Recipes: Breads And Pasta

I don't know why nobody ever told me that Alfredo sauce was easy to make, but I've wasted far too much of my life buying the glass jars of commercially made pasta sauce when a great alfredo is almost as easy.

Just last week, we were running a little short in the food department, so it came time to try and scrounge what we could out of what was sitting around in the house. To that end, I collected the following ingredients:

• 2 cans evaporated milk (heavy cream would be better...)
• 1/8 lb. Parmigiano-Reggiano, shredded
• Lots of black pepper
• 1 stick butter
• Garlic salt
• 1 bag egg noodles

I melted the butter while the pasta started boiling. Once completely melted, I added the milk and whisked it all together, then whisked in the pepper and garlic salt. After the egg noodles were done, I drained them thoroughly, put them in the milk mixture, and began to fold in the cheese.

That's it. The best recipes are disgustingly simple. Although, after I ate the noodles, I felt like my heart was going to explode. This is some heavy stuff, friends. Don't get addicted.

About this time last year I started looking for the best biscuit recipe I could find. The first thing that had to be determined was, "What makes a great biscuit?".

My Criteria:

• Must not be dry (I hate eating a biscuit that makes me choke and I have a drink with each bite)
• A mild buttery taste to it
• A tender sort of fluffy finished product (not overly thick and dense)

I spent many months trying every biscuit recipe I could get my hands on. Most of them were all to dry. One day Tele decided he wanted to make Biscuits and Gravy. When he was searching for a gravy recipe he found one that also included a biscuit recipe. We used both recipes and both were great. The biscuit recipe became my favorite, for a limited time.

The search for the best biscuit recipe finally came to an end the day I realized that there was a biscuit recipe on the back of my SaCo Buttermilk Powder container. I am so happy with this recipe. I have been using this recipe for a few months now and I don't even look at other biscuit recipes anymore.

The SaCo Buttermilk Biscuits meet all of my requirements. They are moist, tender and have a wonderful buttery taste.

I try to limit the amount of hydrogenated oils I cook with so I have been substituting butter for the shortening called for. Either way the biscuits come out wonderful.

In an attempt to adhere to my one-post-a-day-who-cares-about- writers-block year of 2008 rule, I bring you, some random concoction. Also known as: "Somewhat healthy thing I thought up that probably isnt healthy at all"

Pasta in browned butter sauce

I will finish this article tonight after I actually make the dish.

One evening at 10pm I decided that I just had to make the Pop-Tarts I had seen good 'ol AB make on Good Eats. This is a super easy recipe and comes out tasting great.

To see the recipe in its original form please refer to The Food Network.

Here is how I work the recipe:

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt

Add the flour, baking powder and salt to a medium bowl. Stir with a fork (or if you would like you may sift them together).

Next add in 6 tablespoons shortening and combine until crumbly (as shown in photo). Now stir in 3/4 cup milk.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until elastic.

Note: I find that this dough works best when it has just left the sticky stage. So, you may need to add in an extra 1/4 - 1/2 cup flour during the kneading process.

Divide the dough into two equal halves.

Roll each half into a 12 inch by 12 inch square. Cut each square into 12 rectangles measuring 3 inches by 4 inches.

Bottoms: Place about 1 tablespoon of your favorite jam, jelly, or preserves into the center of half of the rectangles.

Tops: With a fork dock the other half of the rectangles.

Dip your finger or pastry brush in water and run it around the edge of the bottom. Now add the top gently pushing out any air from the center. Use a fork to gently seal all the way around the edge.

Place the tarts on a baking sheet and bake in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. These tarts do not brown on the top.

Eat them hot from the oven or allow to cool and place into an airtight container. If you want a hot one just pop it in the toaster!

The kids and I have been talking about different flavors. All the early batches were strawberry, but today we used a greek jam that was sour cherry. I would like to try putting a bit of cream cheese inside with the jelly.

