a la mama

After an extended period of zero interest in making edible things in the kitchen, my cooking mojo came back just as Mercury emerged from retrograde (and what a doozie that was). I made a sort of freehand pea soup, Galician Garbanzo soup (Mollie Katzen recipe), and West African Peanut Chicken. And then on the sweet side: Cathe Olson’s applesauce cake recently featured on Mothering.com, peanut butter biscuits for the doggies, and CINNAMON ROLLS. The cinnamon roll recipe came from the new Sur La Table cookbook Baking Kids Love by Cindy Mushet.

I have had fear of Things Not Rising for over ten years, ever since I geared up to make bread and ended up with a flat glob (bum packet of yeast). I felt emboldened by the fact that it was a book geared toward kids. Even still, Sunday, everyone dealt with my low-level anxiety.

“Is it foaming? Is it foamy? Is it as foamy as the foam in this photograph?” It was. It worked! The dough (same recipe as bread dough in that book) rose, and rose again in the form of beautiful cinnamon and brown sugar stuffed pinwheels. I gave the kids chunks of dough to play with and knead. They were so psyched.

There was waiting involved–the first rise, and then the second one, and then the actual baking period…and an abbreviated cooling period. Luckily we were futzing around the house anyway…football on in one bedroom, Honorée and her friend playing dress-up in another one, Nathaniel on the couch with Laura and me, checking out a pictorial history of Paris. He was delighted to see an illustration of someone going to the bathroom in a more than semi-public bath, back in the Middle Ages. He is such a fan of peeing al fresco.

We passed on the powdered sugar glaze…the rolls were just perfect the way they were. So now I’m thinking about making the shepherd’s bread my mom used to make when I was little…and pizza dough…and I want to experiment with gluten-free bread doughs that supposedly approach the yumminess of oft-problematic wheat.

Speaking of childhood recipes, my friend Ziggie asked me if I had a pot roast recipe this morning, and I do. It’s my Grandma Marie’s pot roast recipe:

http://www.mothering.com/recipes/grandma-maries-pot-roast

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under mama sadhana, the flavor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.