Croissant Baking the Pan de Vida Way

Lest you think things become routine, even a morning in the kitchen can have some unexpected twists and turns. Due to a large donation of frozen items yesterday from a grocery chain down in Mexico City (which requires 3 hours travel each way to pick up, and several more hours to sort through and put away, the morning's market run was cancelled! (Only after Herb and Hannah & Jeff got up at 6:10, drove along with the team over to the lady's house who heads up the kitchen, and the conversation resulted in "No verdura" [no vegetables] today.) Highly unusual.

After I got laundry started and headed to the kitchen, I was assigned the job of baking up the croissants. Well, I hadn't seen the ovens used at all thus far, so I started off.



The dough was not packaged in the little containers you pick up in the store, however, but in very large plastic bags - oh, and all of the dough had thawed, already. So, another lady and I began. 6 very large pans, of which 4 fit in the ovens at one time.



First you spread margarine on each pan (fingers). Then you pull apart a portion of the dough, as best you can, hopefully still resembling a croissant. Each pan holds about 36 croissants.



Then you need to brush each one with a bit of milk. Instead of a pastry brush, you use a small piece of cardboard. I removed pieces of shrimp, chocolate cake and frozen french fries, as I worked my way through the bags of dough.



When they were done, you would never have known where they came from.



"Lord, for the food we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful", we prayed as we had fresh croissants for lunch. They were very tasty!! At 2:00 p.m., the last of the dough was on the pans, and Herb offered to finish up baking the last pans so that I could have some lunch.



Yield: Two Large Pots full. Just another morning on the job.