Sunday, April 8, 2012

And since we're on the subject...

Speaking of food, I may not be able to make biscuits as well as a two year old, but tonight's traditional Easter dinner of Mexican breakfast proved that I have mastered the art of the homemade flour tortilla.

When Sister Lal in Fiji was teaching me how to roll out the dough for roti, which is incredibly similar to flour tortillas, I begged her to tell me how she got hers to bubble up so beautifully. She said it would come with practice. There were no tips or tricks. And she was right. It was beautifully bubbly tonight.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Let's play a game

Ok, people, let's play a game. I'm often curious about what people have for dinner. It seems so impossible to plan for. I'm 27 years old and still can't plan more than a few hours ahead about what we're going to eat. I am always grasping at straws trying to come up with stuff. My parents have received many a last minute, "if you had 20 mintues to make dinner, what would you make?" call and even more (only slightly) less last minute "what are you guys having for dinner?" calls. So I'm going to just list the dinner menu from the Wong house this last week and I'm hoping you'll do the same in the comments. If you served cereal, no shame, people! Don't let that stop you from commenting. I've still got freezer meals people kindly prepared for me (having a baby and what not.) Oh, and Kevin cooks too. That helps. I'm really hoping to get some "as easy as cereal" suggestions from this so when my meatloaf supply runs out there will be other options. All right, this week we had:

Sunday: Hamburgers
Monday: Curried okra and roti
Wednesday: Meat loaf, baked zuccini, and baked sweet potato fries
Thursday: (crock pot) Pork Roast with potatoes, carrots, onions, and apples with a side of biscuits
Friday: Whole-wheat waffles with strawberry syrup, nutella, peanut butter, and bacon (P.S. Sesika, we desperately need your recipe. These waffles were limp and floppy.)
Saturday: Pork Chops with fried apples, rice, and green beans

There's usually more rice in a typical Wong week, but I've been playing with freshly ground whole wheat flour lately. Thus all of the made from flour stuff. In writing this I discovered it's pretty hard to remember a whole week of meals. Feel free to leave blanks in your week, or if you're one of those fabulously organized, plan-ahead people you can give us your plans for this coming week.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Biscuits

My grandmother once told me that her mother made the most delicious biscuits, but that no one ever asked her how it was done until it was too late. My grandmother regretted her lack of biscuit know-how for the rest of her life.

Today I made biscuits. I come from a house where all of the biscuits I can recall were of the Pillsbury variety. My perfect biscuit heritage is 4 generations away, after all. I have attempted to make biscuits from scratch on a few occasions. I've never been terribly fond of them. (I wasn't terribly fond of the from refrigerated dough version either.) But today there were a few in the batch that I really, really enjoyed. They were the ones that Alena and Reasor made from the scraps. For some reason I was under the impression that you don't want to play too much with biscuit dough so I rolled it out, cut a dozen and then the the kids play with the rest and a couple of cookie cutters. They made about 6 more from what was left. They were lumpy and I worried they were too thick, but I just baked them anyway. When they all came out of the oven it was fairly obvious that I had rolled mine too thin, but the difference between mine and theirs was more than that. Theirs were flakier, mine were heavier, theirs were more delicious. And now you're waiting for the punchline, but there isn't one. I want input on this. Was I wrong about whether on not one should handle biscuit dough too much? Was it just the thickness? (It wasn't. I'm almost positive it was more than that.) Was it the love and joy the children put into theirs? How can I recreate their delicious biscuits?