sausage gravy kolache

I was introduced to the miraculous stuffed pillow pocket that is kolache last summer. It was my first day at my current job, the office manager walked me to the kitchen for catered breakfast (as is the Friday tradition here), when she inquired innocently enough, "have you ever had kolaches?"

If you're familiar with my personality, you know that hearing about a dish for the first time excites the shit outta me. The Kolache Factory is the only restaurant in STL that makes these, I am told, and my lord, are they on top of their game. I love the sausage gravy and spinach-artichoke ones, as pictured below:

I was so taken with these little bastards, I had to recreate them for my family at home. Here is the result: 

Mine were much larger than the ones from The Kolache Factory, but were amazing in their own right. I searched around for a good sausage gravy kolache recipe, and found this one that looked fit to use. 

The dough is a basic yeast dough: proof yeast in warm water with sugar before, then cream butter, sugar, salt and egg yolks together in a separate bowl before adding the yeast mix, some milk, and some flour. I used my kitchen aid for this, with the dough hook attachment, making short work of my mixing. 

Let the dough rise on your counter for an hour and a half, then divide into balls and rest for ten minutes or so. Make sausage gravy filling: cook sausage, remove meat, add butter and flour, then milk and pepper until thick, then add the sausage to the gravy. I cooked my gravy a little longer to thicken it up before filling the dough with it. 

Take a dough ball in your hand, flatten a bit, scoop some gravy into the center, then form the edges of the dough together, trapping the filling within. Set these seam-side down on a baking sheet, then rest for another half hour or so before baking at 350F for fifteen minutes or so, until golden brown.

Here is my result:

These were not as good as the store-bought ones, I'll openly admit that, which only serves as encouragement to attempt this recipe again and again, adjusting as necessary until I'm wholly satisfied with the result. Definitely give these a try, you can stuff them with damn near anything and this recipe makes a TON. I'm thinking they freeze well, but don't quote me on that until I eat a frozen/reheated one. Try em out!

pita bread and hummus

A friend of mine gifted me The Bread Bible over the holidays, and I couldn't be happier. Bread is an admittedly weak point of mine. As a result, I tend to avoid even the easiest of yeast-flour recipes. There's this monte cristo pull apart bread I still have not made because of my bread baking aversion. It's embarrassing ridiculous.

All of my bread attempts outside of my mother's oatmeal potato rolls (which she lovingly calls bread bread good bread, in preservation of our childhood nickname for it) ended in hard, tasteless failure. So I gave up for a while, going as far as biscuits but no more, too annoyed with the finicky nature of yeasty dough. This book changes that.

I was craving hummus and pita chips, so I cracked the spine on The Bread Bible  in search of a pita recipe. Surely the bible of bread would have one, and sure enough, pitas, right there on page... (peers closely at photo) 224.

As you can see, pitas are unbelievable straightforward, ingredient-wise. I used Gold Medal bread flour (not bargain brand) per the book's recommendation. I was not about to sabotage my bread efforts over a detail as small as the wrong brand of bagged flour, so I made a trip to the grocery store specifically for a bag. Grabbed a bag of oranges on display at the entrance, as well. It's cold and flu season, gotta keep the vitamin c intake as high as possible, and peeling one of these juicy bastards really helps curb my desire to eat jam straight from the jar come midnight.

Dump the flour, water, salt, yeast and olive oil into your stand mixer. No yeast proofing required, just toss it all in there. Do measure right, though. Baking is notoriously unfriendly to eyeball measurements.

Use the paddle attachment at speed 2 to mix up all the ingredients.

Look at that sticky dough.

Switch to the dough hook and increase the speed to 4 for ten minutes. Make sure your stand doesn't fall off your counter as the dough mixes.

Here's the dough after 10 minutes. Look at how smooth and elastic it looks!

Press the dough into an oiled bowl, spritz with oil and cover. Mark the side of your bowl at the level approximately double to your dough, cover, and let it rise. Ideally, you'd stick this in the fridge overnight, pressing down every hour or so. I stuck mine on my oven and it doubled in a couple hours. For depth of flavor, though, let it rise overnight.

Here's the dough doubled in size. Be sure to preheat your oven to 425F an hour before baking the pitas, with a large pan or cast iron resting on the oven rack. Set your rack to the lowest position.

So shiny!

