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I'm sorry to hear about the freezer failure, Mike. Losing all the food makes it that much worse.
The hardest part of my low saturated fat diet is having to avoid the cookies and pastries that rely so heavily on butter. While a little butter can be ok, a lot of my recipes call for significantly more, and even a modest serving can add up when attempting to stay at 11 g or less of saturated fat per day, especially when I've already assigned 3 grams of that to dairy, and I still need to add in meat and/ or eggs--and the Land o' Lakes light butter-canola spread I plan to have on my sweet corn tonight. I spent yesterday afternoon exploring some recipes at My Nebraska Kitchen, and I printed some promising ones.
On Sunday afternoon, I baked Lemon-Anise Biscotti, which was submitted to the Baking Circle on April 8, 2004 by Bettina (aka Laura Four Paws). She had it from a Cooks Illustrated email that invited subscribers to send it to friends--and we were all friends on that site. Assuming an egg is 2 grams of saturated fat (I’ve also seen it listed as 1.5g), these biscotti have only 4 grams of saturated fat. When cut into slices, that will be quite acceptable, and eggs have valuable nutrients as well.
The recipe is missing one step, as it does not say when to add the lemon zest, anise seed, and vanilla. I whisked them in after first whisking together the eggs and sugar, before sifting in the flour mixture over the egg mixture and incorporated it with my large dough whisk. It is a very sticky dough. I weighed it on saran on my scale. (I need to weigh my bowls so I can divide dough in them on the scale.) Instead of floured hands, I used slightly damp hands and a metal knife to spread and shape the two rolls on the parchment-lined cookie sheet. (I’m not sure why the recipe says an oiled cookie sheet covered with parchment. It must be a mistake.)
After the loaves had cooled, I found that they stuck to the parchment, and I could not get a spatula under them, but I pulled up the long side of the parchment next to each loaf, so that I turned it over, and then the parchment was easily peeled away. I cut mine straight rather than on the diagonal so that the pieces would be about the same size. That actually gave me 5 dozen. For the second bake, I stood them on their sides, but still baked for the stated 15 minutes. (I'm not fond of turning biscotti.)
The flavor of the crumbs from when I cut them is great, and I'll try one after they cool, but this recipe is certainly a keeper. I look forward to having them with tea and coffee.
It's not in the recipe section, but in the saved threads:
Unfortunately, I'm on a low-saturated fat diet, and 1 Tbs. of regular cream cheese has 6 grams. I do, however, have plenty of homemade jam, in three flavors, that I made earlier this summer.
The taste will determine if I decide to give it another try. Figuring out how much yeast to use, keeping the dough to two rises (I could kick myself for not just shaping and panning it in spite of the quick first rise), and possibly using different pans might make a difference. Each pan had 663g of dough, and my 8x4 pans usually have unbaked dough of about 860g.I have some 7x3 pans, and they might have worked better.
