Saturday, August 27, 2011

An Ode to The Pioneer Woman - Maple Bacon Cinnamon Rolls





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Today Ree Drummond better known as the Pioneer Woman aired her first TV show on the Food Network. I hope you caught it cause it was pretty cute. I've been a huge fan of her website, particularly her recipes, for quite a while know.

My absolute favorite of her recipes is the sticky bun or cinnamon roll recipe. I've made a ton of different variations of the recipe such as chocolate chip cinnamon rolls, caramel apple cinnamon rolls, cinnamon chip rolls, and even a pumpkin cinnamon rolls. But today's was inspired by my recent trip to - I made the ultimate in breakfast cinnamon rolls - the Maple Bacon! And let me tell you it was everything I expected and more. I took Ree's original Maple Cinnamon Roll recipe and tweaked it based various maple bacon cupcake and cinnamon roll recipes on the internet - what did people do before Google?!

Before I get to the recipe I need to share my stellar example of parenting. While I was in the middle of making the cinnamon rolls Naughty 1 came into the kitchen and asked for an apple. I told her I didn't think we had any but she should check. She looked in the fruit basket and said no we didn't have any apples "but look how about I have this instead" holding up a bag of veggie chips. I promptly said "No you can't have chips for breakfast because their not healthy" as I crumble bits of bacon on to dough that has been doused in sugar, butter and bacon fat. That's a parenting win if I've ever heard of one.

Maple Bacon Cinnamon Rolls

Ingredients:
Rolls:
1 recipe of The Pioneer Woman's Sticky Buns dough (note the recipe I linked to make TWO pans so halve it)
1/2 package of bacon cooked well done, SAVE THE GREASE
2 tablespoons butter melted
1/3 cup sugar
A generous sprinkle of cinnamon

Icing
3/4 - 1 cup powdered sugar
1-2 drops of maple extract
2-3 tablespoons of bacon grease
A splash of left over coffee
A splash of milk

Directions:
Make the dough the night before so it can firm up in the refrigerator over night.
The next morning while the bacon is cooking roll out the dough into a large rectangle. Be sure to use enough flour on your surface or you'll have trouble rolling up the dough.
Once the bacon is cooked mix 2-3 tablespoons of bacon grease with the melted butter, reserve another 2-3 tablespoons of grease for the icing. Add 1/8th of a teaspoon of maple extract to the butter grease mixture, then pour and spread evenly over the rolled out dough. Sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon evenly over the dough. Then crumble 2/3rds of the cooked bacon on to the dough.




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Roll up the dough being sure to make a tight roll. Cut and place into a pan cut side down, not too tightly packed.




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Allow the rolls to rise at least 30 minutes but longer if you can wait (we went to the park for 2 hours while they rose.) The picture is post rising! See the bacon pieces!!!




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Bake at 375 degrees for 20-30 minutes.

While the rolls are baking mix all the ingredients for the icing together. Use your judgement - add more milk if it's too thick, more powdered sugar if it's too thin.




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When the rolls are done baking, pour on the icing and topped with the left over bacon. Send Tanya a thank you note.




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These beauties are a perfect blend of sweet and salty and bacon-y goodness.





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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Fried Chicken and More

Unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard of the movie The Help. It came out last week and I was lucky enough to go see it with a few members of my book club. The movie's based on the book of the same name by Kathryn Stockett:


I read this book back in January at the urging of friends. It was wonderful. Some parts were so sad I cried, other parts were so funny I laughed until I cried. The movie was equally as good, whoever did the casting did an excellent job. One of the happier parts of the book/movie was all the amazing southern food, specifically the fried chicken. I've noticed lately that I start craving foods that are mentioned in the books I'm reading: for 2 weeks all I wanted was stew and fresh baked breads and I was reading the Kingdom books, any time I read a Stephanie Plum book I have to have doughnuts, and A Game of Thrones has me dreaming of roasts. Of course books have the opposite effect on me too, Skinny by Diana Spechler had me gagging and skipping meals.

So with the Help so fresh in my mind I decided it was time to cook up some delicious fried chicken and biscuits. In addition to that we had some grilled veggies and potato salad. It was quite the ethnically Southern meal.




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Fried Chicken
Adapted from this recipe

1 whole chicken cut up (we about 10 pieces)
2 cups buttermilk
salt/pepper

1 1/2 cups flour
salt
pepper
garlic powder
paprika
3 T buttermilk

At least 2 hours before you plan to cook the chicken season the pieces liberally with salt and pepper and place in bowl or plastic bag. Cover with the buttermilk. Flip the pieces every so often.




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When you're ready to cook the chicken mix the flour and the seasonings. Sorry I didn't measure but I'd say at least a teaspoon of each. Drizzle the 3 tablespoons of buttermilk over the flour mixture and stir until you get small crumbs. Remove the chicken from the buttermilk and coat in the flour mixture. Place the chicken on a wire rack until you're ready to fry it.




