My Mom's Rolls

As far as I know, my great grandmother brought this recipe from England when she immigrated. She was a young WWI bride, leaving her family to go to the wilds of Canada to be with the young soldier she'd nursed back to health. She got to Canada before her letter saying she was en route did, consequently, my great grandfather was not there to meet her. Standing on the dock, with everything she owned and no where to go, knowing no one, she could have been prime meat for all sorts of disreputable people. Fortunately, a generous man took her home for the night, much to his wife's suspicious dismay, and then took her out by horse cart to go from farm to farm searching the countryside looking for my grandfather's family farm.

I grew up on this recipe. My mother uses it for everything from pizza dough to cinnamon rolls. Everyone who has my mother's rolls, never forgets them. I've spent many years trying to get them exactly like hers and while I've gotten close, I have come to believe that there must be some element of my mom's sweat itself that I am missing, gross as that may sound.

At any rate, since Thanksgiving is coming up and there is no gathering without these rolls, here you go, as she dictated to me many years ago. Having made at least one batch a week for the last 40 years, she doesn't use a recipe.

Hot Rolls
Dissolve one package yeast in 1/2 cup warm water. Add 1 1/2 cups warm water, 1 egg, 1 t salt, 1/2 cup oil, 1/3-1/2 cup sugar (depending on the final salt/sweet balance wanted). Add flour until the mixture is the consistency of cake batter. Set aside for one hour in a warm place until it doubles in size and gets all bubbly. At this stage it can be fried like pancake batter if wanted. Add more flour. Knead until the dough isn't sticky. Place it in a large bowl and smear shortening over the top. Place in the fridge, preferably overnight to let the flavor develop. One and a half hours before you want to serve them, make into rolls and let rise in a warm place. Bake approximately 15 minutes at 350.


Here's another Thanksgiving tradition at our house, one of my absolute favorites.

Three-Layer Chocolate Dessert
1 cup nuts, chopped
1 cup flour
1 cup butter
Press the above into a 9x13 pan. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

8 oz. cream cheese
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup cool whip
Mix and spread over cooled crust.

1 small box instant vanilla pudding
1 small box instant chocolate pudding
3 cups milk.
Mix and spread over the above. Spread more cool whip on top and sprinkle with nuts and shaved chocolate.


Just writing this is giving me cravings.

Dinner for Dickens

Today's food experiment was steel cut oats. I'm a big fan of oats, and have an occasional hankering for oatmeal. I'd heard that steel cut oats were much better than the rolled oats most commonly available in the U.S., so why not? Got myself some from Bob's Red Mill and followed the recipe on the package which is essentially just adding it to boiling water and simmering for 20 minutes or so, with a little salt. It's almost like the recipe for Oatmeal Gruel in the Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936. How much easier could it be?

Oatmeal Gruel
1/4 cup oats
4 cups boiling water
salt
Slowly sprinkle cereal into rapidly boiling water. Boil rapidly, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Strain. Add salt to taste.

(Strain??? I thought gruel was just runny oatmeal. Are you straining out the excess water? Or straining out the oatmeal and eating the oatmeal juice. Ack.)

Well, Bob's recipe needed a lot more water and kept sticking to the bottom of the pan. And while it was cooking I did a little internet browsing and found versions where you brown the oats in butter first, and use various combos of milk, half and half, or buttermilk added in near the end of the cooking, all of which made me wish I'd waited and tried for something a little more elaborate.

However, when all was said and done, including vanilla, cinnamon, sugar, and a slosh of creamer...I am definitely a convert. The texture was different, creamy but more chewy, like risotto. I understand a savory version is made in Scotland and served on the side very much like risotto. I'm thinking there are tons of experimental possibilities here, both in the this-really-doesn't-count-as-breakfast-anymore-it's-really-dessert direction, and in the stuffing/pilaf/quinoa direction. I've definitely gotten my fiber for the day too.

In the same book, below the Gruel recipe, there's a recipe for Graham Mush. I'd say that the word 'mush' actually sounds more appetizing than anything called 'gruel', which I always associate with Ebenezer Scrooge, but once you scan the recipe you'll see that names, not unlike looks, can be deceiving.

Graham Mush
1 cup graham flour
2 cups boiling water
1 t salt
Sprinkle flour, stirring constantly, into rapidly boiling water. Add salt. Stir frequently to prevent lumping. Cook 30 minutes over direct heat or over hot water in the double boiler 1 hour.

I can't imagine this keeps from clumping. It sounds like a tasteless white sauce. Mmmm, please, sir, can I have some more?

As long as I'm on this page of the book, at the bottom is the recipe for rice. I've noticed that in these older books, rice is quite frequently cooked like pasta, as follows:

Boiled Rice
1 cup rice
8 cups boiling water
1 t salt
Wash rice thoroughly. Sprinkle gradually into boiling water. Add salt. Boil rapidly until rice grains are plump and tender. Pour into a sieve. Pour boiling water over rice until each grain is distinct. Reheat in a double boiler before serving.

Shortnin' Bread Redux

I don’t know why I didn’t realize when I was typing the recipe up, that the shortnin’ bread recipe in the Lincoln Heritage Trail Cookbook, by Marian French, 1971, was a shortbread recipe. Have I really been so dense my whole life, wondering what shortnin’ bread was and never equating it to my favorite kind of cookie? *Whacks self in head so hard birds twitter around it* I didn’t make the connection until I was actually making it.

Here’s my favorite regular shortbread recipe, my own combination of several others for the ratio of sweetness to crispness that I like best.

