Tammy’s Pumpkin Dinner Rolls are very popular amongst Menu Plan Monday participants — I see them linked all over, and I’ve thought about making them many times. There’s just one thing that has stopped me in the past: I was afraid of working with yeast.
Today, I conquered my fear. Success was mine! Except that, aside from being able to say I have now made a yeast bread, I won’t be passing out samples — they didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. That’s my fault, not the recipe’s: I mistakenly bought a large package of straight whole wheat flour rather than the white whole wheat I usually buy. The recipe calls for all-purpose flour anyway; the white whole wheat would have been light enough to get by, but using almost 100% whole wheat flour made the rolls heavy and chewy. (I briefly considered running next door to borrow some AP flour, but what kind of crazy person asks to borrow 10 cups at once?) They are totally edible, and A. was happy to eat them split and spread with butter, but they were definitely not a best effort on my part.
I don’t see myself doing a lot of this type of baking in the future, simply because I generally don’t have big blocks of time when I’m in the house and can tackle each step of a yeast bread on schedule. This morning I got A. on the bus, then ran back to the house and whipped up the dough (combine ingredients, knead by hand which took forever, plop in an oiled bowl, throw in oven that was preheated to 170° and then turned off so the dough could rise) in the 25 minutes before I had to take G. out the door. It rose for an hour while I was out, then I punched it down and divided it into rolls. Once on the baking sheets, the dough had to rise for another 30 minutes. Then preheat the oven and bake them. It’s not hard, you just have to be around to take care of each step. I’m usually not.
I do feel compelled to try these again with the right kind of flour, just so I know I can make them successfully.
On Monday night J. and I went to a great cheese tasting led by Taylor Cocalis of Murray’s Cheese. I have to mention her by name because she was full of cool bits of information and great tips about cheese selection and tasting. For instance, she touched on the impact of retro-nasal input on cheese tasting — if you aerate your cheese by opening your mouth slightly and breathing in while the cheese is on your tongue (similar to the way you taste wine), you’re both smelling it and tasting it at the same time, which is a much more full experience than sniffing it first, then putting it into your mouth and tasting it afterward. It was a surprisingly huge difference! I love learning tips like that. There’s a good explanation of retro-nasal smell, albeit in wine tasting, at The Wine Tasting Or, Should We Say, Wine Smelling Experience.
She also shared a good device for remembering how to choose a variety of cheese for a tasting plate: something old (a cooked pressed cheese, like Gruyere or Parmigiano-Reggiano), something new (fresh, like chevre), something stinky (washed rind, like Taleggio), something blue (a blue cheese, like Stilton). Buy about 1 oz. of each cheese per person if you’re doing a tasting of 3-5 cheeses.
In order, we tried:
Selles-sur-cher: The first aged (lightly) goat cheese, I’ve tried, it was surprisingly smooth and mild. We both enjoyed it.
Sweet Grass Dairy Green Hill: Mushroomy and more earthy than I’d expect in a cow cheese. It’s a double cream, but so silky and rich it felt like a triple. Yum.
Serra da Estrela: Made with vegetarian rennet from thistles, this was too salty for me but J. enjoyed it (he thought it smelled of olives).
Pecorino Foja de Noce: This cheese smelled wonderfully nutty — not surprising, since it was aged in walnut leaves. It was crumbly and dry and didn’t make much of an impression taste-wise (J. pointed out it tasted better with some pinot noir, and I agree).
Beeler Gruyere: My absolute favorite of the evening! It had a lightly sweet, butterscotch smell. This Gruyere has those awesome crunchy bits in it that you sometimes find in aged cheese. I never knew what they were until Taylor enlightened us: they’re clusters of the amino acid tyrosine, caused by the breakdown of the main protein in milk, casein. The most delicious non-essential aminos you ever did eat.
Valdeon: Our last cheese was this “aggressive” blue; a 7.5 according to Taylor on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intense blue cheese flavor. I like blue cheese, but this was a bit much for me — I’d probably prefer something closer to a 6! One of our favorite blue cheeses is from Rogue River, and Taylor recommended Gorgonzola Dolce as a good “gateway” blue — something easy to taste to ease you into this type of cheese.
For the past several years, we’ve put together a cheese tasting for our family before our Thanksgiving meal. After taking this class, I’m especially looking forward to choosing the cheeses this year, and you can bet I’ll be including the Beeler Gruyere.
Last night the boys ran ahead of me to get to the table, which was already set for dinner. I heard G. let out a big “Ewwwwww!” when he saw something green on his plate. A. said, “Don’t be silly! That’s yum yum edamame!” And A. ate it all up. (G. of course did not eat any.)
Have you been to realfoodforhealthykids.com? A book by the same name, authored by Tanya Wenman Steel, was just published. She’s a local, but also the editor-in-chief of epicurious.com. You can see a sample of the kid-friendly recipes on the book’s website.
I actually made one additional dish for the second night of the holiday that I forgot to mention in my entry; a chopped salad that included mixed lettuce and tomatoes from our farm share.
Special thanks goes out to Lauren, for being the laid-back kind of hostess who didn’t mind not knowing what I’d bring until the last minute!
