Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category

Today I’m baking cinnamon rolls, using my sweet roll dough as the bread dough part of it. I’ve tried different recipes, including some made with Bisquick (ugh). I prefer a nice yeast dough to start out with.

I’ve made Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls a few times. The first time I followed the recipe exactly.

I didn’t like them very much, too greasy. That’s an excessive amount of oil in the recipe in my opinion. Plus, who needs baking powder in a yeast bread? Not to mention the fact that the recipe is way too large unless you are planning on giving lots away in which case it’s fine. I cut it in half and decreased the oil quite a bit, and it was much better for me. I do have to admit, though, that while I can’t see the point of baking powder in a yeast dough, I have been known to put a little yeast into a biscuit dough.

Anyhow, I’ve had my own sweet roll recipe for a few years. I usually make it as dinner rolls for a holiday dinner, even though it is on the sweet side. They sell those Hawaiian rolls as dinner rolls… so why not? Portuguese people eat sweet bread with dinner type stuff, and I’ve always loved a good Portuguese sweet bread. It’s probably where they get the Hawaiian bread originally… from Portuguese people that came to live there.

This originally started out as a bread machine recipe. I have it written down in a notebook… but because I’m pretty good with bread baking I didn’t feel the need to follow a recipe the last time I made it. (besides, the recipe is a little off… my son made it as written in the bread machine and ended up with batter instead of dough) I haven’t used a bread machine in a few years… I like kneading dough. Plus, it’s easier to adjust flour if you have the dough in your hands.

If you aren’t comfortable baking bread without actual measurements of flour, this recipe is not for you. If you are, jump right in!

Ingredients:
1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt (oops, forgot this in todays batch!)
1 6 oz can pineapple juice
2 eggs
3 to 5 cups flour, either all purpose or bread flour

(Flour as you like or happen to have on hand… todays rolls have a mixture of both, as I ran out of bread flour and had to switch to all purpose.)

Basic dough instructions:

Stir yeast into warm water and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cut up butter and melt in the microwave. Stir in sugar, salt, and pineapple juice, and when cooled, whisk in eggs.

Add a cup of flour and beat with a spoon until combined, then add in the dissolved yeast. Add more flour as needed to make a soft dough. I’d guess it took about 3 cups today, but can’t be sure as today was one of those days that I didn’t use a measuring cup to scoop out flour. Just add a cup at a time until you have a good dough going.

(Which reminds me of a book I’d love to own… a cooking book that is all about proportions of stuff rather than exact amounts. Gotta remember to find that book again and put it on my wish list!)

Turn dough out onto a well floured surface and knead, adding more flour as needed to keep it from sticking. Knead like you would any other bread dough, until it becomes nice and smooth and elastic. Round it up and put into an oiled bowl, turning to coat all sides. Cover and let rise for a couple hours or until doubled in bulk.

Punch down, let rest for 10 min. At this point you can form it into dinner rolls or carry on and use it for another purpose like I did today…

If making dinner rolls, divide dough into whatever size rolls you like… you can make cloverleafs in muffin tins, or just divide the dough into bits that will make the size roll you are going for. Place on parchment lined baking sheet and bake 20 min. or so @ 350 until golden brown. That’s what I usually do… and I make rather large dinner rolls. This recipe fills up a baking sheet pretty tight, though. Rolls all stuck together.

But today I wanted cinnamon rolls. So, after punching down the dough and letting it rest, I got my trusty pastry cloth back out and my wonderful non-stick rolling pin (thanks Val!) and rolled the dough out to a sort of oblong. Melted a stick of butter, poured about 1/2 of that on the dough. Sprinkled about a cup of sugar onto that, cinnamon until it looked right, and then a double handful of raisins.

The rest of the butter went into the baking pan… one of those throw away foil pans with a plastic lid for carting to work or where ever.

Rolled the dough up tight and then cut into really thick slices. I think I overdid it. Not to mention, the pan wasn’t big enough but I am lazy and squeezed all the slices into the one pan anyhow. I’m going to take a photo in a few min. but I just wanted to warn you… I probably should have used BOTH pans not just the one, and cut the slices smaller… one inch, rather than two inches. This recipe was fine for one large cookie sheet of dinner rolls, but with all the filling and slicing and all.. a bit much for a 13×9 cake pan. No surprise really… the cake pan is half the size of my cookie sheets. Duh!

