Hello everyone! We are 10 days from Christmas, and I don’t know exactly what we’re going to be doing for our family celebration. We had 10 people for Thanksgiving, so we kept to our state’s limit, but for Christmas we’ll be just our immediate small group: the five of us who live here in this house plus my brother-in-law. The vaccines are rolling out even as I write this, and we don’t want to expose ourselves unnecessarily right as help is on the way. We’ll be sure to do a Zoom call with my sister-in-law and her husband at some point.
Breads
A Nice Addition to your Roll Repertoire
Hello everyone! Just a quick post today with the promised roll variation. I’m not posting a picture of anything–just the brief description from my own recipe files. This is from my Cook’s Illustrated magazine that my son subscribes me to every year for my Christmas present. I’ve changed it just a little bit to make it simpler and more streamlined (of course),but other than that it’s basically the same. I like the addition of the molasses and the oatmeal. It’s like a warm, cozy, nubby sweater for fall!
A Lovely, Festive Holiday Sweet Roll Recipe—That’s Not Too Sweet!
For the main dish at the Cherry Creek Chorale’s Saturday-morning rehearsal breakfast, I’m making my old reliable Union Square Breakfast Casserole. I didn’t make enough of my Caramel-Apple French Toast casseroles last time; I think for this event I’ll make a six-fold batch. But . . . I have some nice ham on hand that I need to use up, so I’m just going to dice that up and use it instead of the Italian sausage called for, and I’m going to make 1/3 (so two panfuls) without the ham so it can be vegetarian/kosher. I won’t have to brown sausage, which is a whole step in the recipe. [Also, later update: I didn’t do the fresh mushrooms, nor did I cube the bread. The casseroles were pretty thrown together, but they tasted great.] You do need to follow the recipe for the egg/milk proportions and for the basic amount of bread, but beyond that you can do pretty much what you want. Which I did!
A Beautiful Loaf of Bread
As I’ve been working on the chapter on bread in my planned forthcoming cookbook (when it will come forth is very much an open question), I got inspired to make a bread-machine loaf, something I don’t usually do. My breadmaking usually falls into much more controllable territory–rolls, pizza dough, breadsticks, and overnight bread baked as a round. I don’t have to worry about whether or not rolls are going to cave in, as they are baked outside of the machine. I can eyeball how far they’ve risen and adjust accordingly. But a big loaf is inherently much more unstable, and you can’t tweak the machine’s cycle after it has started. Here it is, though. I was reminded of a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, in which the orphan Rose is raised by her Uncle Alec. She takes housekeeping lessons from one of her aunts as a part of her education, and here’s how her baking lessons come out: