Orange date rolls hot out of the oven

Last week I got some dates in my LOVE Delivery box. I don’t really like dates plain very much, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them. Then, over the weekend, I started thumbing through the bread recipes in How to Cook Everything and came across a recipe for orange date rolls — a variation on sweet rolls and cinnamon rolls.

I’ve never made them from scratch before, but the recipe didn’t seem too difficult. The dough came together easily — a mix of flour, sugar, salt, butter, milk and yeast. I let it rise for about 2 hours before rolling it out into a square. I then brushed on butter, and covered it with a half a cup of brown sugar, 6 or 6 chopped up dates and the the chopped up zest of a large orange. I rolled up the rectangle, then cut it into slices about an inch and a half wide.

These looked a little small right after they were rolled

I was worried that they were a bit small and loose, and the recipe said to put the rolls in individual muffin tins — and I don’t have a muffin tin — so I just put them in a cake pan and hoped they would rise.

Thankfully they did rise -- this is just before I put them in the oven

Thankfully, after an hour they did, and I made a glaze with orange juice and sugar to pour over the rolls before I put them in the oven. After baking for about 30 minutes at 400 degrees, they smelled incredible and puffed up even more. They were slightly shiny from the glaze, and when I started pulling them apart, they came out easily and were soft and fluffy and sweet, but not overly so.

The finished product -- they turned out perfectly!

I’m not normally a big fan of cinnamon rolls and the only time I ever tried Pillsbury orange rolls I didn’t like them very much, but these were incredible. I guess I’d just never had something like this fresh out of the oven. The orange and date flavors weren’t overpowering, and they blended together well. They also looked quite good. They weren’t the same at all after they had cooled. Though I ate one for breakfast the next morning, it wasn’t anywhere near as soft or tasty as it was straight from the oven.

I don’t typically make a lot of sweets, but there were totally worth it — and even though they take 3 to 4 hours to make, I would definitely try to make them for a breakfast/brunch (though I think I’d let the dough do its first rise in the fridge overnight so it would take a bit less time).

Click to view a larger version of the comparison

Last week’s Photoshop class assignment was to recreate the look of a Planet Terror poster using our own images and textures. I chose a photo I took of Guiselle where she looks sort of scared, and painted on some eye makeup and made her lips a deeper red-orange so she looked like she was wearing lipstick. I couldn’t quite recreate the drippy mascara as well as I wanted, so I left it out. I also changed the color of her shirt from purple to green, and added a lot of highlights and shadows to make the lighting feel more like the original.

Click to view an even larger view of Guiselle's Planet Terror moment

For the background, I blurred some crumpled paper to give the yellow some texture, and added scratches to the edges. I also added the paper folds, which was a pretty complicated process since I wanted to match the original colors in the folds, as well as the original feel, and I wasn’t working with the best photo of folds to begin with since my paper was just white and it has quite a lot of shadow on it.

I played with the text a bit, though just used the Title and production company logos from the original.

Click to view a larger version of Evan's texture moment

As this was texture week, we also had to create a bunch of original textures from photos/scans and use them in an image. I made of of Evan, using many textures, from tree bark to crumpled aluminum foil to ripped paper in the background, and dirt and more marked up tree bark on top of him to make him look grittier.

The original poster we had to match

I created another image of Evan since I felt like him looking away and sitting would lend to a similar feel to the poster. I used a landscape photo I took in Budapest and added a number of layers of cracks, dirt and noise to give it a grittier texture. Also, the color changed slightly when I saved Evan’s portrait for web, so it doesn’t look quite as close a match as it really is.

My color-matched portrait of Evan

I used a portrait I created of Evan — I started playing around with it for the Editorial Portrait assignment. And added various halftone masks, layers and effects.

The original portrait I created by compositing Evan, a Goose and a background that I took in Cambridge while punting

A very simple, even halftone pattern with no variation in size in 50% gray -- you can barely see it in this small version, it's just giving the photo its softness

This is sort of an old-timey look, and it was a required matched look for the assignment

Here I deconstructed the color halftone into layers of red, green and blue and applied different opacities and effects like strokes and drop shadows

Then I went even more abstract, again pulling apart the color channels, but also using an alternate color scheme

If I had used a less detailed image, I could have gotten much more dramatic effects or created a more Pop Art feel. I sort of wish I’d gone that way, but this is a learning process… and I do love how these change so dramatically as they increase or decrease in size.

William is from Malawi, and starting at a young age, he was fascinated with bicycle dynamos and radios. When a famine hit the country and his parents could no longer afford to send him to high school, he decided to try to continue his education by going to a small library with about 900 books. He didn’t read much English, but he was fascinated with the science books and learned mostly by looking at the diagrams. In one book, he saw a windmill and decided to build one to bring electricity to his home and his village.

