Wee Feast

Photo by Leigh Cooper

Nothing says “weekend morning” like cinnamon rolls. Somewhere in my history, I became a complete cinnamon addict. Now I’m the person with about 2 dozen cinnamon rolls just waiting to be consumed in my freezer. I’d say it’s been a delicious development.

The recipe I’ve used is The Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls. I halved the recipe and still had plenty for the freezer stash, ready to be pulled out for an 8 a.m. Sunday morning (British) football game.

Photo by Leigh Cooper

Ingredients:

• 2 cups milk (I used skim)
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 package Active Dry Yeast (I used the rapid-rise kind)
• 4 cups (plus 1 extra cup) all-purpose flour (I used unbleached)
• 1/2 heaping teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 scant teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 tablespoon salt (I used kosher salt)
• Ground cinnamon, melted butter, and 1 c sugar for filling

Photo by Leigh Cooper

I love Sunday dinner. Even when it’s Monday (since today was the end of a three-day weekend). I’ve mulled over my feelings on Sunday dinner for awhile, and I realize it’s often the highlight of my week. As such, I plan to blog about it.

In fact, moving forward, I plan to only blog about food. It’s what excites me. I enjoyed trying my hand over the past year at different styles of writing, only to come back to food. It’s comforting. It feels right. Just like Sunday dinner.

This vegetable pot pie is a hearty meal for 4 people. You can stretch it to 6 if you serve either a salad alongside or ice cream and cookies afterwards (I did the latter).

Here’s the recipe, which I’ve made before. What I changed this time is blanching the vegetables and making the pastry beforehand, so that all I had to do was mix up the filling and assemble.

I invited a big group of friends over for sausages, vegetarian sausages, roasted potatoes, apple cabbage, caramelized onions, acorn squash and polenta casserole, sourdough pretzels, kettle chips, and pumpkin bread. The beers: Ayinger Brauweiss, Erdinger Hefeweissen, Spaten Oktoberfest, Sam Adams Oktoberfest, Hofbrau Hefeweissen, Pumpkin Ale. We also may or may not have consumed a gallon of fresh-pressed apple cider.

Some people, like my college roommate, choose to spend their alone time blasting motown music and singing along in an empty house. Another friend takes time alone as the chance to obsessively clean and organize her apartment. And what do I do? I eat blue cheese, thanks for asking.

This recipe is an easy way to jazz up some mixed greens and pears. It’s based off an Ina Garten recipe. Just core some pears, stuff with walnuts, cranberries, and blue cheese, and roast in a wine/juice bath. Serve warm. It makes a delightful fall lunch.

“What the heck is beet cake?” I can hear you asking. It’s exactly what it sounds like: instead of using oil or applesauce or sour cream, you moisten a cake with pureed beets. (Confession time: the beets I had were rather small, so I had to top off my beets with applesauce.) I boiled and pureed a few beets, mixed up a shockingly magenta batter, baked, and let it cool as I went about my Sunday. The finished product had no color, odor, or texture reminiscent of beets. Despite all this, I’m quite picky, and I waited for two friends to pronounce the cake delicious before I would dig in. They were right!

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My talented sister took this photo.

This cake is plain in a good way. You can jazz it up with fresh or dried fruit, sneak in some chocolate chips, or just enjoy its mild simplicity. It’s also designed to be a perfect nut cake, where you use a little ground nuts instead of flour, and fold in some whole ones to the batter. Light, fluffy, and what you are hoping to get when you order pastry at most coffee shops (where I tend to be disappointed), this cake would be a great one to add to your repertoire.

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I’d like to think one of my better traits is loyalty. I would also describe myself as constant. Even when I’m being spontaneous—up and quitting my job, for example—it’s not really a deviation from the norm. After the congratulations, I usually also got an “I’m not surprised.”

