June 17, 2015

Butterscotch Coffee Rounds

June 17, 2015/ Blair Cowan

First of all: I AM ABOUT TO SHARE WITH YOU A RECIPE FOR BREAKFAST FOOD SOAKED IN BUTTER.

Ok, now that we're clear on that, here's the back story. When my parents were first married, long before I was born, they lived in South Georgia while my dad finished his undergrad degree. For awhile, they lived with my great-great-Aunt Gladys, in a wee farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was their time living near her that taught my mom to like tomatoes (warm and fresh from the vine), asparagus, and probably a lot of other Georgia produce.

By the time I was born, Aunt Gladys was quite old (she was, remember, my grandmother's aunt), but we would go up to Georgia to visit her every year or so. Whenever we went, she would set me loose in her yard with a pecan picker-- basically a tiny cage on a stick that you could use to pick up the pecans that fell from the trees without bending over. Her home was shrouded with pecan trees that I remember being taller than an office building, and in the fall the ground underneath them would be thick with nuts. I'd gather shoeboxes full of pecans-- paint buckets full!-- and we'd eat them for snacks all year round, give them as Christmas gifts, and bake all kinds of delicious things with them. (One time, in a story I'm not sure we ever told her, my brother and I were so hungry for pecans while my mom was at the store that we couldn't wait for her to come home and tell us where the nut cracker was, so we spent the afternoon on the kitchen linoleum, shattering pecans with my brother's baseball and gathering up the shell remnants to avoid getting caught.)

Ever since then, in the many years I lived in Georgia, I could never drive past a rural general store promising 'papershell' pecans. I've been duped into buying my fair share of (probably imported) mediocre pecans at exorbitant prices, but I've never tasted pecans as good as the ones that grew on Aunt Gladys' trees.

Gladys probably never knew Eleanor well (linked, as they were, only through Gladys' great-nephew and Eleanor's daughter), but I think that based on the number of recipes featuring incredibly Southern ingredients I've found in the box, it's a safe bet that they probably had a fair amount of overlap in their cooking repertoires-- at least when it comes to desserts.

Now, as I mentioned, these breakfast rolls are soaked in butter, studded with pecans, and coated in a sticky brown sugar glaze. Not sold yet? How about this: it's a one-bowl recipe and you don't even have to use a mixer. You can even make these on a weeknight (I did) and still be in bed by the time the sun sets at 11:30pm.

If you have Georgia pecans, they'll be even better, but don't let it stop you if not: these are decadent and heavenly, and so worth making as a reward for your coworkers for making it through another week of madness. There's nothing particularly 'butterscotch' about them, but they pair great with coffee (or tea!) and I can personally vouch that they are just as good the second day as they were the first.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. Seriously, make these. They taste as good as cinnamon rolls but they're a fraction of the work. These are definitely a luxury breakfast-- not the kind of thing you eat every day, but that makes them even more special when you do make them. Make these and everyone in your house will be grateful.

The recipe:

Pecan Breakfast Rolls

the directions:

Dissolve yeast in hot water.
Add 1 1/3 c flour, sugar, salt, soda, sour cream, and egg.
Mix thoroughly until fairly smooth, but do not overmix.
Stir in remaining flour, mixing until smooth and scraping sides of bowl frequently.
Melt 1/8 c of butter in each of two 8- or 9-inch round cake pans.
Sprinkle brown sugar and pecans evenly over melted butter in each cake pan.
Drop batter in tablespoons evenly over mixture in pans.
Let rise in a warm place for 50 minutes (batter will not rise much).
Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Bake 25-30 minutes until golden brown.
Immediately invert pans onto serving plates then let pans remain a minute so butter drizzles over coffee cakes.
Serve warm, if possible.

Yields 12 rolls.

the ingredients:

1 pkg yeast
¼ c tap water, very hot
2 1/3 c flour, divided
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp baking soda
1 c sour cream
1 egg
¼ c butter, divided
¼ c brown sugar, packed & divided
¼ c pecan halves, divided

June 15, 2015

Jiffy Tuna Supper

June 15, 2015/ Blair Cowan

In Scotland, you live a little bit like bears, all year round. In the winter, you hibernate (because it gets dark at 3pm), and in the summer, you stay up and bask in the sunshine all day (because it stays light until 11pm and gets light again by 3:30am). And so every winter, we (along with everyone else in this country) find ourselves eating dinner at 5:45pm, the minute we get home from work, because our bodies assume it must be at least 9pm, based on how long it's been dark. And in the summer, we routinely find ourselves awake (and convinced we've slept til noon) at 5am, and not eating dinner until we notice our stomachs growling and realise, with surprise, that it is, in fact, 10:45pm.

This is exactly what happened to us last week when I made this meal.

It was a normal Thursday night, we were hanging out doing Thursday night stuff, when suddenly I realised that it was 10pm and, though still light, far beyond a reasonable dinner hour. So I did what any self-respecting American living in Britain would do and got a box of 'Macaroni Cheese' out of the pantry. Over here, there is (bewilderingly) no 'and' in the title-- and while I am the first to admit when Scottish phrases surpass American ones in cuteness (wee), awesomeness (higgledy-piggledy), or weirdness (peely-wally), I think that in the case of macaroni, the 'and' is merited. Without it, I get nervous that it's the noodles that are cheese-flavoured, not the sauce, and that would just be terrible.

Also, Kraft and Velveeta aren't available in Scotland (which is why, when I spent a month in Miami in January, I ate macaroni and cheese approximately three times a week)-- there's just one terrible generic brand that comes with powder cheese that's not very cheesy so if you make it yourself you have to add real cheese in order to make it taste anything besides just yellow. The package, however, is tartan, so at least there's that. But the fact remains: it's a little embarrassing how I keep thinking that the weirdest-sounding recipes in the box will be absolutely disgusting, and then, inevitably, Judson and I end up happily munching away on our dinner... and this latest one is no exception. Neither of us are picky (we're both quite the opposite), and while we've definitely found recipes we wouldn't make again (looking at you, chicken-flavoured-chicken), there haven't really been any that we couldn't at least muddle our way through. (Judson's good humour in this regard is probably a giant reason that this blog still exists, as he's been stuck eating an awful lot of dishes we never would have otherwise tried since I started this project.) I thought for sure this recipe would change our near-perfect track record, though-- its core ingredient, after all, being a box of macaroni and cheese-- but I'll be damned if this wasn't a perfectly fine late-night meal on a cool summer night when we could hear a storm blowing in as we cooked.

Your eggs should be cooked more than these ones, it just turns out I'm SO good at eggs I can't make a dry one even when I'm trying.

Eleanor, who cut corners on dinners but never desserts, would be proud, I think, by our ability to make do with only the barest of pantry essentials on this recipe-- you're almost sure to have everything needed for this recipe already in your pantry, and whatever you're missing is, of course, completely omittable (except for the mac n' cheese, which is kind of the backbone of this recipe-- for better or worse). This is the kind of meal I imagine Eleanor making for her kids after a long day of work at the middle school where she made her career, and while it may not be healthy, it's got a vegetable, a protein, and a starch in it and sometimes, that kind of stodge is all you can ask for.