Recipes

Got any good ones? I mean any good, badly written ones. Permit me to elaborate.

My m-i-l is known for her delicious potato rolls. She’s always baking five dozen or so at a time for church event or family get-together, no matter who’s the host. Could you bring your potato rolls, sandwiches for fifty guests? Please?

She first showed me a recipe for these refrigerator rolls a couple of decades ago. It gave a few steps then said “go to church. When you get back, they should be ready.” What?

She just shared with me the original, published in a local paper decades earlier. Not only does it call for shortening twice, the second time it appeared it was in place of sugar. Then it goes like this: “Work it up good and put in refrigerator to rise until light. Put a wet cloth over it, then work down, and fix out anyway you want to cook it.” Huh? To someone who’s never made bread before, it must be like reading ancient Greek.

I had the luxury of putting myself through cooking school so I know a lot about how food works. I’ve never been much of a baker because my mother and sisters were, and that’s more of a science with exact rules to make something rise, for instance. Many of my recipes are familial lore, oft-practiced creations or seat-of-the-pants creations. I’m loath to write them in a recipe for a friend because it’s so difficult to put a feel (of dough) or taste in writing and make it come through understandably.

When a recipe is printed in a newspaper, however, one would think it would have some vetting, editing for clarity’s sake at least. So, I’m not speaking to you as a recipe-writing expert. Here I’m just trying to show how not to write a recipe.

Yesterday, at an alt-family Thanksiving my m-i-l was hand-writing her potato roll recipe for yet another guest, a wife of twenty years who has raised a family and still doesn’t know how to cook, especially making bread, so the recipe had to be exact. Two recipes, one with ingredients and the other with each detailed step described. I felt for her, knowing that no matter what the recipient did with the recipe, it would never have the je ne sais crois that M’s has for the past fifty-plus years she’s been making them. I’ve been cooking with her for twenty years and I’d never try to make her potato rolls.

This weekend we tried my seat-of-the-pants version of a breakfast bread. One recipe of M’s potato rolls, rolled out and spread with my cranberry sauce (that I also used for my creation of a Cranberry-Orange Trifle for the gang), then rolled up, made into a ring and split partway into 1″ slices before baking. It was gorgeous and very tasty, topped with a sheen of leftover buttercream. Yum.

My version, a riff on a published lemon blueberry trifle, mixes lemon-orange (7-Up) cake, orange syrup, cranberry sauce (homemade), homemade orange curd and whipped cream/orange curd mix garnished with candied orange slices. It was a hit. No, I’m not giving you the recipe. A fun thing to do, however, when you know the basics for a simple English trifle, is riffing on flavors. My most recent starts with a Ghirardelli brownie mix substituting espresso for the water. sliced in half crosswise. Layer brownie half in a trifle bowl (c’mon, it’s the easiest dessert and looks difficult and presents magnificently so spend $30 for a proper trifle bowl), spread on raspberry pie filling from a can, add a layer of homemade whipped cream and repeat. Top the upper layer of whipped cream with cocoa powder or chocolate curls. If the brownie mix is stale, no problem, brush some simple syrup on each layer before the berries and cream. Voila. Looks and tastes great.

It was a good weekend until my transmission failed on the trip home As Scarlett O’Hara would say, “tomorrow is another day.” Indeed. Cheers and submit Oopsie Recipes to me if you wish. Dee