One of those constancy traits that shows up is when I find a cook or baker whose work I admire, I keep following his or her recipes until the cows come home. So it goes with a small handful in my recent cooking and baking past: Deborah Madison, Dorie Greenspan, Ina Garten, Deb from Smitten Kitchen. Today is another Smitten Kitchen recipe. Even though my mom is always, “You got a recipe online?” they tend to turn out supremely awesome.

That was a long and complicated back story just to say, I hope you’re not bored with my recipes yet.

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Finally, a way to use up leftover risotto. Although I got so excited about these risotto cakes that I sort of packed away the last bit of risotto in the pan before everyone was really done with it so I’d have enough for the cakes. Hey, they’re that good. I was inspired by Ina Garten, who makes risotto from scratch just to make these cakes (except with a lot more flavoring than I added, but she is working from plain rice). 

How to make risotto cakes:

• Get yourself some leftover risotto. Mix in some fresh herbs to punch up the flavor.
• Set yourself up an assembly station with 2 dishes: one with an egg, beaten, and one with some bread crumbs. If you want to get really fancy, use panko-style bread crumbs.
• Heat some oil in a frying pan (I used olive oil or canola oil, either would be good, this isn’t a deep hot fry so you’ll be ok no matter what).
• Shape your risotto and herbs into patties (mine were about 3/4 of an inch thick and maybe 2 1/2 inches wide.
• Dip in egg, dip in bread crumbs. You can do this even if you loathe eggs as much as I do.
• Fry ‘em up, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels. Eat.

I served mine with some fresh zucchini on the side, but a salad would be even more ideal.

I just had a birthday recently. And yes, I made my own cake. It was a lovely day.

When I was tiny, my cafeteria used to serve yellow cake with chocolate icing once every couple of weeks as the dessert portion of the meal tray. Yellow cake with chocolate icing became an instant favorite.

I used Smitten Kitchen’s Best Birthday Cake recipe, and it was amazingly delicious. I even called up more than one person as I was mixing the batter (by hand…for the last time…that’s right, I got a Kitchen Aid mixer as a present) to remark on how perfect it was. “It’s like a pound cake, with a tight crumb and a nice density. But it’s really fluffy too!” After I bored friends far and wide with the batter, it was on to the frosting. I liked the sour cream frosting, but I think I will stick to buttercream in the future. It gives it that diner cake flavor that I particularly enjoy.

Here’s one of the cake layers cooling:

And the finished product, in all of its frosted, sprinkled glory:

Now I’m dying to know: what is your favorite birthday cake?

“Very rarely does anyone go into a garage, phone store or shoe shop and ask for ‘the cheapest, most rubbish one.’ So why do we walk into supermarkets and support those companies that are producing cheap products?”
—Jamie Oliver

Growing up, it was not so easy to find organic rBGH-free milk and free-range eggs if you lived in an urban area. And yet that’s the type of grocery staple I grew up with: berries in summer, turnips in winter, and meat as a side dish at our weeknight dinners. Some of it cost a little more, like paying top dollar for pesticide-free produce or ethically raised animals. And that’s the way I prefer to continue to eat these days (although I pass on the meat).

Food in-season tastes better and has more nutrients. Food made in smaller batches by smaller companies tastes better and has more nutrients. I can’t understand why people eat synthetic crap all the time (although synthetic crap has its occasional place), and it makes me want to yell screaming from the rooftops. Your food is not just fuel for your entire body, it is the raw building block that composes your body. I think people act like your body is a static thing, and you are just providing it energy to function by feeding it. It’s so much more than that. Your hair, your nails, your skin, your cell membranes all must be made and remade from what you eat. This, to me, is not an area to be cheap.

It’s like the idea of forcing yourself to eat whatever fruit is the cheapest, like navel oranges. If you only allow yourself to purchase bulk navel oranges at the grocery store, you are not going to be much motivated to eat your fruit. They’re bland, they’re boring, and they are really only good in winter (did you know citrus has a season? It does.). In case you’re wondering, I justify the increase in my enjoyment of food and overall health by upgrading my grocery bill to a “somewhat high” cost.