He shared how he collected scraps of metal and PVC pipe from a trash yard, and how his family and friends thought he was crazy. But his idea worked — he ultimately created a functioning windmill, built a circuit breaker and light switches, and stored the power the windmill generated in an old car battery.

I took AP physics in high school and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done any of that.

William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

He and his co-author, journalist Bryan Mealer, shared a lot of stories about the tough times William’s village was having during the famine, and how he gathered together parts with the help of his cousin and another friend. He also then talked about what happened after journalists had discovered what he’d done. He was profiled in many papers and was invited to speak at the TED conference, where he met Tom Rielly who would turn his story into a documentary and help get him into a pan-African high school in South Africa. He’s now helping William pursue college in the U.S. — he’s been looking at Harvey Mudd while he’s been in LA.

William also told some funny stories about his first time on a plane, in a hotel and using a computer — and how he wished he had access to Google back when he was trying to figure out how to build his first windmill. And we heard about the changes in the quality of life in William’s village — he built another windmill to pump water for his mother’s garden, and started a youth soccer team to keep other kids out of trouble. The village also now has its own fresh water source, and William’s parents’ home has a real roof and some better amenities than it had when he was growing up.

I’m really excited to read the book, which I got signed by both William and Bryan. I’m very honored to have met them — and have had a bit of time to actually talk to them. I also met Ben Nabors, who is producing the documentary about William’s story. Check out the Moving Windmills short below to learn more.

The nooks and crannies in my fork-split whole wheat english muffin

The first two times I made english muffins, I thought they were delicious but I missed the nooks and crannies that you get with fork-split muffins that toast up nice and crispy and catch lots of butter and jam.

I also missed the little crunch of cornmeal that most store-bought english muffins had, so I decided to modify the recipe a bit to get what I wanted. So instead of dusting with flour before the muffins rise between two baking sheets, I dusted with corn meal. That was easy enough.

And for the nooks and cranies, I decided to try fork splitting. After much Googling, it seemed that the way to do it was to just poke the english muffin all around with a fork as soon as it came off the stove. I tested it out — it wasn’t too hard since the muffins don’t get too hot and can be handled by hand right off the stove. It worked perfectly. They’re now easy to separate by hand, and they have a great texture from pulling them apart.

The fork split might not look quite as nice as leaving them whole, but it's worth it

They didn’t look quite as pretty with the sides mangled from the fork, but I could have probably been gentler. I just wasn’t sure what sort of pressure I needed to make sure they split easily.

So that’s it! The secret of how to make nooks and crannies revealed!

Also, to make whole wheat english muffins, just use the same recipe for regular english muffins and use 2 cups of whole wheat flour and 2 cups of regular bread flour. Maybe next time I’ll try honey wheat ones…

When I took photos for the first week of class, I used my friends Guiselle and Kacie as models. I shot the photos in my apartment against a white background. I also took photos of Evan, but for this assignment, I decided that I wanted the fictional article I was putting these photos together for to be a series of profiles of strong women.

Guiselle's Portrait - Click to view a larger version

I decided to use two sort of confrontational photos. In Guiselle’s she’s jumping — actually hurdling — right at you. She ran track in high school and college, and she’s now a lawyer. I felt that her intense look and body language pushed out of the frame, showed a lot of movement, and really showed a strong woman. The background I used was from Highgate Cemetery, and I decided to add the flowers in to add a fanciful element, add more color and visual interest, and soften the photo a bit.

Kacie's Portrait - Click to view a larger version

In Kacie’s photo, I placed her in front of a house, giving a “get off my lawn” sort of stare. Kacie is one of my funniest friends — and she’s actually started doing stand-up comedy. She also loves bizarre props, like Billy Bob teeth, rubber chickens, alligator feet and flamingos. I chose to take a photo of that building because of the skull stickers on the door and the truck in the lawn. And I added in the gas meter, sign, and flamingo to add some more interest and humor to the image, and to help balance it as well.

This was a really fun assignment, and I feel like I was able to capture my friends’ personalities quite well. It was a lot of work to get the photos to look like this, but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

One of this week’s assignments was creating a custom brush (to use instead of one of the default paintbrushes), and using it in a composition.

My set of flower brushes

I ended up creating a few different flower brushes, and I then used them in various colors and sizes, and with different “jitter” settings to paint a funky background. As the background, they looked like they were screen printed, though I added some texture by putting in a stucco wall. I really like how they turned out, especially in combination as a background for Kacie’s photo, and can definitely see using them for future projects.

