One Pass, One Fail--Ruhlman Rolls and Monkeybread

Cooking is one of those things where sometimes you just fail.  I've set the frying pan on fire, dropped pan loads of lasagna fresh out of the oven, exploded soup in the blender and all sorts of other entertainingly spectacular (and messy) disasters.  Other times, cooking results in absolute hits where impressed guests clear the dinner platters and ask for the recipe.

This week had both.

First was the monkeybread.  Jo's pics and rave reviews had me drooling over the thought of some gooey yumminess.  The recipe was easy to follow and mixed up easy as could be.

The first and second rise went great.

As I was planning on making them the next morning for breakfast, I put them in the fridge overnight.

This is the monkeybread after the second rise.  Looking perfect and wonderful.






The next morning, unfortunately, didn't go so well. I pulled the bread from the fridge and it looked very sad and deflated.  I popped it into the oven anyway...not one of my better ideas.

Ah well, so it didn't turn out to be the prettiest breakfast in the world. But I will say, it was tasty.  But yeah, pretty much a fail. Oh yeah, I call it Monkeybread instead of Monkeyballs because, after my six-year-old daughter went skipping off to her Catholic school singing "I love Monkeyballs, Monkeyballs" I decided maybe we'd keep it a bit more G-rated.

On the other hand, the buttermilk rolls from Ruhlman were amazing!  Admittedly, I was bit nervous after the Monkeybread incident, but decided to go ahead with them anyway.  OK, so I didn't weigh the flour or be as precise as Ruhlman suggested I be...but I referenced the two other recipes cited and just kind of went with it.  First, happy little dough balls.

Which rose exactly as expected.

Then baked up nice and golden.

And were some of the most tender, delicious rolls I ever ate.  Total win.

So there you have it--sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.  At least with food the results, no matter what they look like, it's almost always delicious.

Things You Don't Do: Explosion Avoided

With my work day, sometimes I can step away from my desk and get dinner started in the early afternoon and others...well, let's say I'm scrambling at 5 or 5:30 trying to get something on the table before BabyBella is hollering that she's starving: now.  Problem is, I rarely have any sorts of heads-up and know when work is going to be crazy so between that and BabyBella's weird food habits (this week she suddenly hates PB&J after asking for it daily for lunch for the past six months...really child?) any sort of pre-planning of meals is out the window. This entire week has been like that--running like the idiomatic chicken at dinnertime.

Side note and warning: cooking is an art form. And like any art, there are proper tools, techniques, and rulesets that should be followed as you exercise your creativity.  Have I mentioned I'm not so good at following rules?

So BabyBella has been asking for roast chicken all week and here I am last night, standing in the middle of my kitchen at 5:45 pm staring dejectedly at my still-mostly-frozen cornish hen.  I had taken it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge overnight, then it sat on the counter all afternoon, but the stupid thing was barely thawed.  I dropped it in a cold water bath to hasten the process and turned to the internet to find a solution (yeah...at this point I should've just ordered a pizza or made something else, but I was on a mission dangit).  Bingo!  I find three recipes (here, here, and here) for deep-friend cornish hen which only takes twelve minutes!   More after the break...

Jumuk Bap

This recipe was something I found on Serious Eats. http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/01/jumuk-bap-korean-rice-balls-beef-pears-seaweed-recipe.html In retrospect it seemed like a great comfort recipe, reminding me of something my mom made when I was a toddler and for my son when he was young. I think every ethnicity has some type of comfort easy to chew type food. Call it baby mush. Not that I remember from my childhood, but when I tasted it, I had a sensory recall. Mom would take lean beef, flank steak or flap meat, or lean pork, using two cleavers she would chop the meat finely and marinate it. While the meat marinated she would prep the vegetable of choice (for my son it was green beans fresh from her garden, or squash from mine) In a 3 or 4 qt pot she would cook rice on the stove top and add the meat and veggie at just the right time to gently steam on top of the rice, the flavor soaking through out the dish. She would make this every day for my son as a lunch. One of my friends loved it when her son would come over for play dates and he would be given a little margarine tub of this concoction to take home for her son's dinner. She had difficulty deciding if she could justify eating it all herself and not sharing.

Then something went wrong.  More after the break.