So, no icing yet. I may not put icing on these… I can’t see it going anywhere but OUT of the pan… or maybe totally swamping that one roll in the middle that didn’t seem to pop out like all it’s sibs did. :)

It’s dinner time, and guess what I’m having for dinner? Heh….

hugs,
Vyx

Okay, so… I logged out and went to have a cinnamon roll. They weren’t cooked, too overcrowded. That must be an important thing to follow: do not overcrowd cinnamon rolls in the baking pan. Give em room to rise and room to expand even more in the oven or you will end up with a pan of half baked and/or overbrowned rolls. I got both, but after taking out the middle two I put foil over the pan and stuck it back in the oven until they were done.

Won’t be doing that again! (the overcrowding/undercooking, that is) Lesson learned. :)

It’s another nice fall weekend. I decided yesterday afternoon that it would be a good time to do some more barbecue on my smoker, before I put the smoker away for the winter.

I bought a big pork roast, and an eye of round beef roast. Will smoke them for 4 or 5 hours, then wrap in foil and continue cooking until they fall apart. Will serve with cole slaw and potato rolls.

Anyhow, I thought I’d share my dry rub recipe with you. Very easy, very adaptable, very delicious.

Basic dry rub recipe

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons salt (I use pickling salt)

(All other measurements are in single tablespoons unless otherwise noted)
To the above add in:

• black pepper
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• chili powder (regular or hot)
• paprika
• dry ground mustard

Mix together in a small bowl with a fork.

That will give you a good basic rub for just about any type meat.

For pork I like to add:

• ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tablespoon cumin

You can pretty much add anything that happens to be in your spice cupboard. Maybe some poultry seasoning if you are doing chicken, and leave out the chili powder and dry mustard. Dry mustard is actually a new addition to my dry rubs, it was something I’d seen listed on someone else’s recipe, so I thought I’d try it. Now it’s a staple. You can add or subtract seasonings to suit your taste, experiment!

You can use this rub for cooking in a smoker, on the grill, or even in the oven. Take your meat out of the fridge, rinse and dry with paper towels. Put it into a fairly large pan and rub the mixture into all sides of the meat. Then let it stand for about an hour at room temperature before cooking. It will get all gooey looking, but that’s okay. If you are roasting in the oven, I’d switch pans before cooking and put foil in the cooking pan to keep from having burnt sugar to clean up later.

Oh, and this recipe will give you a lot of rub, but that’s okay. Pour the extra into a clean jar, and store it for future use! I made two different batches today, doing two types of meat, and now have 2 half pint jars of rub in the freezer. I’d rather have extra than find out I don’t have enough.

Now it’s time for me to get the roasts on the smoker. :)

hugs,
Vyx

At least at making homemade Mozzarella cheese.

My milk curdled just fine, it set up into a big giant curd just fine. Sliced it up like they tell you, spooned it out into a big cheesecloth lined colander.

I did a good job of straining the whey out. Maybe too good of a job.

But I could NOT get the cheese to get soft and pliable, nuking it didn’t help at all. I’d burn my hands on boiling bits of whey still trapped in the cheese, but the cheese would be just crumbling. Kept trying… recipe said to nuke it for 30 seconds or so, a few times…. That was plenty to get tiny pockets of whey super boiling, but not long enough to melt the curds so that they’d be pliable.

Finally I gave up and decided that we just have crumbles of mozzarella instead of nice smooth balls of it. The texture is still wonderful, as is the flavor… I got just the right amount of salt mixed in. It’s not as smooth as it could be but still chews just fine like fresh mozzarella should.

I will try again… perhaps with a better recipe. I wanted the short version, where you have Mozzarella cheese in about 1.5 hours. The other recipe I found took 6 hours to get the cheese. That’s more time than I want to spend on some fresh cheese, even if a lot of that is hanging it to drain whey. But if the short version doesn’t work for me… I’ll have to try the long version.

Dogs and cats all got whey mixed with kibble for dinner… and I still have a quart of whey. That’ll probably end up in the dogs food again, because if I try this again I will have another supply of it.

It’s all sort of shocking to me, because I’m good at stuff. LOL! What a blow to my ego here today… I can’t make fresh mozzarella! Oh, I’m sure there are lots of things I can’t do first time perfectly, but cheese is cooking and I can cook. Plus, cheese falls into the category of “crafts” and I’m good at that too. Oh well, live and learn as they say… and I know other failures will come to mind if I think on it.

Yes, popping up in my brain right now. Wanted to make a cake. Couldn’t find a recipe in the cookbook where we had all the right ingredients… except for a chocolate cake. Except I didn’t add the chocolate or cocoa, because I didn’t want a chocolate cake. It was bad. Probably a good base for a fruit buckle type cake, but without the chocolate in that cake it wasn’t very good.

