Oh! You Cook!

I subscribe to approximately 130 blogs, most of the recipe persuasion.  In order to prevent my Great Search for the Great Recipe taking up 120% of my free time, I read them all through an RSS reader.

RSS reader?  Hey, Dena, talk English at me!

Okay, Dear Reader.  What RSS reader means, in English, is that I sest up a webpage, personalized with just blogs I subscribe to, aligned in a neat list.  But the really neat thing about an RSS reader is that blogs with updates stand out in bold font.  This way, I don't have to personally visit each and every blog to find out if I read it already.  If it's in bold, there is a new post (or two) that I haven't read yet.  In fact, I don't even have to visit the blog to read it!  I just click on the bolded blog name, then on the emboldened post title and the post opens up right at that exact spot.  No jumping to a new page and wasting all those nanoseconds waiting for the new page to open and display.  Woo-hoo!

I use Google's read…

I recently applied to become a member of Project Pastry Queen, a group of bakers where one of the group selects a recipe from The Pastry Queen (an awesome cookbook BTW, check it out), the members make it, then blog about the results.  This week's challenge of Rocket Rolls, since they are described as "challah-like," looked like something right up my alley.

We will ignore the fact that "this week" turned out to be last week's project.  Because I just finished making the rolls.  And because there is no trophy or cash prize, only posting rights about making the recipe.  No problem ... something I can handle.  Maybe ...

Originally these rolls were called Torpedo Rolls, due to their somewhat torpedo-ish shape.  The current name came about when someone in the bakery asked about the rolls but couldn't remember thecorrect name,  asking about "rocket rolls" instead.

Here is the original rocket roll recipe.   It calls for over 6 cups of flour.  Unfortu…

For Chanukah, my sons gave me 2 sets of shooter glasses.  One set of 12 resembles ice tea glasses shrunk down, the other 12 like regular-size shot glasses.

So I thought, they are tiny enough that one mousse recipe could fill 'em all and still have enough left over for the cook.

Sweet!

But 24 mini servings of mousse is just so boring.  Hey, why not make two different desserts?














One made with crumbled mini-brownies (home-made preferably) and one with crumbled graham crackers.  Oooh, nice job, Mom!

Mini-brownies are recommened since they are almost all crust.  The crunchiness is a nice contrast to the soft mousse.

I have an adaptation of a Kraft mousse pie recipe that is similar to the Pioneer Woman's version I made a while back.  I had forgotten about it when I saw PW's, but shush the following is heresy!  I like Kraft's better.  Sorry, I happen to like semi-sweet chocolate better than that of the milk persuasion.  Don't get me wrong, I liked PW's very very much.…

When I was growing up, my mother would make what we kids called 3-in-1 soup.   She would take a large pot, add short ribs (or some other meat), drop in the contents of bean and barley soup mix, then add water almost to the top.  The mixture was simmered for hours on end.  The meat would eventually be fished out and served.  The soup left in the pot was rather thin and oily, and none of us would touch it even with a 10-foot pole (I knew some 6-foot Poles who wouldn't go near it, either).  After it cooled a bit, the soup was transferred into a smaller pot and shoved into our tiny Frigidaire overnight.  The next day, an inch-thick layer of congealed fat was lifted off.   The now-thickened soup underneath was reheated and served, this time to eagerly awaiting family.  

We dubbed it 3-in-1 soup, most likely because 1) it was soup, 2) that begat a meat meal and 3) I don't remember the third reason but it was really very important back then.

Fast forward too many years to admit.  The…

On a whim, I decided that french bread rolls should be served with dinner. There are a number of recipes in my binder for french bread, but wasn't sure if they would work in mini form.  So I visited one of my usual suspect, All Recipes, to find what was waiting for me to find.

I found a recipe called French Bread Rolls to Die For.  Preposition ending aside, it seemed like a good basic recipe.  The name was a bit arrogant, but I hoped it would at minimum be a Roll to Sit Up and Take Notice.

I missed the part about bread flour, and used all-purpose without adding my favorite cheat of wheat gluten.  Wheat gluten is the binding that makes for a chewy bread.  With less than the optimum amount of gluten, the rolls flattened out slightly, and did not have that perfect chewy goodness I like in a normally chewy bread.

However, theHubby ate 2 rolls with his meal.  YoungerSon ate 3, plus  the remaining rolls during the half hour Hubby and I went on a quick errand.   So maybe the rolls are t…