Christie's Yeast Rolls

This recipe makes 30 yeast rolls. I am sort of semi-famous for my yeast rolls. They make appearances at all the big family dinners and on my friend's tables at the holidays. I get many compliments on them and many requests for them. They are easy to make, once you learn how, and a really inexpensive way to win friends and influence people! They are buttery and will melt in your mouth. I made 60 dozen of these last year for Christmas presents for family and friends. Bake them up, let them cool on a rack and then put a dozen in gallon zipper bags to give for presents any time of year. You will make many people happy!

Ingredients:
(I premeasure everything, then you don't have to think about whether you have already put something in or left it out!)

2 packages active dry yeast or 2 teaspoons instant yeast.
1 1/2 cups warm milk (115 degrees)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 1/4 teaspoons salt
3 large eggs (room temperature)
6 to 6 1/2 cups all-purpose flour or bread flour, plus more for the work surface

If you use packaged active dry yeast, warm 1/4 cup water to 115 degrees and sprinkle yeast on top of the water and let bloom for about 5 minutes. It will turn foamy.

If you use instant yeast (like Red Star Yeast for bread machines) you can just add the two teaspoons to the dry ingredients. This is the method I use.

Wisk yeast, 6 cups of the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl and set aside.
Warm milk in the microwave until it is near 115 degrees. Use an instant read thermometer to check. Put butter in with the milk and melt at the same time. Whisk in TWO eggs one at a time into the liquid ingredients. If dough is still thin after mixing and not coming together, add more flour 2 tablespoons at a time until it resembles shaggy bark.

Using a stand mixer with the paddle blade, put in 1/3 of the liquid mixture and then about 1/3 of dry mixture. Begin mixing on a very low speed or you will have a face and kitchen covered with flour! Continue mixing in thirds until all of the liquid and dry ingredients have been used. If you have a large stand mixer you can knead the dough in the mixer, using the dough hook,  for 5 minutes or until the dough is smooth and shiny. If you don't have a stand mixer, you can do all the mixing by hand and then flour a clean work surface and dump the dough onto the work surface. Knead until dough is smooth and elastic.

Spray a large tub or bowl with Pam and place dough in the bowl, turning once so that the dough ball is greased lightly. Cover with plastic wrap, sprayed with Pam, over the bowl and place in a warm spot to rise until dough doubles in size, (about 1 hour and 15 minutes.)

Butter two large rimmed cookie sheets or three 13 X 9 pans. Divide dough in half, then divide each half into 15 pieces. Shape each roll into a disk with your fingertips on the counter, then shape into balls by turning edges under over and over, then cupping in one hand and rotating the top hand in a circle. You will get perfectly round rolls this way. Place rolls in greased pans and cover with sprayed plastic wrap, and let stand for about another 1 hour and 15 minutes or until doubled in size.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees with racks in the upper third and lower third of the oven. In a small bowl, beat remaining egg with 1 tablespoon of water until well blended. Brush onto the tops of the rolls. Bake for about 20 minutes, rotating pans back to front and top to bottom halfway through baking time. When finished baking, brush with melted butter. If using immediately, place in a towel lined basket and cover with a towel to keep warm. If using later, let cool on wire racks and place in gallon zipper bags. Enjoy!

My first memory is this, "Worms, worms." I was less than three years old and I wet my bed. My mother heard me crying and cleaned me up and put me in bed with my oldest brother, Everett. There was hole in his quilt and he had twirled the filling into strands that felt like worms. I guess he would play with the filling to comfort himself. It's strange where you find comfort when you are little and chaos reigns in your world. Laying in my brother's lap twirling the quilt worms was a comfort when my daddy was yelling at my mother to shut up that squalling child and come back to bed. My mother was gentle with me and paid him no attention, but my world and my brothers was not easy.

My mother and daddy had met in post-war Los Angeles when my mother was living with her sister and daddy was there too. They parked cars in a parking lot. I have a picture of Mother and Daddy outside my aunt's house and they are smiling and laughing. I never knew anything about their courtship. I have three pictures of my mother on her wedding day: two in my grandmother's front yard and one of Mother and Daddy in the house. They are beautiful and happy. I don't know when things went wrong, but they did.

My two brothers, Everett and Terry, were eleven months apart. I didn't come along until seven years later so we have very different memories being almost a generation apart. Both my parents came from big families, eleven children were in mother's family and twelve in my daddy's. They both grew up on farms. Mother in DeKalb County in Alabama and daddy in Egypt, Arkansas.

My grandaddy Everett was a master carpenter, a farmer, and at one time ran a dairy in Lebanon. Mother was born in their house in Fort Payne at the foot of Pine Ridge. Sometime in the 1930s, grandaddy bought the property in Rainsville that will forever be what we all think of as home. The house is built of rocks that he and my mother snaked out of Town Creek with a yoke of oxen. Many of the rocks are three or four feet tall and at least two feet wide. The walls are nearly a foot thick and rock inside and out. The floor is a little wavy as my grandaddy built his house on a rock that he dug out from the side of a small hill. There was a three foot walk around the house and on the back of the house the ground was about six feet high. The roof was flat concrete 4 inches thick. They say my grandaddy used to grow flowers on the roof. By the time I came along it had a gable roof on top and the screened porch had been taken in for another room forever called the front porch.