Break the dough into a dozen or so pieces, roll into a circle and flatten into a disc. Place on oiled plastic wrap, and cover with more of the same, then rest at room temp for 20m or so.

Roll out each disc to 1/4'' thickness and set aside. Place each one one on the preheated pan and bake 3m, until puffy. If your pitas don't puff, spritz them with water. Moisture is essential to getting the dough to puff up. a lot of mine did not puff, likely because I rolled them too thin. 

Look at the one that did puff, though! So proud!

The hummus was ridiculously easy, food process a couple cans of chickpeas, then add tahini, roasted garlic, cumin, salt and lemon juice until it tastes just right. You may need to divide your hummus to fit it all into the food processor, that's fine. Add the water in the chickpea cans to the food processor to thin out the mix.

I served the pitas torn up (like chips!) alongside the hummus, some chopped veg and a block of feta. Very tasty. My fella ate his pitas with ricotta and mozzarella, and adored them. These were all gone the next day. "You don't want them getting hard!" the fella says. I'm just happy they all got eaten, and my bad luck streak with bread baking has finally come to an end. Definitely try this on a free afternoon, the hummus takes five minutes max and the pitas are eternally superior to the store-bought ones. Will absolutely be making this again.

Next from The Bread Bible, ricotta loaf! And I didn't mess it up! Stay tuned!

Potato Leek Soup

A buddy of mine made me this soup when I first got into town on my last vacation. "I know you like potatoes." Hey yeah, I totally do! And I had never made potato soup, let alone eaten much of it, so I was more than blown away by this dish. Paired with a big hunk of French bread, this soup is a go-to meal for cold winter nights at home. 

I used leeks in the soup, as I've only heard them references alongside potatoes and had never prepared them. As you can see, this one-pot dish uses a small amount of simple ingredients most cooks keep around the house in their day-to-day. See the food processor in the background? Picked it up specifically for preparation of this soup.

I have a handheld immersion blender, and will be using it next time I make this dish, as pouring cups of scalding veg into and out of my food processor was as painful as it was messy. But that part comes later. First, bacon.

My scissors were in the dishwasher, so I reluctantly used a knife to chop up a couple slices of bacon, which went into the pot first to render its tasty grease. Once browned, the bacon was removed and reserved for garnish.

The smell was incredible. Cooking bacon works like an olfactory magnet, drawing all beings with noses into the affected area to examine the source of attraction, and if lucky/sneaky, to snag a quick sample as my attention is held elsewhere. Sneaky bastards! That goes on after, goddamnit!

Look at how feathery and lovely the inside of the leek is. Beautiful to slice, with a subtle onion scent.

Toss the leek into the pot with the bacon grease, and let it cook until soft, releasing its oniony aroma into the environment. Totally sold on leeks, by the way, and am excited to incorporate them into upcoming recipes.

Carrots and celery come next.

Mix and cook for a bit, until the veg softens up a bit and gets a bit of a sear to it. "Color is flavor," I remember hearing Gordon Ramsay say on one of his shows. Say, not scream, which is likely why I remember him saying it, the delivery came across as downright uncharacteristic of him. I'm loud, too, so he represents me inadvertently, in his own boisterous way.

Save the bits and skins and ends of all the veg you cut for this soup and save them in your freezer. Once full, toss in a pot with a bit of salt and a bunch of water and simmer a couple hours, then strain into jars or ice cube trays for broth, shown above. Easy to do, saves money and reduces waste.

Seasoned with salt and pepper. I peeled my potatoes, for once! Fish prefers skin, I wanted a smoother base, though, so off they went.

Add stock to cover and boil it down. Smelling ridiculous by now...

And voila! Scoop into a food processor, or hit it with a handheld blender, then add some milk, heavy cream, and cheddar. Top with the bacon, more shredded cheddar, a dollop of sour cream and a hunk of bread. The soup is thick like a dip, almost, and packed with flavor, especially pepper. I will make this again, it reminds me of my au gratin potatoes somehow, sans ham though. I bet this would be good with ham chunks. Holy shit, that's a great idea...

xmas dinner

I was all turkied out from Thanksgiving to roast another one nearly a month later, so I asked my father what he'd be into eating on Christmas. "A roast would be nice," he said, much to my immediate relief. Roasts are stupid easy to prepare, and taste incredible.