I did try out a frosting recipe, but the thought of Pop-Tart Blow-Torches has scared me away from pre-frosting the tarts. I would like to come up with a sweetened cream cheese frosting that I can keep in the freezer and then just squeeze on to the tarts after they have been toasted. Something like what Pillsbury does with their Toaster Strudels.

This recipe really is super simple and the kids all love them. I love them because they taste way better then a box of Pop-Tarts and they have none of the additives. The most unhealthy part would be the shortening, but Crisco just made that trans-fat free. If that is still a concern though you could try substituting Smart Balance Shortening. If you do try that let me know how it works out. I haven't bought a can yet, but it has been tempting especially with how often I have been making these tarts.

One final note. If you looked at the original recipe you may have noted that AB uses an egg wash around the edges of the tarts to seal them. After making the recipe several times and having to discard the remaining egg wash I decided that I wanted to find an alternative. I have found that simply using water is enough of sealant. No more wasted eggs!

I was feeling relatively lazy, but wanted to whip up something for dinner, so here's the not-quite carbonara I pulled out:

• 1 lb angel-hair pasta
• 5-6 strips of bacon
• 1/4 stick butter
• 1 bulb garlic
• 1/2 cup grated romano
• 1 egg
• olive oil

While boiling the pasta, I baked the garlic at 350 degrees and shredded the bacon into small pieces. Then, I put the bacon and butter on medium-high heat until crispy. After taking the garlic out and mashing it, I mixed it, the butter and bacon, the egg (beaten heavily), and the romano into the pasta. Pretty fantastic stuff, and less work than it seems from the description.

Note that the egg is not cooked before adding, which probably freaks out the salmonella gang. I think it got pretty well cooked by the hot pasta and butter, and none of us got sick, so that's par for the course.

Sure, I could run to the store and grab some hamburger buns. But, you know that would involve getting in a van that is about 130 degrees inside, driving down the street, going in a store, waiting in line to pay, climbing back into the 130 degree van, and driving home. Ugg, to much time and money for some hamburger buns. Those thoughts led to "let's make some from scratch".

I found a recipe that looked simple enough and yet yummy. We had all the ingredients needed so I went for it. Homemade hamburger buns here we come!

Tele asked for some small square or rectangle buns like those you get with a White Castle. So I made some round and some square per his request.

When the buns first came out of the oven they had a regular yeast roll taste to them. Also, they were looking a little dry on the top so I took a stick of butter and rubbed it over the top of the buns to give them a little shine and butter flavor. After cooling they were a nice dense hamburger bun that could soak up lots of the BBQ sauce Tele made. I will certainly be making these in the future.

Why buy buns when you can make them better yourself?

You must have rolls at Thanksgiving. Now you could get some Brown & Serve Rolls from your local market, but wouldn't they taste so much better if they were homemade? from scratch? Sure they would. What is that you say..."I have no time to make rolls. I have all these other dishes to make". Take a deep breath. Calm down. And follow my lead.

The solution is a yeast dough that you make the night before and put into the fridge. Yes, you heard right. The mixing of the dough is done the day before.

So are you with me now? You can do this. There is lots of time between now and Thanksgiving. Mix up a batch and give dinner an extra special touch this week. You deserve some fresh baked dinner rolls.

I am presenting two buttery roll options for you two choose from. Each dough can be made a day ahead. One can just be plopped into muffin tins and baked, the other needs a little shaping and then rise time.

Spoon Rolls

Southern Spoon Rolls are super easy to make. I always make them with salted butter (never margarine). The recipe link calls for self rising flour, but you need not go and purchase it. For each cup of self rising flour needed use: 1 cup of all purpose flour, 1 tsp baking powder and 1 /2 tsp salt. You can make this dough the day you are going to use it if you wish or you can make it ahead of time as the dough will last for up to one week in the fridge.

Buttery Rolls

• 1 package (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water (110 to 115 degrees)
• 1 cup butter, melted
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4-4 1/2 cups all purpose flour

In a small bowl dissolve the yeast in warm water. In a mixing bowl, combine the butter and sugar. Add in the eggs, salt and yeast mixture. Stir in enough flour until the dough leaves the sides of the bowl and is soft (do not knead). Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Punch the dough down. Turn onto a floured surface and divide in half (follow shaping procedure for each half or refrigerate the 2nd half for later use).