My Grandmother and Grandaddy Hufstedler lived in Pocahontas, Arkansas when they married and at some point moved to Egypt. There, they raised their children and share-cropped cotton. They lived in an old farmhouse and I don't remember being there as a child until I was fourteen and went to visit with Everett when my nephew was born.

Mother and Daddy divorced when I was three. Mother and us kids moved into Grandmother Everett's house and lived there until I was 12. The house wasn't very big...it had three small bedrooms and Everett and Terry slept in the attic. The house was warm in the winter from the fireplace and the big gas heater on the front porch, and cool in the summer. Those thick rock walls were all the insulation it needed, but Terry and Everett were not inside those thick walls. I'm sure they were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. There wasn't insulation in the attic at all.

I didn't know until after my mother died when I was 19 that mother and daddy were married twice. They got divorced and daddy went back to Egypt to live with his parents. My mother was "sick" sometimes and my uncles and grandmother took care of us kids. After my daddy left to go back to Arkansas, I never saw him again until he came to school to see us kids when I was in the fifth grade. He wanted us to go "for a ride" with him and I wouldn't go. I said if I didn't go home after school, mother would worry about us. I saw Everett and Terry ride off with him and I went back to Mrs. Armstrong's fifth grade class. That was the last time we saw Everett and Terry for several days. My mother was frantic when I told her they were with Daddy. Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard called the sheriff and swore out a warrant for Daddy's arrest. They found him and my brothers at a friend of daddy's in Henagar. That was the last time I saw my daddy until I was fourteen.

So...in my really formative years I never really knew my daddy. I was priveleged to have my Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard though. I never knew my mother, brothers, and I were poor until after I grew up. I didn't have all I ever wanted but I had everything I ever needed. Most of all I had the love of a big old family. Uncle Guice and Uncle Barnard never married. They took care of us and my grandmother. Uncle Barnard is 87 and still works several days a week. He still is visiting the sick and the poor and taking care of others. I am so blessed to have him.

Thanks to my family I am still...Living Life.

Cleaning

My mother was a world champion cleaning freak! There was never a Friday that didn't meet its match in my mother. As soon as she got home from work, she lit into housework like a fire consuming dessicated wood. We had to clean a room of windows every week. Dust would fly and I would think I was going to die from sneezing. Every week we would clean one room deeply and give all the others a once-over. Every night I had to miss Jeopardy to wash the dishes. I could hear it, but never got to see it because the dishes had to be done before we could sit down in the living room to watch anything!

When Nicole was a baby, you could have eaten off my floors. I mopped my kitchen and bathroom every night before I went to bed. Every other day, I vacuumed the floors, dusted imaginary dust, and cleaned the table tops of Nicole's little handprints. When she was eight months old and I was going crazy from being in the house with a little one all day, I went to work at the Boy's Club. I had a 9-6 job with an hour for lunch everyday, a $20,000 a year job and life was good. I also hired my first housekeeper. I thought I was in high cotton. Not only did my housekeeper clean the house, she did the laundry for Freddy and me and did the ironing.

I was such a good "ironer" that my mother hired me out to iron when I was fourteen! I began ironing when I was 5 or 6 years old and distinctly remember being in our house in La Puente, California and mother sending me to the basement to iron her nurses uniform. I came back up the stairs with it and she made me go back and "lick that calf over." It took three times before it was to her satisfaction, but I never had to iron something more than once ever again. There was an ad in the paper on Sand Mountain by husband and wife chiropracters and they needed someone to iron their sheets for their exam tables. I did them so well that they started bringing me their lab coats and then eventually all their clothes. I had liked ironing up until then. We didn't have air conditioning and it was terrible that summer ironing in 120 degree heat in our house! When school started back to my relief Mother told them they'd have to find somebody else. I still never slept on a sheet that wasn't ironed until I was somewhere in my twenties. On occasion I will still iron the part of the sheet that turns back on my bed. Now I iron on Sunday mornings before church and only what Freddy and I need to wear to church.

Now I have the cadillac of irons...a Rowenta steam generator. It is something my mother could have only dreamed of. I will never miss that old G.E. iron my mother had that weighed several pounds and sputtered water on the clothes! Then irons became unbelievably lightweight. They didn't get hot enough to take the wrinkles out of the clothes and I hated them. When Nicole was little and I started smocking I had to have a better iron and became a convert of Rowenta. I used several irons until I burned them flat out. I am on my second steam generator. There is nothing like a well ironed shirt. When I hang a freshly ironed shirt, it looks so crisp, I'm sure my mother would be proud.