I bought two 2.5lb beef rump roasts for this, though I hear chuck is much better, which I will try next time. I seasoned them liberally with salt and pepper before searing them in a pan with some oil, so the outside gets nice and crispy.

Once browned, I removed the meat to this roasting pan I picked up second hand earlier in the week, as I roast chicken weekly and could use a dedicated baking vessel for it. I threw some veg into the same pan I seared the meat in, adding a bit of broth to get all the crispy meat bits off the pan (deglaze, it's called).

Once the veg has some color to it, toss it onto the roast with some more stock and a cup of red wine. Liquid should reach halfway up the meat. I threw in some garlic and thyme before putting the lid on. Roast this at 275F for four hours, until the meat flakes apart when applying gentle pressure with a fork. You can reserve the juice and make a gravy, if you'd like, just mix butter+flour in a saucepot and add a couple cups of juice and stir until thick, seasoning to taste.

I made a gooey butter cake on a whim, though I won't be remaking this one, as it needed more filling and more flavor. The dough was more like a pastry than a cake, it called for yeast and a rising time, but was easy enough to throw together. Left MUCH to be desired, however, so I'll need to tweak the recipe a bit before posting it with pride. 

The pecan pie did not disappoint, it set nicely as it cooled, and the crust didn't burn as bad this time. I covered the edge of the crust with foil to ensure it wouldn't turn a deep inedible brown while baking. Pie crust was easy enough to make, and the filling was easy to heat, though make sure it cools down before adding the eggs, or they will scramble and you'll fuck up the texture with bits of cooked egg in every bite. Not appealing, I know.

My father requested brownies with walnuts, and these did not disappoint. I tried a different method, melting butter (not oil) in a bowl resting over a pot of boiling water with the sugar and cocoa before mixing in the eggs and flour. The result was rich, fudgy brownies with a strong chocolate taste and an unbelievable amount of moisture. Sometimes brownies are like mini cakes. These are not those.

All in all, it was a satisfying meal that yielded leftovers to pick at in passing or ladle into soup bowls for a hassle-free lunch at home. I will make this again with the chuck roast and see if I can note any difference. The wine was a great choice, as was the double-boiler brownies. That gooey butter cake was a failure, though, one I will be revisiting in another post sooner or later, where I will claim victory over this finicky STL favorite.

okonomiyaki

I used to be Features editor for my campus newspaper, and of all the stories I covered, the multicultural events were the ones I pursued with the most passion. Last March, I nearly snapped my neck jumping at the chance to cover Foreign Language Week, a few days of on-campus cultural awareness executed primarily through food. The Japanese cooking demo excited me the most, where a smiling faculty member, Hiromi Ishikawa, prepared okonomiyaki for a room packed full of eager student mouths.

Many of the students (overwhelmingly foreign language majors) had eaten okonomiyaki before, some during their stay in the island nation while studying abroad. I watched with childlike fascination as the woman readied her work station with ingredients bearing foreign characters and cartoon mascots.

Hiroma oiled a large flat-top electric griddle, and prepared her pancake batter as it heated to cooking temp. She added fish powder to the batter before pouring a generous amount onto the griddle, topping with a heaping pile of shredded cabbage and bean sprouts.

Once the pancake browned for a few minutes, she used two spatulas to delicately yet deliberately flip the steaming stack over, careful not to disrupt any cabbage or tear the pancake. The cake traps the steam beneath it, effectively cooking the cabbage and sprouts it sits upon.

As the veg steamed, Hiroma added sliced pork and soba noodles to the griddle to cook alongside the pancake stack. She liberally applied okonomo sauce -- a dark and sticky sauce reminiscent of hoison or teriyaki -- to the noodles and pancake.

Once the pork was thoroughly cooked, she mixed it with the noodles, then scooped up the vegetable pancake and carefully placed it on top of the mix.

After a firm press, Hiroma slices the dish into eighths and distributes a slice to the hungry students, who had formed a sizable, salivating queue in front of her table, watching each step as I did.

Once the last piece was served, she wasted no time wiping her griddle clean and applying more oil as before in preparation of another batch to satisfy the culinary curiosity of the student body.

