmas. We pulled out our new bread machine for it's inaugural use because we were both a little tired and lazy for the necessary kneading. So we dumped the ingredients in the bread maker, set it for dough and let it go.

After playing through several more worlds of Super Mario Bros. for Wii (soooo awesome), the dough had finished kneading and risen for 30 minutes. It was time to get our hands dirty.

The fiance divided the dough into 8 chunks while I mixed water and baking soda, and then we set about rolling out long tubes.

This turned out to be a pretty arduous process after we realized we didn't really have a clean space to roll them out and parchment paper was too darn slippery to offer the right surface. Alas, we rolled all 8 pieces in the air, which took a LOT of arm work. My muscles are still tired from the work.

But we eventually go to the part where we twist the dough tubes into pretty pretzel shapes. Which is more difficult than it looks. Mine all ended up with an extra twist in the twist part, and the fiance insisted on putting little nubs on the bottom of his (which bothered me, even though that's how pretzels are supposed to look). After dipping the shapes into the water/baking soda mixture (as per the instructions), we laid them out on baking sheets and tossed them into the oven.

Now, the fiance wanted plain salt pretzels and I wanted cinnamon sugar, but I also considered garlic and Parmesan cheese ones before settling on just cinnamon sugar (which were AWESOME). After they were done baking, we brushed them with melted butter and then sprinkled our preferred topping.

Then we chowed down with sparkling white grape juice (another Christmas gift) and episodes of The Big Bang Theory (hilarious).