For CloverLeaf Rolls (This is easy to do and they look so nice. This is my favorite shape for this recipe.): Roll into a long rope about 1 1/2 inches thick. Fold into thirds and cut, leaving you w/three equal length ropes. Divide each rope into 12 equal size pieces (36 total pieces). Roll each piece into a ball. Drop 3 balls into each cup of a greased muffin tin.

For Crescent Rolls: Roll into a 12 inch circle. Cut into 12 wedges. Roll up the wedges from the wide and and place with the pointed end down on a greased baking sheet. Curve the ends to form crescents.

Cover and let rise in a warm place for about 1 1/2 hours or until doubled. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Note: I have found that this recipe is best when used within 3 days of making the dough. On the forth day it is just not as flavorful. (example:If you make the dough on Monday, finish it up on Wednesday.)

So it all began something like this via instant message...
June 26th

• Tele: So Savory wants to do Asian night
• me: Asian night? What would we be eating on Asian night?
• Tele: I don't know. He just wanted Asian food.
• me: I don't know any Asian dishes though.
• Tele: Stickybuns!
• me: Stickybuns are Asian? (Thinking to myself-"A stickybun is something warm and gooey with cinnamon and sometimes covered in a thick frosting and nuts. You get that at a bakery. This is so not Asian. What is my husband speaking of?")
• Tele:Char Siu Bao
• me: Stickybuns & porkbuns are so not the same thing.
• Tele: sticky pork buns
  

June 27th

• Savory: Has Tele talked you into making Cha Siu Bao for Sunday yet?
• me: He sent me a recipe link yesterday. I didn't realize that was his way of asking me to make. Then he came home and said that you were both thinking of asking me to make the pork buns.
• Savory: lol

And so be began my journey. I have never eaten a pork bun. I have never seen a pork bun. I have never been to Dim Sum. So I had to do research. No time to go eat this Asain food so the research must all be done on the internet and via further chats with Tele and Savory. I found that Savory prefered his steamed with a little honey baked in. Tele prefered his baked. Well alright, we are off to a start. Baked, I can do baked (I worked at a pretzel shop for 3 years). Steamed, I do not know a thing about steaming. (Tele apparantly did. Whew, one less thing I have to worry about. He can teach me on cooking day.)

I ended up combining 3 seperate recipes to make my one dish. I found a food blog with a recipe that I felt would work well, but I needed a dough that could be seamed and baked. I was not sure that her dough recipe would work well both ways however she had other elements that I would definately use. Her site was extremely detailed and that was a bonus (remember I do not know what this item is that I am making). I do believe that she made her life a little more complicated than necessary by cutting out individual little wax paper squares to set the buns on, I chose to just set mine on one large wax paper sheet. I used her site for the details and the filling as well as how to bake the Pork Buns. She didn't have a recipe for how to roast the meat either as she bought hers pre-roasted. The next order of business was to find a versatile dough recipe that would work well both steamed and baked. I found just such a dough recipe. This recipe ended up being an extreamly simple recipe to make. The dough did work well both steamed and baked. The dough was sweet to the smell, but not to the taste. I then found the Chinese barbeque pork recipe on the same site as the dough.

This dish came out very well. Tele and Savory seemed to enjoy them very much. I absolutely loved them. Both the steamed ones and the baked ones were excellent. My 1 year old baby loved the roasted meat and was eating as I was shredding it! There were a lot of seperate steps to get the dish done, but over all it was actually all very simple to do. You must think ahead however as the meat needs to marinate over night first, then get roasted, cool, shredded and then heated on the stove with the rest of the filling ingredients. I felt like the dish was well worth the work put into it and am glad that these two silly guys talked me into making it.

Because this was all a bit confusing, here is a list of the links I used for the different parts.