I didn’t remember to put my onion in the freezer 20 minutes before it was needed, so I decided to try out the candle idea to keep me tear-free as I chopped. It didn’t work for me — this was a plain old supermarket onion and I still had to leave the room in the middle of that minor knife work. It wasn’t a total loss, though — it did amuse me to have such a romantic setting for my dinner prep!
Why Do Onions Make You Cry? The onions from my CSA are particularly brutal, leaving me totally blind for a few minutes as tears stream down my face. I thought dull knives could be exacerbating the situation, but even after J. sharpened them all I don’t see an improvement. I wore a pair of the kids’ goggles once, but they just fogged over so I couldn’t see anyway. Next time I’ll try freezing them for 20 minutes or so before I chop them.
Our preferred method of cooking corn on the cob is out on the grill, but when I cook it indoors I’ve always boiled it. It takes forever for a huge pot of water to come up to temperature, though, and since you only need to cook corn for a few minutes it seems like a waste of time, energy, and water. Didn’t I feel silly when Lauren recently showed me how she steams hers instead — just a bit of water in the bottom of the pot, stand the cobs on end, and steam for 10 minutes or so. She credits her mother-in-law Susan for teaching her this method. I’ll never boil corn again.
One little-reported benefit of veggies from a CSA or farmer’s market: no produce stickers to remove.
Several weeks ago I entered a recipe I created into a contest run by our local paper, The Journal News. The contest hasn’t been judged yet, but they’ve been featuring some of the submissions in the paper, and today my Sweet & Sour Refrigerator Pickles were published as a lead-in to a list of farmer’s markets in the area. Too bad they left off my blog address! Even if I don’t place in the contest, it is a thrill to see the recipe in print.
Last night I made Sweet Potato & Black Bean Burritos, but I subbed the Sunshine Kabocha squash from last week’s CSA share for the sweet potatoes. The swap did not go over well with J., or the boys (not that the kids would eat them anyway). The squash was much more dry and flaky than a sweet potato, more like a Russet, and wasn’t that flavorful. The burritos were OK, just not wonderful as usual. I froze the rest and will share them with my parents — I know they won’t mind eating them with me!
There was an interesting article in the New York Times Dining section last week profiling Julia Stewart, the chief executive of the company that owns Applebee’s and IHOP (”A Craving for Riblets and Change at Applebee’s“). One point made was that there seems to be no level of sweetness that is too much for the American palate. I loved this sentence:
Among the dozen dishes on her table [at IHOP] that day was the Georgia praline peach streusel pancake, a dish so sweet it made a Butterfinger bar seem like a refreshing palate cleanser.
Can’t you just feel in your teeth how horribly over-sweet those pancakes would be? I love that description.
We recently tried Trader Joe’s Harvest Grains Blend, which is a mix of Israeli couscous, orzo, baby garbanzos (cute! I’d never seen these before), and red quinoa. It was beautiful and I wanted to love it, but cooking it according to the package directions left the garbanzos and quinoa undercooked. Had I cooked it more, I fear the orzo and couscous would have gotten mushy.
Camp is over, and summer’s end is drawing near. We’ll be out and about the next couple of weeks, so posting will be sporadic, as will my cooking.
I know I’m going to use fresh green beans from our CSA to make a canned soup classic this week: Green Bean Casserole. I have chard to use up, which I’ll likely saute with olive oil and garlic and use as a filling for an omelet. Otherwise, I have no concrete meal plans — we won’t be home for as many meals as usual, and I plan on indulging the boys in some extra end-of-summer ice cream. We can get back to square meals when September rolls around.
Have you heard of Cookthink? I saw the site linked on Mango & Tomato. Cookthink is more than just aggregated recipes from all over the Web, they’re a super search engine (you can even search by “what are you craving?”) and they test all their own recipes. Their “Cookthinktank” includes Vegan Yum Yum, which I already read and love. Plus they have in-depth tips on how to handle specific ingredients.
I stumbled across wastedfood.com today, and can’t stop reading. It bothers me when I waste food in my own home, and I’ve often wondered about the tremendous amount of waste grocery stores must have, especially in an area like mine where there is probably little market for reduced dairy and produce. Wasted Food takes a look at all the excess around us, and tries to find ways to redistribute that food to those that need it. They discuss how to create less waste, too.
I’m thinking of getting back to composting. J. built us a huge outdoor compost bin a few years ago, and we’ve used it on and off (with the composted material being used in his garden). I just haven’t found a good solution to storing the compost in our small kitchen before I bring it outside and add it to the heap. I found a link on Wasted Food to BioBags, which makes biodegradable bags for countertop composting bins. I’m excited to get back into this and think having a bin that’s easier for me to use in the house will help me throw away less of all the veggie and fruit scraps we create, especially during CSA season.
I'm Dara, the chick in the kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two boys, ages 3 and 5, and husband. Trying to feed my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Reach me at .
Want to Try
Enchiladas in Pumpkin Sauce: I'd make either a chicken version without cheese, or a vegetarian version with cheese and beans as a filling. Either way, the pumpkin sauce sounds delicious.
Cook to This
"Bullet with Butterfly Wings" by Smashing Pumpkins. We've been watching Whale Wars on Animal Planet, which I was surprised to hear using this track as their theme song. I think it's alienating as a opener for the show, but it rocks in every other way.
I'm Dara, the chick in the kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two boys, ages 3 and 5, and husband. Trying to feed my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Reach me at .