Operation Meltdown Is Under Way...

Have you ever misread your own directions/instructions that you have handwritten? This could be a recipe you have used plenty of times (or maybe not) that has always worked out beautifully and bingo, you take a wrong turn and end up with either 1 of three things. 1) You end up with a pleasant mistake. These are called happy mistakes because your recipe has been improved or changed in a way that changed the whole molecular structure of the dish into something amazing, a discovery even. Case in point, I read once about a lady that baked the most wonderful cranberry muffins. She had made them a million times over and next thing you know, she took a wrong turn and forgot to put the sugar in her mix/batter first and ended up throwing it in at the last minute to try and salvage the batter. What happened next was pretty neat. She ended up with a yummier muffin that was moist on the inside and a little bit crisp (caramelized) on the outside. A textural change that worked out for the better and now she makes them the new way all the time.

2) You end up with something salvageable and close to your original recipe (enough that your family knows what it is and what you were trying to accomplish). Something edible but not quite up to your standards. This is called a salvageable mistake. Something you will not toss into the bin.

3) You end up with a total utter flop that you wouldn't even attempt to salvage and toss it into the bin, and afterward slowly slide your body down the side of the kitchen wall until you are sitting on the floor with your hands on your head and tears in your eyes. Every Chef/cook has done it (I think) well, I hope because I would feel pretty stupid if only a few people made culinary mistakes and that I would have to include Myself in that list of 'only a few people'.
However, I really don't think that is the case. Everyone has had some kind of flub up. The thing to remember is to pick yourself back up and try again. It is painful when it was a recipe that took all day to make or when you saved up all your pennies to purchase expensive ingredients to use in the flub up. Yep, that sure does hurt. Sometimes though, even if your mistake took you all day to make you might end up at the very least not too far in the gutter if say, you were making something like I made yesterday. Bread. Flour isn't too very expensive and yeast won't break your bank either. A bit of sugar, salt, butter and milk won't necessarily bankrupt you but still, wasted money is wasted money and nobody likes that. NOBODY. That is unless you are Mr. Rockefeller and have so much money that you light your cigars with hundred dollar bills that is.

Sigh, if only. Nope, just a poor dying servant slave to food and the pure joy of cooking/creating and painting/decorating plates. Sauces, this is something I really want to specialize in and I need to start experimenting. There is nothing like a lovely sauce to go over/on a dish or to simply garnish/decorate a lovely plate of food. Quite elegant indeed. You sort of feel like Picasso with a paint brush in hand and the pallet being that of your plate. In any event, there I go again, going off the beaten path and totally talking about something completely different than what I set out to do in the first place.

I just know this blog is nothing but a giant black hole in the Universe. Nobody reads it (maybe My Dad does) I hope he does as I have showed it to him before. Nobody comments on it. Maybe I can just treat this like My daily diary and include other things about My not so interesting life along with My recipes and food pictorials? That way, when I do expire, My husband and or any friends I may have had will have something to read and remember Me by.

Back to My flop/bread mistake of yesterday. Dang nab it! It took Me so long to go through the making of the yeast roll process and I flubbed it up with ONE yes (that is all it takes is one) mistake. I also noticed that a tool I use for kneading My dough has mysteriously gone missing in action. It was a red sturdy plastic scraper (like the paint scraper tools/metal scraper tools) that you could buy at a hardware store, only this one was made specifically for the kitchen to be used in a variety of applications (including that of kneading dough). Gone. Maybe someone could donate one to Me (hint hint) and send it over through the mail if they have a spare one that they aren't using. Okay, enough shameful begging for now right? Right.

Okay, I promise this time that I am going to tell you about My bread debacle of yesterday. I added DOUBLE the amount of melted butter that I needed for the recipe. Of course, I found this out after I had already mixed all the wet ingredients together and more than half of the flour. This means: I needed more milk, another egg perhaps, more salt, more sugar, more more more of everything as the extra butter totally screwed Me up big time. The dough did rise and I did have a good amount of dough (more dough than normal) so I could at least make the rolls larger. I figured if I did that, I could compensate for them not being as 'heavy' as they should have been. Heavy isn't even the right word. SOLID and firm would be more adequate words to describe how the dough should have been. Nope, when I started kneading it again and pinching off the pieces to make the rolls I knew something was wrong. I punched down the dough as normal but noticed that it wasn't as silky and heavy as that of My previous roll dough. I tried My best to make nice spheres and even knead each one of those to make it silky smooth and perfectly round but it had these little pot marks on them. I stuffed each muffin tin with a large amount of dough and let them rise for the second time. Again, they looked almost perfect. Almost as they should have been but they just weren't 'as solid' as they should have been. When lifting up the muffin pans they weren't as heavy or hard to lift as before. You get the gist of it.

Well, I baked them and the aroma was lovely just as you would expect from a perfect yeast roll. I peeked inside the oven and they were browning nicely, just as you would expect them to. Some were so large that the dough was hanging over parts of the muffin pans. After taking them out of the oven and putting them onto a cooling rack and took one out of the tin and onto a plate to cool more quickly so I could give it a taste. I immediately noticed the pot marks on the tops of the rolls (not smooth and perfect as they should have looked). I also immediately noticed that these rolls were light and sort of 'fluffy'. They weren't the solid stick to your ribs type rolls as I had made before. :-(

Still, they tasted just fine and We took them to a dinner party that friends of ours were throwing to serve along with the dinner they made and everyone loved them. They were actually thrilled that I brought them because they had forgotten to buy bread to serve along with the meal and now that problem was solved. My friend Julies son seemed to like them and wanted to put a piece of cheese inside one (Velveeta cheese) as I recall. Sounded good to Me too. I love hot cheese sandwiches or any type of cheese filled bread/dough. There used to be this lovely little place down the road from where We live called 'The Kolache Factory' that had tons of lovely filled breads. My Father and I simply loved that place and would frequent it quite often and bring home boxes of their wonderful Kolache's (or would that be Kolachies)? In any event, as it were, I would love to make some of those sometime soon. It is so hot as of late though that heating up the oven (even the new energy efficient oven I purchased) can be brutal so I don't do it very often at all. The range is fine and doesn't make the house heat up like that of the lower level part of the oven. You can put any type of filling from savory to sweet inside Kolaches. It was a nice chewy yeast dough like the one I use for My rolls. I especially liked the broccoli cheese and rice filled ones along with the spicy Jalapeno sausage filled Kolaches. Ham and cheese filled Kolaches were always a big winner with Me as well. I tried a few sweet ones a few times in the AM but this was because they were on special or something and not because I went there for anything sweet in nature. NOW, the breakfast Kolaches were super awesome. Egg and cheese filled, omelet filled with green peppers. YUM. I also liked the steak and cheese filled ones and of course, the Barbecue filled Kolaches.

I am hungry again. Back to the rolls. For some reason I cannot keep My mind on one topic at a time today. We ate them and they were good but they weren't 'excellent'. Time to get back on the horse again I suppose.

Until then, keep living, laughing, loving and most of all, cooking!
As always, The Gothic Gourmet.