• Roasted Meat I did not use any variations, just the Basic Steps 1-5 replacing 6 with shredding the meat rather than cutting into bite sized pieces. I did end up using Pork Tenderloin because it was all my Sam's Club had available 30 minutes before closing.
• Dough and How to Steam Buns
• Meat Filling and How to Bake Buns

You already know that Tele owned up to cheating by making Egg Drop Soup (Thank you, it was excellent!). But what you didn't know is that Savory made Stir Fry (Also, thank you. It was tasty). So now what I want to know is how did I end up cooking for 2 days while they ended up cooking for 15 minutes! I think I shall be much more suspicious next time they "assign" me a dish to cook.

While I'm still at the point where every bechamel has a fifty percent chance of turning into gruel, I can admit with some well-deserved selling-out shame that I can do French Toast just as well as anyone else.

With indeterminate origins shrouded in the mists of time, French Toast (known colloquially in some American regions as 'Fried Eggy Bread', to the sounds of every dead Frenchman spinning violently in his grave) is known by several names throughout the world, including Bombay Toast, arme riddere ('poor knights'), and the term en francais, pain perdu.

Regardless of its origin, I got up this morning determined to eat something other than cereal or pork chops in hot sauce, so I started poking through the pantry looking for things that I might have, at one point in time, heard of as a potential ingredient in french toast. Unfortunately, her Tartiness immediately sensed the twinging of directionless fumbling resonating from deep within my Y chromosome, and hauled out her favorite french toast recipe.

As I reluctantly set down the Clabber Girl (we might have had an interesting breakfast indeed) and perused the recipe, my inherent fiddliness blossomed into full-on transmogrification mode. I mean, the recipe she gave me had six ingredients. Six! I believe in simplicity for simplicity's sake as much as the next man, but this morning I was feeling much more Da Vinci than Kazimir Malevich, and ornery besides. I glanced longingly at the Clabber Girl. Her disturbingly large Victorian eyes seemed to be pleading with me to ignore the pragmatic whims of my wife and instead follow her down a psychedelic yellow brick road of chaos, pestilence, and creative breads.

Unfortunately, looking at the bread and thinking 'yellow brick' inspired in me an unsettling urge to return to simplicity.

In a Pyrex baking dish, I added the two eggs, mixed in brown sugar (take that, recipe), and mixed in the rest of the ingredients in old-school eyeballing fashion. Since it was French toast that I was making, I used half a stick of butter and made sure to scorch each piece slightly.

The result was delicious- but heavy. Brown sugar and butter with a particularly absorbent bread do indeed yellow bricks make. Though they were pleasantly crunchy in a waffle-like fashion, they weren't too sweet, and didn't mind being dusted with confectioner's sugar (I think it was confectioners sugar, but where did little miss Clabber go?), nor did they mind a little pure maple in the tradition of the great French Toast Eating Lumberjacks that used their mighty axes to pave the way to our modern landscape of McDonalds and california rolls. I only managed to eat one piece, but the other slices quickly disappeared due to guerilla action from the other family members. Let freedom ring.

I was going to make pancakes for breakfast this morning, but that plan was foiled. Then I remembered this muffin recipe I had seen in Family Fun Magazine for French Breakfast Muffins. (You know my tendency towards desserts and sweets!) They have this great section called “Let's Cook” where they give you recipes that are simple enough to cook with your kids. Tele is much more patient with LittleRoq than I when it comes to cooking in the kitchen, but this was one recipe I thought I could tackle with him. Sure enough LittleRoq and I survived the experience with him doing most of the mixing and then spooning into the muffin stone (Pampered Chef of course). These muffins have a mild sweetness to them so everyone including Tele (who doesn't have much of a sweet tooth) enjoyed them. In searching Google I found that there are many similar recipes available out there so you should be able to find one to suite your fancy.


I think this would be a great recipe to use as a mix from your pantry. Just decide how many batches you would like to have on hand. Mix up the dry ingredients according to the directions and place in a zip-top baggie. Voila! Your very own muffin mix with no preservatives.