The condiments adjacent to the skillet were liberally applied to each individual slice by students, who covered their samples with Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise, seaweed sprinkles and fish flakes before consuming. The fish flake made for an interesting condiment, as it wriggled on top of the hot food as I ate. The flavors are unique yet familiar, not at all offputting, with that distinctive warm umami taste to it.

I was so impressed with the dish, I recreated it at home the weekend after my article was printed, taking Fish to Global Foods for the first time to acquire niche ingredients to prepare the Japanese pancake/pizza in my own kitchen. The family devoured it.

I never made it again, though I should, as it's so simple and straightforward, and tastes unforgettably delicious. Makes for a quick foreign weeknight dinner, or an impressive presentation on an at-home dinner date. Just look at that tasty pile of awesome. Tell me you don't wanna wrap your mouth around a piece of that. Lie to me, I want you to, though I'd favor your attempt over your dishonesty, if we're being totally open with each other. 

barbecue chicken pizza

I roasted a chicken on Sunday, and had quite a bit left over. Instead of throwing the leftover breast meat into a soup or between some bread slices with some miracle whip for the kid (yes, miracle whip, and no, no bread for me), I peeked into my fridge to survey any other leftovers that needed used up. My eyes wandered over the round tupperware of homemade alfredo sauce from spinach chicken alfredo I made per the kiddo's request late last week when suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, last night's dinner occurred to me:

Barbecue. Chicken. Pizza.

Used the alfredo sauce as a base for this, sprinkled some powdered garlic and onion over it with a few generous shakes of italian seasoning, then added the chicken, which I first shredded with my hands, mushed up some carrots from the roast in there, and added a bunch of bottled barbecue sauce lingering in the back of my pantry. I usually make barbecue sauce myself, which is why the bottled stuff was shoved to the very back, more than likely. Very easy to do. More on that another day, though.




















The alfredo was an easy recipe, just some cream cheese, parmesan, butter and a bit of milk, generously seasoned to taste with garlic and onion powder and some black pepper. The crust was very quick: proof a package of yeast with a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of warm water. Too hot and you'll kill the yeast, too cool and it won't proof. I sprinkled both solids over the water and let it sit as I showered off the gym sweat (made this around 8:30 last night, as soon as I walked in).

Once the yeast was all creamy and foamy, I scraped it into my stand mixer's bowl and added a couple cups of flour, some olive oil, and a little salt, and used my dough hook to mix it up. Too dry? Add more water. Too moist? Add more flour. Mix until it forms a ball, a minute or so, then turn over onto a floured surface and roll out. You can use your hands, but I use my rolling pin for a more evenly flattened dough.

Flatten this dough ring onto a pizza pan, any pan, really, just make sure it's oiled so the crust doesn't stick to it. Top with the sauce, seasonings, chicken and cheese, and bake for 15m or so, until you can smell it and the crust looks nice and brown. Rest for a bit before slicing. I messed up and added the chicken before the cheese, but it turned out nice, though I sliced it too early and disrupted the toppings a bit.























Start to finish, this was an under 30m meal, very easy to throw together and obscenely adaptable. I ate the slice below with a salad and some homemade beet horseradish dressing, then had two more slices before passing out for the evening. It's under 400 calories a slice, if you're counting, and all the ingredients can be easily logged as a recipe in MFP, if you use it. I swear by it. New years always smack of accountability, and what better way to hold yourself to your resolutions than with a food tracking app?

Do yourself a favor and delete Domino's number from your address book. Don't drive to Pizza Hut or Little Caesars, don't order Papa John's online. Stock your cabinets with cheap yet essential staple ingredients, mix them up and shove them in the oven. It's faster, cheaper, and tastier, and is healthier, more often than not. My pizza wasn't greasy at all, or burnt, or cheap-tasting. It owned, and yours will, too.

meatloaf cupcakes

Here is another weeknight dinner recommended to me in passing by a friend of mine. I cherish decisive responses to direct inquiries:

I crave resolute culinary advice like this. Maybe it takes the imaginative burden off of me? The effort of brainstorming a meal? Is it the waitress-turned-short order chef in me, eager to fetch any dish on demand, per request? Is it submissive laziness? Who cares, I got my dinner plans ironed out, baby!

I bought ground beef (gasp!) for my meatloaf. The taste and texture of cow in this dish resists substitution. Can I use pork-turkey? Absolutely, I do it all the time. Should I? Not if I want that nostalgic taste from my youth, no.

When preparing childhood favorites as an adult, I've found preserving the flavor as I remember it is closely tied into enjoyment of the meal in the present. Even the slightest substitution risks a dish tasting off, which kills the impact a childhood dish has. What inspires me to make food from my youth is in preservation and authentic recreation, not in experience-based adaptations.

This outlook turns my recipes into historical documents almost, resisting modern tampering, lest it rob the memory of authenticity. When aptly executed (and tradition heavily considered), that first bite tastes like time travel. In an instant, I am thirteen again, sitting at the dinner table with my sisters, squirting ketchup into my fried potatoes. I didn't even make fried potatoes with these, but my stepfather always accompanied his meatloaf with home fries, that's why I taste them when I bite into his signature dish.

As you can tell, I am a bit of a sentimentalist with regard to my food memories. I want to say my interest in bringing foods from my past to today's dinner table started with my father, who fondly mentioned my mother's green beans when I first moved into town. I recalled them, the tangy-sweet pop they had, but was more struck by the long duration spanning between recollection and consumption. I called my mother later on that week, she retold her preparation method to me, and I made a batch that weekend.

The moment that first saucy green bean bite passed my lips, my eyes began to water. I was eight or nine again, so young! How has it been so long since I have had these! How could such a significant taste escape my memory for such a long time?

Ever since that moment, I began reviewing recipes I was raised on with a bit more reverence and respect. My father, drawing from his own childhood, recommended I make a tunnel of fudge cake for him, a dessert he hadn't tasted since he was sixteen. After much research, I tracked down the recipe for him, nearly broke my arm mixing it (a thick, unmerciful batter), and presented him the cake. "Just like I remember," he said to me, and I became lightheaded with pride. I will post about this cake (if I haven't already). I need to make him one soon. Maybe around Father's Day, or sooner? Not sure yet.

I make the simple, back of the box onion soup mix loaf, a recipe I gleaned from years of watching my stepfather prepare it: beef, egg, breadcrumb, ketchup and a tiny bit of mustard, and a packet of onion soup mix (you can use beef broth and onions, though). I did use half turkey, half-beef, but come on, dude. The price of beef is FUCKED, and mixing pound for pound doesn't disrupt the taste or texture of the beef, believe it or not.























Mix up your meat and seasonings and divide it into a dozen balls. Grease up a muffin tin, preheat your oven to 350F (really, start your recipe this way), then take your pound of pepperjack, the thin brick kind? Slice in half, quarter each half, and third each quarter. This is 24 cubes of cheese. Take two cubes and press into the center of a meat wad, concealing the cheese with the meat. Place this into the muffin tin, and repeat for the other eleven meat wads. Place a pan beneath the muffin tin to catch any cheese before it hits your oven and burns for fucking ever, and bake the mini meatloaves for 20m or so, until the cheese oozes and the beef is set.

As the meat bakes, boil some potatoes, drain them and mash them with salt and pepper, butter and evaporated milk. OH MY GOD EVAP MILK, first used it on my tater mash on Turkey Day and will never go back to milk/potato water, never. Add a little garlic and onion powder, tasting frequently as you stir in your seasonings. You're there when sticking a finger of mash in your mouth makes you recoil with delight, shouting "omg that's it, right there, that's it" as you vigorously shake your head in culinary affirmation. Gotta taste your food as you make it, very important. Just don't make a meal of sampling, small yet frequent mini-bites leads to cleaned plates in the end, I assure you.

Once the meatloaves finish, simply remove from the muffin tin, plate, and fill a plastic bag full of spud and cut off the end. Voila, cheapy piping bag! Start at the outer edge of the loaf, moving towards the center as you apply light pressure to squeeze out the spud. This may take a couple tries to make the potato not resemble a big albino turd resting atop your meat.

My mother's green beans are simple: ketchup, Lowry's seasoning salt (it goes by name where I'm from), garlic and onion powder, and brown sugar. That's it! My daughter loves this meal, though has requested I substitute the cheese for a milder blend, which I naturally and outright refused, per my aforementioned reasoning behind recipes reminiscent of my past. I stuff meat with cheese all the time, sure, but this specific dish comes from my past, and as a result, is a preservational effort, not a progressive one. So sentimental. It's as embarrassing as it is delicious.

EDIT: My friend's meatloaf cupcake: