Misadventures with Yeast and Foolproof Monkey Bread

I mentioned in my February 6th post that I would share some photos of random recipes I’ve been making while taking a break from blogging about family recipes.

I attempted to make these Baker’s Dozen yeast rolls—TWICE, from a recipe I found in a Taste of Home magazine publication.

When my dough didn’t rise, I thought my yeast from the jar had gone bad, so I bought new yeast in packets and attempted the recipe again. The dough still didn’t rise—and this in spite of the fact that I used a candy thermometer to measure the water temperature before I added the yeast to it to make sure the water was neither too cold or too hot, something I’ve been told is a necessity when working with yeast. I am starting to wonder if I am capable of making anything requiring yeast, as I previously attempted a bread recipe and failed at that recipe more than once, as well (then, I thought it was the recipe that was bad, not the yeast).

I had someone mention to me that I should buy active dry yeast at a natural food store, like WholeFoods, instead of the instant yeast I’ve been buying at regular grocery stores.

Maybe I just don’t have the yeast gene, though? I’m not ready to completely throw in the towel yet, but I am ready to put aside my roll and bread-making attempts for the time being.

However, my craving for something starchy and doughy and loaded with carbs still hadn’t went away, so I decided to make what most people refer to as Monkey Bread using a foolproof ingredient—frozen dinner rolls. I knew I couldn’t mess those up!

Monkey Bread Recipe

from http://allrecipes.com/recipe/quick-and-easy-monkey-bread/ (I actually cut this recipe in half.)

Ingredients:
12 frozen Rhodes rolls
½ cup brown sugar
½ package butterscotch cook and serve dry pudding mix (not instant)
1/8 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ stick butter
1 cup chopped (shelled) pistachios or walnuts or pecans

Instructions:
At least five hours before you want to start baking these (most people prepare these right before they go to bed for the following morning), grease the sides of a Bundt pan (I use an olive oil mister, but a product like Pam No-Stick Cooking Spray or smearing butter on the sides of the pan with a paper towel would work, as well).

You can either buy your nuts already chopped or if you have whole nuts a nut chopper is a great way to quickly chop them. Another great way to chop whole nuts is to put them in a heavy-duty plastic, freezer bag and take a few whacks at them with a hammer on a sturdy surface—this will probably get rid of any pent-up aggression you may have too!

Sprinkle your nuts evenly around the bottom of the pan, and then place your frozen rolls in a circle evenly around the pan, on top of the nuts.

Mix the brown sugar and butterscotch pudding mix together and sprinkle evenly over the frozen rolls. Then, mix the white sugar and cinnamon together and sprinkle evenly on top of the brown sugar and pudding mix. Melt your butter (45-60 seconds in the microwave) and pour evenly over the top. Cover loosely with wax paper.

Overnight, the rolls will rise—in my case, they rose like crazy sticking to and pushing upwards the wax paper I used to loosely cover the pan, showing I’m not a complete jinx to yeast, I guess.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove and toss the wax paper. Place the Bundt pan on a cookie sheet (to catch any potential overflow and keep it from spilling into your oven) and bake for 30 minutes. Remove pan from over, flip Bundt pan over onto a large platter so nuts will be on top, serve warm, and watch these delicious rolls disappear before your eyes!

Everything but the Kitchen Sink Chili

Chili is one of those items I can’t recall ever using a recipe for, because every time I make it, I use whatever ingredients I have on hand. Ground beef is usually a given, as are canned tomatoes, but everything else varies. Sometimes I add beans, sometimes I don’t. When I was little, I didn’t like beans at all and used to pick them out of my mom’s chili. I thought I was just different but have found out all these years later that actually chili WITHOUT beans may be more true to chili’s origin than chili WITH beans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_con_carne). Regardless, I do include beans about half the time now when I make chili, just because I know beans are so good for a person, but, if I’m being honest, I still prefer my chili without beans.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink Chili

Ingredients:

1 pound ground beef cooked, fat drained.
1 can Ro-Tel Diced Tomatoes and Green Chilies
1 small can Tomato Sauce
½ white or yellow onion chopped
1 cup celery chopped
1 cup mixed red, yellow, and red peppers, chopped
1 bag frozen corn and black bean vegetable blend
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon Sloppy Joe Seasoning blend (optional)

For the toppings:
Sour Cream
Chili Cheese Fritos
Sharp Shredded Cheddar Cheese
Whatever topping you like!

