Saturday, March 23, 2013

Snack Edition: Homemade Cheez-its

Happy weekend my fine-feathered cooking friends and welcome to another SNACK edition of Mama Feta's Meals!  I have ENTIRELY too many meals to catch up on!!  This is what happens when there's a birthday.  This time it was our youngest and he just turned eleven!!!  Ack!  As usual with this family, birthdays tend  to turn into week-long events and this birthday was no exception!  However, I'm back and plan to hustle these in to catch up because there are at LEAST 10  that I have to do...possibly 15...yikes.
So this particular snack I've actually made SEVERAL times since I've made them the first time a few weeks ago...it's that good.  The best part?  I was able to make these snacks dairy free for our birthday boy too!  So cool!
So first thing's first: I preheat the oven to 375 degrees and then I took 8 ounces of mild cheddar cheese and shredded it in my Salad Shooter and set it aside (for our youngest, I used the Go Veggie! brand and this was already shredded, so I just set it aside!).  Once that was done, I put the shredded cheese into my food processor (keep in mind I did this twice, once for the non-dairy version and then for the regular version)using the chopper attachment and added 1 cup all-purpose flour, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons room temperature, unsalted butter (I should have mentioned I took this out earlier to warm up to room temperature, make sure that you do as well!), 1/2 teaspoon of paprika and 1/4 teaspoon ground mustard.  Then I pulsed the mixture until it became crumbly.
Once that was done, I put the food processor on low and slowly added 2 tablespoons of cold water until the crumb mixture turned into a dough ball.
The original recipe states that you can put it in the fridge for 20 minutes but they chose not to wait, and neither did I!  I put the dough ball in between two sheets of plastic wrap and used a rolling pin to roll it out.  I tried to roll it out as square as possible, just to make sure when the pieces were cut that they were fairly even, but roll it out as you see fit!  Once it was rolled out, I used a pizza cutter to cut out the squares and then used a toothpick to put the famous hole in the middle of each square!
The recipe states that they used parchment paper to lay onto a cookie sheet, however, I didn't actually have any at the time and just used cooking spray, which seemed to work very well.  I will definitely try the parchment paper when I can remember to get some!  :)  I placed all of the squares on the cookie sheet and cooked it for 11 minutes and voila!  Homemade cheez-its!  I was able to get 103 cheez-its out of that batch and they were only 17 calories/cheez-it!  It was also only $0.03/cheez-it, whoa!
Here's the recipe!

8 ounces mild cheddar cheese (I also used 8 ounces Go Veggie! veggie shreds)
1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons room temperature unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon ground mustard

Happy snacking everyone!!!!

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