Dragon Landing

I've said for years that if I ever wrote a cookbook I'd name it Cream of Cheat (the companion baking book would be Rollin' With My Homies). I've realized that I will probably never actually write it, but it doesn't stop me from thinking about what I would put in there and why. After I told my mom this years ago, she and her friends tried to determine what "their" cookbooks would be. Mom decided hers was Set the Oven to Preheat and one of her friends came up with Brown An Onion And Think because that's how she starts dinner every night in her house. I think the names we choose say a lot about our personalities, our food philosophy and how we survive the care and feeding (often the same thing) of those around us. I think my titles say I'm a little whimsical, not afraid of taking shortcuts (although I really do like complex recipes), and that it's not so much the what as the who involved with my food.

So today I did my weekly grocery shopping at one of the three local grocery stores.  Since there are so many nearby I tend to shop at whichever is most convenient any given week; and this week’s winner was Kroger.  For the past several years I have been following the Menu-Mailer from SavingDinner.com to help me plan my shopping and menus to make life easier for myself.  However, lately (as in the past year or so) the ingredients have been getting more and more esoteric.  In fact, I often have to visit at least 2 of the local grocery stores and sometimes even make the 45 minute drive to Whole Foods or Central Market in order to find items on the list.  Even more often I have to make substitutions.  I have no idea where the folks who design the weekly menus shop, but it certainly isn’t in my grocery store.

Since I normally don’t realize what I won’t be able to find until after I’m already at the store, I have taken to looking these things up on my iPhone.  Google is a wonderful thing.  I used to ask the butcher/produce manager/fishmonger/etc. what an appropriate substitution would be, but after getting lots of clueless looks (well except from the folks at Whole Foods and Central Market) I mostly just rely on the Internet.  Normally the first search is to figure out what in the world is the odd ingredient in the first place.  Then after some futile searching around I typically repeat the search with “substitution” added.  Today’s missing item was a beef tri-tip roast.  The butcher at the store looked at me like I was crazy when I asked.  Enter Google.  Turns out a tri-tip roast is a cut of sirloin taken from the flank and there’s only one per side of beef.  And if you can’t find one (which you might not be able to because it’s usually cut up for stew beef) you can substitute a flank steak.  Now those I could find.

Tim is bringing breakfast for his team today at work; and since the last time it was his turn he took the Sausage Roll-ups, I figured that I should make something else his team would enjoy that might be a little out of the norm.  I went with oatmeal because it’s not something you would think of taking to an office breakfast.

The actual dish was cooked overnight in my favorite small kitchen appliance – the Crock-Pot (slow-cooker).  I woke up this morning to the house smelling wonderful and thought I should do this more often.  However, the sight that greeted me was definitely scary.  A thick, dark brown mass was sitting there in my cooker, smelling great but looking awful.

But I stirred in more water to restore it to a more creamy oatmeal texture and gave it a taste.  Luckily, the oatmeal wasn’t that dark due to burning.  It seems to have been colored by the walnuts, raisins and dates that were cooked with it.  I gave Tim a package with bowls, spoons, dried cranberries and brown sugar for last minute additions.  Hopefully the guys will like it.

Several years ago, one of my aunts commented that she used to go out the day after Halloween and gather up the smashed pumpkins around her neighborhood to make pie.  Since I got married, the orange squash has graced my table in celebration of All Saint’s each year, typically in pie form.  Growing up in the South though (and in a rural section at that) did seem to require poking some fun. Hence the name “Roadkill Pie” even though the idea of actually scraping pumpkin from the road grosses me out (I always use canned).  This year, as I was making the sausage roll-ups and cookies and had a knitting workshop, I cheated and used pre-made pie crusts.  I don’t think anyone around here will care.

After the disaster of last week, I was unsure whether or not I should make another roll type of bread. After I mentioned my reservations to Tim, he countered with the fact that he is taking breakfast to his team tomorrow morning.  They are getting these.  I think if I were to make these again I would do a double batch since they really weren’t that difficult to do once I had cleared sufficient counter space to really roll them out and the directions tell you a stopping point for refrigerating the dough so you can make them the next day.  However, I still don’t think these would be a standard type of breakfast food around here.  Maybe brunch.

This dough was no where near as aggressive as last Monday’s, but was considerably stickier.  Kneading the softened butter into the dough before adding the sausage and rolling made each of these rolls a bit flakier.

This week’s cookies were the Orange-Pistachio Milk Chocolate Chippers.  However, as I much prefer dark to milk chocolate, I decided to swap the type of chips.  The smell of the almond extract was a little overpowering as I scooped the cookies out but it mostly baked out.  I’m curious how these would have turned out using vanilla extract instead, but I suppose that is for another trial.  The orange gave them a nice amount of tang without overpowering the pistachio and chocolate.

These cookies have been voted Tim’s favorite so far of the cookies I have made.  They created a bit of a surprise around here since they contain regular chocolate chips as well as white chocolate ones.  I really liked these, but getting the macadamia nuts was a bit of a pain since my grocery store only had them in the small bags that were rather expensive by the time I’d gotten 4 of them.

The whole time I am making these, all I can think of is the “Robin 101” episode of How I Met Your Mother that I recently saw.  I may not be Canadian, but I do like my butterscotch (dark chocolate is still better though).  However, these fell a little flat to me. I think it was the granola. It was neither fish nor fowl and just stuck out as an oddity in the cookies. But the one I got which didn’t have any granola in it was really good.

I’m skipping the Mega-Chippers recipe as the whole point of those is “make them bigger.” I am perfectly capable of doing that without needing to actually spend a week‘s recipe on them.  Since the purpose of this adventure was to learn to bake better by baking a lot of things (practice makes perfect or so they say) something that is exactly the same except for the cookie scoop used will be passed over.  Maybe I’ll make one of the later recipes big.

Given that, you may ask, what’s the big deal about adding some nuts in then? Ahh, here was a challenge for me.  For most of the rest of these recipes I’ll be swapping in some different ingredients for part of the chocolate chips (and some of the other ingredients) in the Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.  The swapping will let me work from a baseline to learn how different things go together (or don't).  The real challenge I had with this one was I toasted my own pecans.  Previously when putting nuts in cookies I didn’t bother toasting the nuts, but it makes a difference I found.  These were great!  I think the full 4 dozen cookies might have lasted 18 hours around here.

These had the added bonus of explaining to Jackson some cooking terminology with which he was unfamiliar.  I got to feel smart, which is a rare thing these days.

While the plan is to do the bread baking on Mondays, tonight's dinner was a crock-pot beef stew that just seemed to be begging for rolls to go with it. Since rolls were the next item from Breaking Bread With Father Dominic I decided to go ahead and make them a day early.  The only difference in what I did was brush some melted butter on them after baking. As it was, I’m not sure that was an improvement.  The rolls felt a little greasy afterwards but still tasted good. They weren’t really fluffy and didn’t remind me of the rolls I grew up on (Grandmommy made the best rolls) but they were nice for mopping up soup.  I think making more, smaller rolls or packing them tighter in the pans would have made them better.