I’ve burned stuff… I’m the only person I know who has burned boiled eggs. Boiled them dry and only realized it when they started exploding and sending egg and eggshells all over the kitchen. Being hearing impaired I just sort of heard a funny noise a couple times… why is it raining in the kitchen? :)

Anyhow, I will report back if I actually make some mozzarella that is like it’s supposed to be.

hugs,
Vyx

I don’t like cake. Seriously. I especially hate bakery cakes with yucky frosting. Bakery frosting is gross. (butter cream with white margarine, loved it as a kid)

But I’ve been wanting to make an applesauce cake for a while. I had a jar of applesauce no one wanted to eat. Big jar. Don’t want to throw it out, so I looked online for a cake to bake with it.

Found a recipe that looked pretty good. No fat at all in the cake, no milk, no eggs. Some odd ingredients, but I just left some of those out. I added some ingredients I thought would help, too, like a couple eggs.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m not real popular or anything but I still don’t want anyone bringing a cake for me, so last night I baked one and took it to work today. The preemptive cake, lol!

The recipe I used I found on RecipeSource.com. I used Splenda instead of sugar, since I had some on hand.. I’m sure that cut down even more on the calories. I was surprised that most of the diabetic recipes I found used Splenda…. but didn’t cut down on the fat at all. I understand why… fat adds flavor, especially if it’s butter or margarine that you are using. If it’s just cooking oil, though… yuck, leave it out if you can! More applesauce! (Low fat or no fat products add extra sugar, you really have to watch that!)

The problem with applesauce as a cake additive is… it’s very hard to mix in and the batter will be REALLY stiff… but after cooking the cake will weep. And weep. Powdered sugar for a topping? Turned into a glaze.

The original recipe link: http://www.recipesource.com/baked-goods/desserts/cakes/31/rec3100.html

I don’t think I should post the recipe here, just the link. I changed the heck out of it anyhow. For one thing, I made it half again in size to fit a 13×9 pan. Yeah, the recipe says you can use a bigger pan, but I know that the volume would NOT be nice. It would be a very THIN cake.

My new recipe:

Preemptive Applesauce Cake

9×13 inch pan, greased and floured (I used canola spray and cake flour) Heat oven to 350 F.

3 cups flour (I used cake flour, just because I had some)
1 1/2 cups Splenda
2 teaspoons baking soda
3 teaspoons baking powder (not called for, but didn’t seem right to me)
1 teaspoon salt
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa, unsweetened (far as I can tell this is just for color? can’t taste chocolate in the cake and original recipe says you can leave it out, next time I will add a lot more)
1 teaspoon cinnamon (I left out the rest of the spices, apples and chocolate both go well with cinnamon)
24 oz jar of unsweetened applesauce
2 eggs
water to make the batter be able to pour (sorry, didn’t measure this)

Mix dry ingredients, add applesauce and eggs and water as needed to make a very thick batter. Pour into prepared pan and spread it out, bake for 45 min or until toothpick comes out clean. (this was right at 45 min for my version of recipe)

I DO recommend sifting some of the dry ingredients together… the things that like to clump, like baking soda. My finished cake came out with lumps of baking soda floating on top. I didn’t use a mixer, just a wire whisk. Mixer would probably be better, get more air into the cake, too.

I won’t try powdered sugar on this cake again if I cover it, it wept too much and turned the powedered sugar into a fine glaze. Not a problem, really, but to be really sugar free you’d want to leave it off anyhow. (I did find a recipe to turn Splenda into powdered sugar, but way too much trouble)

It tasted fine, mostly of applesauce and cinnamon. Not too dense, not too light. No yucky fluffy frosting.

Great cake for a gal turning 50 who is trying to watch what she eats and watch her weight a bit. Even if I don’t normally eat sweets or desserts.

(the cake is a lie!)

Hugs,
Vyx

Got the new screen for the food mill during the week. It’s well made, although hard to see if it’s welded any better. Obviously not made by the same company, but it does fit and the spirals turn inside of it.

I used the old screen yesterday when I made more blackberry jam. Only took out 1 gallon bag and one pint bag from the freezer. Cooked them up, ran the stuff through the food mill twice just like before. Ended up with WAY too much juice/pulp for the amount of jam I wanted to deal with, so I put the extra into a labeled container in the freezer.

