Garlic-Parmesan Pull-Apart Loaves

Holy Cannoli, Batman! Our little part of the world just brought in about 20 inches of snow. It started late last night and lasted until sundown today. We didn't even bother to open my store, and we spent most of the morning drifting in and out of happy-sleep in bed. It's been a good day. Cold...but good.

Down south we LOOOOOOVE snow. Nothing better than a snow storm. The city stops for (no joke) an inch of snow. Schools are canceled, everyone crashes their car into anything within 20 feet. It's glorious. Up here snow is a hated part of life. You tell someone you're looking forward to the snow and they look at you like you have a severe case of leprosy. That's when they know. They KNOW you're from out of town. Because, apparently, not a single soul in New England can find beauty and joy in snow. At first, I didn't understand this...it's so glorious and amazing and white and fluffy and fun! But you know what isn't fun?? Spending an hour and a half snow blowing and shoveling your driveway, and cleaning off your cars. Turns out that's not that great. Oh it's fine at first... until you get close to 2 feet and the plow truck that comes by throws ALL of the snow from the street onto YOUR side of the road, and creates a four foot blockade that you have to shovel down before you can snow blow. Well... then you start to see how SOME people could start to dislike snow.

Up here, if you have a son, he hates snow, because you make him go out and shovel it at 5 AM so you can get to work. And the wind is blowing, and the snow goes up his nostrils, and his whole body gets crusted with icy bits from the blowing snow/wind. And then he comes back in and no one has made him hot chocolate and there's no fire and he has to go to school and that's where the cycle begins. He hates snow...gradually. I mean...he likes it. He likes to skii and snowboard and sled and have forts and fights, but...mostly he hates it. There's an age where you go from liking snow up here to hating it... and I'd say that's about when you're big enough to start shoveling so your parents can quit doing it.

Me, though? I still love it. I'm making up for lost time. The most snow I had in the south was when I was about... a year old (and somehow had a snow suit, can we talk about how weird that is?) Now I love when it comes. I love when it comes on WEEKDAYS too! Weekends are not so good since it hurts my store's business, but Wednesdays...bring it on!!! So yeah, we spent a good hour and a half outside freezing cold shoveling and cleaning off our cars (only to have them piled with 4 more inches when we were done, might I add) , but we also played in the back yard with our dogs and smiled and laughed and had a fire and hot cocoa and marshmallows and hot soup when we came back in. My love for snow is infectious. Truly.

Ah all that marching around in deep snow made me tired and so I've just got a short recipe for you today. I know I've been talking about bread recently and I HAVE made two successful batches of bread, but this one is a much easier recipe I snagged from Pilsbury.com a while back at Thanksgiving. These make a super quick and DELICIOUS addition to dinner. They go great with pot roasts, stews and soups and just food in general!

Garlic-Parmesan Pull-Apart Loaves

• 1/4 Cup butter, well softened
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 3 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese (freshly grated if you have it)
• 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley (dried will do if necessary)
• 1 can Pilsbury Grands Jr. Golden Layers biscuits

1. Heat oven to 350°F
2. In a small bowl, stir together butter, garlic, cheese, and parsley.
3. Remove biscuits from packaging. On a baking pan WITH SIDES (butter will run everywhere), make 2 loaves of 5 biscuits each. Set the biscuits on their edges, just touching.
4. Split each biscuit horizontally in half, divide butter evenly between biscuits and spread in between the split layers.
5. Reshape loaf
6. Bake 11 to 14 minutes or until loaves are a deep golden brown and thoroughly baked.

The first tester batch I made of these I used dried parsley, minced garlic from a jar, and bagged shredded Parmesan cheese. It was good but the second time I used all fresh ingredients and it was SO much better. I would highly recommend using fresh ingredients. Bon appetite!

Bread: Friend or Foe?

If one thing thwarts me in the kitchen, it's bread. Making bread has long since proven very difficult for me. My yeast is dead, the proofing water is not warm enough, the rising place is too warm, etc...etc...etc. It's not that I've never made a successful roll, but boy 9 times out of 10 breads involving yeast just do NOT like me.

I figured today I'd use my new purple kitchen aid stand mixer to make a bread recipe. I wanted to get that thing into action! I finally settled on a really yummy and simple looking french bread recipe from my Southern Living cookbook. Well turns out it was one of the few recipes that didn't need a dough hook...but still I proceeded.

I pulled out my yeast.... and it had expired. 6 months ago. Dammit. Well usually yeast will keep for quite a while even past the expiration date, but I was not taking chances! I knew bread was a foe and yeast was temperamental with me...so we got in the car and went to the grocery where I snagged some packets of instant yeast as recommended by my recipe.

At home I proofed it - I even used my candy thermometer to make sure the water was the right temperature. That's right. You think I'm joking when I say yeast is out to get me - I'm not! Over Easter I tried to make hot cross buns and made hot cross rocks instead.... Anyway...vendetta aside it was a successful proofing. A nice foamy yeast top. I mixed in my butter and salt and started mixing in my flour. So far, so good!