Since I started school, I guess I have developed a laissez-faire sort of attitude about housework. Things get piled up before you know it and then you just start overlooking all you can't get to. Of course it doesn't help that I have two packrats in the house. Nicole finds it impossible to throw almost anything away. Freddy is only just a little bit better. My mother was a firm believer in giving things away that we didn't use and every six months, right before Christmas and right after school was out for the summer, we cleaned out closets, drawers, and kitchen cabinets. If we had not used or worn something for six months it was going to the Upper Sand Mountain Thrift Store because that was how mother could help those less fortunate than us and things never piled up around our house. Now it sometimes hurts my heart how my house looks, but today after my last final, I took down the valences and the sheers and cleaned the windows, washed the sheers, scrubbed the valences and I am a happy housewife!


A friend of mine on Facebook said he just looked somewhere else when he saw something dirty at his house and he was about out of places to look! Well, my house had gotten in that condition too...I told him to just do one project a day and in no time his house would be clean. So, between now and starting back to school in January, I am going to get cleaned up! Today, the living and dining room windows, tomorrow the world!

I will get back into my dear departed mother's good graces since I know she is looking down on me and saying, "Sis, it's time to get started!" So...here we go! Today's project is putting up the Christmas decorations and then thoroughly vacuuming the house. The day after that there will be another project beckoning but I will start one day at a time and living life...

Short Ribs

This is one of my favorite recipes for short ribs. Sometimes it is hard to find short ribs but today I was fortunate at Wal-Mart and found extra meaty back ribs. Back ribs and short ribs are the same thing. It is so cold and supposed to be colder tomorrow, so I thought that tonight would be a good time to make this meal for my family.

12 beef short ribs
Kosher Salt and ground black pepper
1/4 cup good olive oil
1 1/2 cups or 2 large onions chopped
4 cups large diced celery
3 carrots peeled and diced
1 small bulb of fennel, fronds, stems and core removed and diced
1 leek, remove outer leaves, cut in half and dice, place in bowl of water, swish around and then scoop out of water and place in colander.
3 large garlic cloves, minced or use garlic press
1 small can tomato paste
3 cups burgundy or other dry red wine
Fresh rosemary sprigs
Fresh thyme sprigs
6 cups beef stock or two 26 oz. Swanson Beef Stock
2 Tablespoons dark brown sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the short ribs on a parchment lined half sheet pan. Salt and pepper ribs and place in oven for 15 minutes. Remove ribs from the oven and reduce heat to 300 degrees.

While the short ribs are in the oven, prepare the vegetables and heat the oil in a large dutch oven and add the onions, celery, carrots, fennel, and leek and cook over medium low heat until translucent. Pour the 3 cups of wine and the tomato paste over the vegetables and cook on high heat until the wine reduces at least by half. I cook until the heat concentrates the wine and the vegetables are almost solid looking again, about 20 minutes. Add 1 tablespoon salt and 1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper. Tie 2 rosemary springs and about the same amount of thyme into a bundle and the brown sugar and add to the pot. Give everything a good stir.

Place the roasted short ribs in the pot in two layers and add the beef stock and add to the pot. Pour in the beef stock all at once and heat until the contents boil again. Cover the pot and place in the preheated oven. Bake for two hours or until the meat is tender. You do not look in the pot during this time, it will do everything for you all by itself.

After 2 hours carefully remove ribs with tongs and set aside. Take out the bundle of rosemary and thyme and discard. Skim excess fat from the top of the pot with a large spoon. Cook the vegetables and sauce over medium heat for 20 minutes, until reduced again. Put the ribs back into the pot and heat through. Serve with the vegetables and and sauce. The meat may fall off the bones!

I like to serve these ribs with wild rice. To cook the rice. Measure out about 1 1/2 cups of rice. Place 1 1/4 cups of chicken stock into a small pot and bring to a boil. Add the rice and stir well. Cover the pot and reduce heat to low. Do not remove cover for 15 minutes. Remove cover after 15 minutes and fluff rice with a fork.

This will serve 4-6 people depending on whether they eat 2 or three ribs.

Excuses, Excuses

I have a pretty short fuse for excuses. I don't like them and I try not to use them except for extreme emergencies. I have even been put out a little when other bloggers I follow don't post often enough to satisfy my need for distraction when I should be studying but I need a little break. That being said I have noticed that I haven't blogged since October 16th and that is really just inexcusable! All I have to offer is excuses and they aren't very good ones.

I was studying through the valley of the shadow of Dr. Knauss for Nutrition.
I was writing my articles for the Six Mile Post the college newspaper that I am a staff writer for.
I have been writing columns for the afore said Six Mile Post.
I have been rehearsing for the Christmas cantata at church.
I have just been a lazy snake soaking in the sun...
You get the picture...too many excuses and not enough effort to just sit down and write about what I'm thinking about! Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do it.

So, what do I want to write about? Barbara Walter's 10 Most Fascinating People seemed to have shorter segments this year and her two toned hair was not her best look. The white on top just looked like her hairdresser forgot to color her gray hair. Her hair would surely be all white at her age and I bet ABC paid the hairdresser a lot of money for that dreadful look. Speaking of white hair, Lady Gaga looked pretty cool and Kate Gosslyn's hair looked so good without the little spikey things sticking up in the back.

Until I started this little rant I think that's enough to break the drought. Merry Christmas all!