This time around I made sugar-free jam. I have a friend who is diabetic and so I said I’d make some jam for her, too. I couldn’t do sweetener free… that would be too tart… so I opted to go with Splenda. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of Splenda if using. (you can also use sugar with the “no sugar needed” pectin, up to 3 cups, which is WAY less than a normal batch would use)

It gelled quite nicely, but is slightly on the tart side. Tastes great, though, and that’s what is important, right? I got 4 full jars (1/2 pint size) and an almost full jar that I will put in the fridge until my friend comes to visit.

Instead of throwing the seed stuff out in the field… this time I put it on a cookie sheet covered in foil and stuck it in the oven to dry. I’m thinking that it would make a good addition to homemade suet cakes. I don’t usually feed the birds here, but I can see finding some places for suet cakes when it’s all snowy or icy. When it’s totally dry I’ll break it up and store it until I can get some suet or lard to mix up with birdseed and stuff and form into cakes for the birds. (there are tons of recipes online if you feed birds)

Made labels again, too. Probably forgot to mention that I spent about 2 hours fixing a photo of a berry until I could use it on a label, lol! I have a really ancient program that I use to make stickers/labels. It doesn’t really like to run in Vista but it does…. and I can import art, but only if it is in bitmap form! I keep using the program, though, because I can move things =exactly= where I want them. I’ve tried to make good labels with other programs but this old program that came with my first Canon printer is the one I use. I use it for my return address labels, stamping swap labels… anytime I need a label or need to tweak things better than I can do with other programs I own. Only bad thing is that it doesn’t do barcodes for shipping labels. Oh well, can’t have everything, right? I even do baggie headers with this program, as a custom sheet.

On to other stuff. Friday I bought a carpet cleaner machine. Mid-range priced Bissell. My little dog Rita is on medication now for congestive heart failure and it makes her pee more. She’s not hitting the potty pads all the time and I was starting to smell it. Can’t really do anything about how much time she’s outside, as I’m gone for over 12 hours a day. I hate wall to wall carpeting… it’s just a big dirt suck and needs constant vacuuming and cleaning, especially if you have pets. I’m not big on house cleaning anyhow… but the carpets here are a disaster. Not all my fault…. gosh knows how old the carpeting is here and no one ever took care of it. But I can’t have the smell of dog pee, so I have to clean the carpeting where Rita has “missed” her pads.

I vacuumed first of course, and we do have a decent vacuum… so good that you can’t get through one room without having to empty it. Like I said, the carpets are dirt sponges. Then I ran the carpet cleaner 3 times over the area I was doing… twice with cleaning solution and once with plain water. It still stinks… and the carpet isn’t really clean yet. But I was worried about putting too much water into it in one day.

I will be doing over probably next weekend… and until I get the smell out… which may be never! But I’ll try, that room is the one designated as the guest room. Oh, and I blocked Rita from going in there, moved her potty pads and put them where she HAS to hit them in a small area blocked around.

More other stuff…. :)

Early today Ron went out to feed the cats and take Rita out. No cats were on the porch, but when they heard the food hit the dishes they came running…. including Wild Thing who came running from the barn with a giant RAT in his mouth! Silly cat! He sets it down so he can eat kibble, and another cat takes it to play. The rat is still very much alive. They kept taking it from each other and Rita finally came up into the area and got very excited. She IS a rat terrier, you know! Ron made her come in the house… she got her treat, and then she kept jumping up to the window to watch the cats and going to the door and whining. So, Ron let her back outside. She ran out and attacked the rat, gave it a shake, dropped it and let the cats have it again. Ron said she yelped, too, so she might have got nipped by the rat and that’s why she dropped it… but she was done, she had her turn at it and came back in the house all proud of herself. As many rats as these cats get down in the barn, well, the barn must be seriously infested. (oh, and Wild Thing is a BOY cat, not usually the best hunters, but all the boys we have now seem to be)

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and I have no plans on watching… I never do. Always miss all the good commercials, lol! Today is also what I think of as the anniversary for Ron and I. We took each other to meet our Mom’s on Superbowl Sunday. Things were great when I met his Mom… Beulah told lots of stories and told me how much happier Ron seemed since he met me. Then we went to my Mom’s house and she had a house full of people drinking and talking politics. When we left there I was thinking… OMG, he’s gonna run away screaming and never want to see me again. But all he said was… “No Bush fans in that house, were there?” And here we are, all these years later… a gazillion cats that I’ve named, a very prolific blackberry bush, the adoption of 3 dogs and the moving of one here, and kids moving in and out. I cook, Ron cleans it up most of the time… and we work different shifts and miss each other a lot. We take time to have fun together… and manage to talk every day. I’m still his computer guru and he’s still my mechanical guy. Long live Ron and Vyx together! :)

This is all for now…

Hugs,
Vyx