I decided to do my first rising in the oven, as it is small and I figured would be consistently warm. I had read somewhere a suggestion to crank the oven to 400 for one minute, and then turn it off and put a pan of hot water on the bottom rack. Well I only have one rack (small oven remember?) But I put it on the bottom of the stove and plopped my lovely dough bowl into the oven to rise! I set my timer...and it wasn't rising. It made it about 1/4th bigger than it began. I even let it rise an extra 20 minutes over the recommended.

As it would turn out, I think turning on the oven to warm it was a mistake since the oven is so small, and I think I killed my yeasties. Damn you yeast!!!! After 50 minutes of rising I decided it wasn't going to rise more and I punched it down and re-formed it into rolls for baking. The second rise happens at this point so I repeated the process I had before (keep in mind I didn't know I had killed my yeast with heat and that only a few were probably clinging to dear life in my dough...this came afterwards with research.) Ahhh well I got about another 1/4th rise, gave it an extra 10 minutes...and then decided to go ahead and bake that bitch cause it was MAKIN' ME MAD.

It wasn't really making me mad, just frustrated. Anyway my oven is hot as the dickens at 400 (Baking temp) and the rolls began to instantly brown...heavily. Uhg. I turned it down to 350 and let a little heat out of the oven and sat vigilantly to watch the rolls. Then I did my egg white wash for the lovely shiny crust...and then I watched vigilantly for 5 minutes until it was time to come out.

Well...at first I was extremely disappointed. The rolls were dense and thick, with a heavy yeast flavor. Ah. As I stood comparing my rolls to the rolls in the picture.... Well... let's just say I wasn't pleased. But we snagged them right off the hot pan. They smelled so good. And we ate them with some garlic parsley butter I had whipped up in anticipation for crusty french rolls. And they were good. Really, they were. It was damn sure not french bread, but they were like yummy dinner rolls. The thick yeasty kind that you meant to come out differently.

Disappointment aside, they are good. Aj's had 3 and so have I. We had them with mini mushroom-garlic hamburgers on them. I had one with blueberry Chevre (yum).

I'm sure you saw the picture up there and you said to yourself "that's the failure? Looks pretty good to me." Well thank you. But now I'll show you a picture of what it was SUPPOSED to look like and you can laugh and say "haha... frankenroll!" Jerk.

Well no matter. I have 2 days off in a row pretty soon and I plan to try again! I'd do it tonight but it's 11:19 and ... well... Yeast has bothered me enough for one day... I'll hand out the recipe for this one when I have the means to tell you how to make it come out right...

In A Pickle

Ah, pickles. Anyone who knows me knows that I love them. I love the crunch and I love the salt. I love the variety! Garlicky, sweet, salty, spicy - Any vegetable pickle, you name it and I probably eat it. So when I got the Just Bento cookbook for Christmas from my mom and found out that I could make salty, delicious pickles in five minutes.... well... you can imagine that I was excited.

Speaking of Christmas... I got a lot of great little kitchen things for Christmas, including a kitchen timer shaped like an ice cream cone , a good meat mallet (so I can stop using my rolling pin), a set of plastic matryoshka measuring cups, and two cookbooks. I already have a beautiful set of Matryoshka measuring cups from Anthropologie, but they are ceramic and I'm too afraid to use them for fear of breaking them. The plastic ones are a great substitute and add some flare to cooking! People who know me know I love anything that combines cute and practical.

Well, back to that Just Bento cookbook -- I see on the cover some yummy looking cucumber bits...and I open it up to find that it's a super easy pickle recipe. I'm going to share it with you here, because I've already made 2 batches and Aj and I love them! The Just Bento cookbook is great - it's simple - it's quick- it's practical. It's made for the American kitchen. It doesn't have insane ingredients that you can't find.

Japanese bento is the art of a packed lunch. It's a small, containered lunch that has a lot of color and a lot of love. It's not about what you pack but how you pack it. It's decorative and functional and delicious all at the same time. I took bento a lot when I was in Japan. Naturally, loving to cook and having ready access to easy bento ingredients, I bought my first bento box and so my bento insanity began. I took bento in that bento box 3-4 times a week, and ate at the cafeteria the rest of the time. It was great. Now with a full time job, it's good to have something fun to look forward to in the middle of the day.

While this recipe is great for bento, if you love pickles, you have to try it even if you don't have any clue what a bento is :)

Instant Salted Cucumber Pickles

• 1 English cucumber, sliced into thin rounds. (These are small, thin cucumbers. I found them pre-packaged in the produce section.)
  
• 1/2 Tsp sea salt (or slightly more if you like it salty)
• Squeeze lemon juice (I genuinely recommend using a real lemon, and not lemon juice from the bottle)

1. In a bowl, sprinkle the salt over the cucumber and massage well with your hands until the cucumber kind of goes limp.
2. Let rest 5-10 minutes.
3. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. Let sit for a few minutes.
   
4. Squeeze out most of the excess juices and then pack into a tupperware. Keeps for about 3-4 days in the fridge.