Scottish Shortbread

2 ½ sticks of butter (for best results, use European style)

¾ cup powdered sugar

2 ½ cups flour (for best results, use pastry flour)

½ t vanilla (optional)

Mix, press into two 9” round pans, score, cook at 325 for 30 minutes. Let cool ten minutes, turn out of pan, cut. Alternatively, can be spread thin on a cookie sheet to bake.

To add insult to injury in my not recognizing shortnin’ bread as shortbread, here’s a favorite brown sugar shortbread recipe given to me by a friend and coworker over a decade ago. These are scrumptious, hence too dangerous to my diet to make outside of the holidays.

Brown Sugar Shortbread

Cookie:

1 cup butter

¾ cup light brown sugar

2 t vanilla

2 cups flour

Topping:

1 T butter

1 c chocolate chips

1 cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugar, and vanilla, beat, then flour. Shape into 1 inch balls, then form into logs. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 17 minutes at 325. Cool.

Dip one end of the logs in the chocolate and butter which have been melted together, then dip into chopped pecans. Refrigerate until set.

This is the Lincoln recipe again. I don’t keep brown sugar around. It just gets hard. All brown sugar is, is white sugar that has been sprayed with the molasses removed in processing. So that’s what I do, just add a healthy blob of molasses when I add white sugar. It’s rich in minerals. In making this Lincoln version, I also replaced a third of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour. It was fabulous. And quickly gone.

Shortnin’ Bread

1 stick butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 ½ cup flour

Mix butter with sugar. Add flour and mix well. Roll about ½ inch thick on a floured board and shape with a biscuit cutter. Bake on lightly greased and floured pan at 350 for about 20 minutes.

I doubled the next batch and tried replacing 3 T of butter with 9 T of ground toasted flax seed, but it was too crumbly, so I ended up adding the butter back in. I replaced a third of the white flour with wheat pastry flour again, and tossed in a handful of wheat germ on top of it. No rolling this out, I had to mold it into shape like wet sand, but the end result is quite tasty, kind of like a Hob Nob. (I would increase the wheat germ and decrease the flax next time, to create a better texture.) Healthy short bread? Who would have guessed? 

Cookie Casserole

I’ve got the blues. I’ve got the blues cuz I don’t have the blues anymore; my favorite, and really, only blues club anywhere around here, went out of business this weekend. I’ve been moping around all this gloomy weekend like my best friend passed away. I suppose I could drown my sorrows in booze, but that’s not my style, or chocolate, which is more my style, actually ice cream cures most ills. But what really sounds good is comfort food: mashed potatoes and gravy or a deep gooey casserole. If I had the umph to leave the computer and go make some. Comfort food works best when someone else is doing the comforting.

Oh well, good enough reason to pull out the Culinary Institutes’ Casserole Cook Book, 1954 and see if I can find some motivation in it.

Good golly. The first recipe in the book is for steak and kidney pie. My great grandmother came from Liverpool. She was a World War I bride and she left a legacy of steak and kidney pie as the ultimate treat at family gatherings—at least through my mother’s generation. There’s a tiny British food store in town and I’ve sometimes picked up some frozen individual serving ones for my mom for Christmas. By my generation, however, the expat fervor was running weak.

All it takes is to smell that stuff cooking…I remember scooping more than my fair share of biscuits off the top and slathering them with butter to smother the taste of the filling, then cautiously picking thru the rest of my portion with a magnifying glass to remove all kidney particles from my plate before eating it. I still have ongoing issues with eating anything that has to have the pee boiled out of it first. But for you brave souls, or maybe my mother, should I be in a particularly dutiful mood someday, here’s the recipe. It uses pie crust on top instead of biscuits and it doesn’t involve any pre-boiling of urine so try at your own risk.

Beef and Kidney Pie

Set out a 2 qt top-of-range casserole having a tight fitting cover. Remove membranes and split horizontally through the center of 1 beef kidney. Remove cores and tubes. Rinse clean in cold water. Cut into 1 inch cubes. Put into a bowl and pour in ½ c French dressing. Turn each piece of kidney to coat well. Cover bowl and let kidney marinate at least 1 hour. Turn pieces occasionally; drain.

Wipe 1 lb. beef for stewing (chuck, brisket, or rump); cut into 1 inch pieces.

Coat kidney and beef with mixture of:

2/3 c flour

1 ½ t salt

1 t MSG

¼ t paprika

¼ t pepper

Heat in casserole over medium heat: 3 T bacon drippings. Add meat and ¼ c chopped onion. Brown meat, stirring occasionally.

Combine and pour slowly into casserole:

2 ½ cups condensed tomato soup (2 cans)

1 cup hot water (or more if needed to cover meat)

1 T Worcestershire sauce

1 bay leaf

¼ t basil

Cover tightly; simmer 1 to 1 ½ hours or until meat is tender.

Heat and cook in a saucepan 5 minutes:

3 T butter

1 cup mushrooms

Remove bay leaf and add mushrooms to casserole.

If necessary to thicken liquid, shake ¾ c water and 6 T flour in a jar until well blended and slowly pour as much as needed into casserole, stirring constantly, to reach desired consistently. Bring to a boil. Cook 2-3 minutes longer.

Make pie crust and arrange rolled out pastry on top of casserole. Press edges to seal and flute. Make slits in top top vent and bake at 425 for 15 to 20 minutes or till brown.

For some reason, I still don’t feel comforted. But I do remember sitting on a play ground in Riyadh while my siblings played and my mother talked to a British lady about recipes. When they got to beef and kidney pie, the other lady was horrified at my mother’s description of how she made it. It took a little for them to realize that the American-to-British translation meant she was picturing a thick stew with cookies floating on it.