Instructions:
Add chopped onions to hamburger and cook over medium heat until hamburger is no longer pink. Drain off any excess fat.

Take cooked hamburger and all other ingredients listed above (except for toppings) and combine in crockpot. Stir well, then cover and cook until heated through 4-6 hours on low.

Scoop chili into bowls and decorate with toppings of your choice. I like sour cream in dollops or in the shape of a heart, lots of cheddar cheese, and Chili Cheese Fritos!

Chili Cheese Fritos as a chili topping

Pinterest and Other Distractions

Marketing 101 – you really shouldn’t ignore your blog. Yet I’ve done just that. I will try to be better. It really is a commitment, though, isn’t it, hard to fit in around a full-time job and a personal life? I’ve still been cooking on a regular basis (I guess one has to if one doesn’t want to starve), I just haven’t been writing about it.

I have deviated from family recipe making again (just for the time being), and have been busy making recipes I’ve either thrown together myself or have found on the Internet, or more specifically, on Pinterest. I’m proof that sometimes people actually make the recipes they pin (and you thought it was just an urban legend)! Most recently, I made these “Cruncher Bars”, for which the full recipe can be found here www.twirlandtaste.com/2011/01/crunchers-addictive-chocolate-brown.html. Oh, are they yummy—I’m having a hard time sharing these—I want to eat them all myself. In my defense, I only had enough ingredients to make a half recipe—does that make me sound less like Miss Piggy?

The next big family recipe I bought all the ingredients for and that I plan to tackle is something my maternal grandma and mom made every year called fruit soup. It’s a little putzy, which is why I haven’t tackled it yet (other than to buy the ingredients for it).

Until I do that, in my next few blog entries, I will share some of the photos of items I have been making over the last month and a half.

In the meantime, one of the things that has kept me busy is that I have been scanning old family photos onto my laptop, so that both my brother and I will have digital copies of all of our parents’ photos. Actually, I’ve been scanning in all my parents’ film negatives, to be more exact. And because I don’t have a lightbox to see what is on the negatives, I either let what is on them be a surprise and don’t know what is on each film strip until after I’ve scanned it into my computer, or, I try to get an idea of what is on the film by using the flashlight feature on my iPhone and holding the negative over my iPhone’s screen. That, at least, gives me a rough idea before I hit scan of if I am going to get an image of a person or a tree, for instance. It’s a fun surprise, most of the time though, to see the detail of the photo emerge, once the negative has been scanned in. I was delighted to run across several of these family food-related photos, as I’ve been scanning, that I thought I would share.

Since my late March birthday would fall close to Easter some years, my paternal Grandma Mabel often made me an Easter-themed birthday cake. This one has little pastel-colored coconut nests with jelly bean eggs on top. That's me (looking feverish and like I am just getting over the flu) in the blue robe, being held by my dad, while my Grandpa Claus looks on as Grandma presents me with my cake. Isn't the cake fabulous? I just love it!

 

This photo is charming for so many reasons--the backyard patio picnic by the grill and swing set--what a slice of Americana. From the left is my Grandpa Claus, my mom, me, and my Grandma Mabel. Isn't Grandma Mabel's dress fabulous? She made all her own clothes. I just love how colorfully vibrant and mod that dress is.

For some reason, I never got an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas, even though I swear I asked for one every year until I was something like 18-years-old! However, for some other odd reason, I was allowed to buy the miniature cakes, cookies, and brownies that were designed to be baked in the Easy Bake oven. I just had to bake them in the regular oven. I still remember thinking those tiny little desserts were delectably good. Hopefully my palate has become a bit more refined since those days.

 

Here is my beautiful mom, Beata, holding one of the apple pies I had just made. One year, the apple tree my parents had planted on their property really went into hyper-drive and produced a lot of apples. I must have made an apple pie every weekend for eight weeks straight that year. It was a recipe from a Taste of Home cookbook that is packed away in my storage unit at the moment, but some day, I will find it again and share it. I don't know if it was the recipe or the hand-picked apples, though, that made it so good.