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Fry each piece until done. I'm not being specific here because this is really trial and error and knowing your kitchen equipment. We used an electric wok and vegetable shortening. At 325 degrees each piece was cooked for 10-15 per side. This will also depend on the size of your chicken pieces, we had big chicken pieces.




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Do NOT place the chicken on a paper towel after frying as this will lead to soggy skin. Instead place on a clean wire rack.

And per request my biscuit recipe. Originally I followed this recipe exactly. Its a biscuit in which you actually cut the dough. Every time half of my biscuits would turn out nice a fluffy and light and the other half would turn out flat and dense. One day I accidentally added too much milk and had to "drop" the dough on the cookie sheet. This produced all nice fluffy biscuits but not the pretty shape - as if that matters. So depending on if you want drop or cut biscuits follow the original or add a tablespoon to two more milk and just scoop and drop the dough.




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After consuming way too many biscuits with honey and way too much chicken I grabbed all my library books. They are a sad bunch because right now I'm trying to finish A Game of Thrones and it's taking me forever! When will I get to these? (Especially since I'm tempted to move directly on two the second book in the Song of Ice and Fire series.)




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Sunday, August 14, 2011

Ethnic Food

As you all know I joined a bookclub a few months back. I found this bookclub through meetup.com. Since then I've checked out a couple other groups on meetup that looked interesting to me. The first was mommy group that I joined and quickly unjoined - no point in being part of a group who only meet mid-mornings during the work week. Then I started looking at singles groups. Mostly they were disturbing and depressing but a few gave me a good laugh. I found one that was geared towards 30 somethings looking for a bit of culture. They have an "ethnic food" night every so often where they meet up at a restaurant that boasts ethnic cuisine. This looked interesting to me since we all know how much I LOVE food. However I was sorely disappointed when I saw that their upcoming meeting was to be held at Buca di Peppos. Don't get me wrong I like Buca's well enough, but 1) it's a chain and 2) how can lasagna and spaghetti be considered ethnic?! I didn't want to write these people off entirely though and so a few weeks later I checked back and their next "ethnic night" was Pat's barbecue. Granted southerners are weird and the culture can be bizarre but come on they're part of the United States of America! That's not ethnic!

But really who needs to meet up with strangers for questionably ethnic food when I live with my mom. In the last 2 weeks we've had our own ethnic food nights. The first was Korean night where we had bulgogi (korean bbq), bebimbop (a sort of deconstructed korean fried rice), and kimchi fried rice. It was delicious!




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Then last night we traveled 5,000 miles from Korea to the middle east. My mom made (all from scratch) pita bread, baba ghanoush (a hummus like dip only it's made with eggplant), falafels (meatless meatballs), a cucumber dip, and best of all baklava! It was fan-freaking-tabulous! The next day we went to a middle eastern grocery store and found some delicious freshly made Iraqi flat bread that we ate with a white bean hummus. 




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So honestly people if you're going to go ethnic PLEASE don't call dominio's pizza and think that will cut it. 

Peach White Chocolate Muffins




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They're good that's all you need to know. Go make them...

Ok there's a bit more of a story to these but not much. I was perusing foodgawker.com and came across this recipe. It sounded super yummy and we have a ton of peaches that are not quite sweet enough to eat fresh. But as I wrote down the recipe today I was put off by the "3 large eggs". Really 3 large eggs to less than 2 cups of flour? That would produce a very yellow/eggy batter in my opinion. So I went to my all time favorite best-est ever blueberry muffin recipe. I made a few adjustments and the result was a nice chewy, not too sweet, weirdly colored but oh so delicious muffin. Enjoy.




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Ingredients:
1 1/2 c all purpose flour
3/4 c sugar
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 c applesauce (or 1/3 c oil I think the applesauce was what gave it it's awesome texture though, and made it healthier)
1 large egg
about 1/3 c milk
1 t vanilla
1/2 c white chocolate chips
1 c chopped peaches

Directions:
1.) Mix the dry ingredients together.
2.) In a glass/liquid measuring cup pour in the applesauce or oil. Add the egg, then add the milk until you have 1 cup of liquid. Beat it all together and add the vanilla.
3.) Mix the liquid into the dry ingredients until just combined. Fold in the peaches and white chocolate chips. (I ended up adding a splash more milk because the batter was really thick).
4.) Fill lined cupcake pans 2/3's of the way full. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes for mini-muffins and 20 minutes for regular muffins. I got 6 mini-muffins and 12 regular muffins from this recipe.

Optional glaze. Mix 1/2 c powdered sugar with 1 T of water. Once you take the muffins out of the oven let them cool for a few minutes but not all the way. Dip them in the glaze, top down. Then let them cool all the way on a wire rack over a cookie sheet (easy clean up).