Last Friday night my 11-year-old son stayed up late, burning the midnight oil as my grandmother used to say, watching Good Eats (Alton Brown) on the Food Network. Flash forward to early Saturday morning, you know the time where I sit on the couch, sip my coffee, and read in my quiet pre-dawn house (my favorite time of day.) S. saunters into the room, proclaiming he had set his alarm for 6:30, and he wanted to make doughnuts – you know “the ones I saw Alton Brown make last night on Good Eats”.
What’s a mom to do? Tell him, “No, I’m reading, and you’re crazy if we’re going to spend 3 hours in the kitchen making doughnuts”. Or say what came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think, “That sounds fine. Let’s find the recipe and you can measure out all the ingredients. I’ll help you roll the dough and fry them.” Needless to say S. was ecstatic at my response. Find Alton’s recipe here.
Mind you, I’ve never made doughnuts before, but have made my share of yeast-risen bread, rolls, and coffee cakes. I was pretty confident headed into this endeavor. Besides, other than my reading time, my Saturday morning had nothing urgent on the books. Just a little pick up, put away, you know the drill.
A quick look at foodnetwork.com proved fruitful – we easily found THE recipe. I left S. alone to measure all the ingredients. I reentered the kitchen to supervise him mixing the dough. After a proper proof, and rolling and cutting the dough, and another quick rise, we had 2 sheet pans filled with the softest rings of dough you’ve ever seen.
These babies were ready to pop in the hot, hot oil. (This part was closely supervised. Like I told S., next to hot caramel, deep-fat frying oil is one of the hottest things in a kitchen.) After a short cooking time and a dip in two delectable glazes, I stood in amazement looking at this:
and this:
AND this:
After the first bite of squishy doughnut S. proclaimed, “I’ve always dreamed of doing this.”
So here’s the question: Was making doughnuts “healthy” for our family? Despite the sugar, shortening, and deep-frying I shout a resounding “Yes”. Our family is more healthy after this time together. To be quite honest, anytime I spend in the kitchen with these guys generally makes me feel better. Even more gratifying was my level of involvement – more supervisor and less active participant – S. is quickly learning how to cook and bake!
These doughnuts made the day of one middle-school aged boy, and they also made the day of his little brother, and his mother. What memories we created. What good doughnuts we made. That’s my exploration of “health” in a whole new way.