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December 2016

Viewing posts from December , 2016

28 Dec 2016

Weekend Cooking: Extra-Buttery Dinner Rolls

By Faizah

Lately I’ve been trying to make my own roti paung, and I searched through the net for different ideas to experiment with.  I still haven’t found the right recipe so far, but during one of my experiments I accidentally created these buttery dinner rolls which, I daresay, tasted better than the Parker House Rolls I made previously.  They’re a lot simpler to make, too.  Even though I considered the experiment a failure in my quest for the perfect roti paung recipe, I still think this recipe was worth keeping.

The addition of cream in this recipe was purely by chance, actually.  I made Cream of Wild Mushroom Soup recently, and had some cream leftover and needed to do something with it.  In any case, I think this is the reason why the rolls turned out so moist.

The next time I make these rolls, I plan to activate the yeast first, the same way I did with the Parker House Rolls.  I’ll also try kneading by hand to see if it makes any difference.  Sometimes using the mixer really just doesn’t cut it.

Serve these rolls warm, on their own or with jam.

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25 Dec 2016

GobbleFest 2016: Pull-apart Stuffing Rolls

By Faizah

When having roast turkey, one usually would have it with stuffing.  Even though I butterfly my turkey and therefore there’s nothing I can stuff my stuffing into, I usually would still make stuffing on the side.  So far I haven’t found any stuffing recipe that Rudy actually liked, and dinner wouldn’t be complete without dinner rolls, so I decided to combine the two and make these stuffing-esque dinner rolls, based on the recipe by Serious Eats.

I hit a stumbling block when making this.  The store-bought pizza dough I had turned out to be pre-cooked, not raw, and was therefore unusable.  I had to make the dough from scratch and lost quite a bit of prep time, but all turned out well in the end.  The 9 by 13-inch tray was just slightly too big for the rolls even after they doubled in size, so I think I’ll use my round pie dish next time and let the rolls expand all the way to the edges.  Even though the rolls came out a bit too brown this time, Rudy and I really liked the flavor, and I couldn’t stop eating them!

I’ll definitely make this again, and try to get it right.

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25 Dec 2016

GobbleFest 2016: Mashed Sweet Potatoes

By Faizah

December 24th, 7 p.m. Malaysian time.  I can’t believe a year went by so fast.  Once again it’s GobbleFest, and Rudy and I decided to have the Round Knights over for dinner.  We bought our turkey early this year, and managed to get a 6-kilogram turkey for RM29.99/kg from Cold Storage.  Yay! Then we saw them selling at RM24.99/kg in Tesco…

Aaanyway, our menu for this year:

Roast Turkey (updated) | Cream of Wild Mushroom Soup | Emerilized Green Bean Casserole (updated) | Mashed Sweet Potatoes | Pull-apart Stuffing Rolls

I’ve made mashed sweet potatoes before, as an accompaniment to my Honey-butter Baked Chicken.  This version by Serious Eats uses minimal ingredients in comparison, and is intended to let the sweet potatoes speak for themselves.  This, however, means that the sweet potatoes you use must be top grade stuff, and I’m not sure how good mine were.  Substituting golden syrup for the maple syrup probably didn’t help either.  I also couldn’t get the potatoes to be as fluffy, and I wonder if it was due to the dryness of the potatoes, or I just didn’t beat them enough.  In the end the potatoes were still quite nice, but not exactly spectacular in my opinion.  I’ll make this again if I don’t want to use too many ingredients.

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