The flower brushes in use

To create the brushes, I used photos of flowers that I took, and a few that I got from free (and royalty free) stock image site sxc.hu. I masked out the backgrounds, played with the levels and contrast, and made them black and white before defining them as brushes in the Edit menu.

You can download the set of brushes here if you’d like to use them for anything.

Whole wheat Irish soda bread hot out of the oven

I’ve been intrigued by all the Irish soda bread recipes I’ve seen in my cookbooks. Each book seems to have one, and they always look relatively quick and simple — especially because the bread is made with baking soda and baking powder as the leavening agent, not yeast, so it doesn’t need time to rise. The only thing holding me back from making the bread was that I either needed yogurt, buttermilk, or milk heated with vinegar to make it, and I don’t often have those ingredients — or at least enough of those ingredients — around.

This week, though, I had some plain yogurt in the fridge, and I wanted to try a quick bread recipe. I decided to use the recipe in How to Cook Everything since most of the other recipes just listed how to make the bread with buttermilk.

I preheated the oven, mixed up the dough in the cuisinart, let it sit for a few minutes while the oven finished preheating, shaped the bread into a loaf, created a cross-hatch pattern with a razor, and put it in the oven. 45 minutes later, it was done. I couldn’t believe that I had made this loaf of bread in about an hour start to finish.

I used half whole wheat flour and half regular flour, and it turned out tasting hearty and healthy. The loaf was pretty dense and heavy, and the bread tasted especially good toasted with butter or cheese. It sliced really well, and I was able to slice it quite thin, and it was good for sandwiches, too.

If you’re intimidated by how long bread usually takes, or if you’re just looking for something quick, this is a great recipe to try.

Recipe: Whole Wheat Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients

1.5 cups buttermilk or plain yogurt
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups wheat flour (replace with all-purpose flour if you want a white loaf)
2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
butter or oil for greasing the baking sheet

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the yogurt or buttermilk to make a soft dough (it shouldn’t be too sticky). After kneading/processing, it should be smooth and elastic.

Let the dough rest for a few minutes before shaping it into a round loaf. Slash the top with a razor blade (I chose to do a cross-hatch pattern). Put on a greased baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes.

When done, the bread is supposed to sound hollow when thumped on the bottom.

Polenta torta with roasted tomato sauce

I don’t have many cookbooks, but the few I have are reliably wonderful. One of my favorites that I really should cook from more is The New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas. First, I love how the book is arranged — seasonally by meals. That means that I can find something that uses what’s fresh, and I can also plan out a whole menu without flipping between too many pages of the book. The recipes are also sophisticated and delicious, and though they’re often a bit more complex than ones in my other cookbooks, they’re definitely worth it — especially when we have company over.

Friday night our friends Annie and Devin were coming over, so I started searching through my cookbooks for inspiration. I knew I wanted to make focaccia bread again because I’d told them about making it and how delicious it was, so I figured I’d do something at least somewhat Italian. I thought about pasta or risotto, but then, searching through The New Vegetarian Epicure, I stumbled across “A Simple Autumn Dinner Party,” which involved focaccia (perfect!), Torta di Polenta with Three Cheeses, Roasted Tomato Sauce, and Parfaits of Fruit and Mascarpone. It also included a lima bean soup that sounded tasty, but it’s still pretty warm here in LA, so I decided to steal from a different menu in the book and make a roasted beet and asparagus salad.

There was a lot of preparation involved in this meal, from peeling and dicing about 18 tomatoes, chopping 4 onions and roasting and peeling 16 beets, to making sure everything was timed properly to be ready for dinner time. The good thing about this dinner, though, was that it was really easy to get everything out when it was hot and ready — and I didn’t have to spend much time in the kitchen while the company was over — because the salad and tomato sauce could be done ahead of time, the polenta torta got to stay in the fridge until I was ready to heat it up, and the dessert could be done after the meal.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t rushing around the kitchen before they arrived, but it was nice not to have much to tend to other than serving the dishes when we had company. Somehow I mastered my time management and everything worked out really well.

I started with the beet salad and got the red and golden beets roasting right away because they were going to need to marinate in the dressing for a few hours. While they were roasting, I scalded and peeled the tomatoes for the sauce, chopped up the onions and got the asparagus ready. The asparagus and tomato sauce went in the oven at the same time — the sauce was going to take two and a half hours, so it needed to get going, no matter what the temperature was going to be.

I made the dough for the bread and set it aside to rise, then started the vinaigrette for the beet salad, which included olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a shallot, roasted garlic and some fresh squeezed orange juice. Then I peeled all the beets — a ridiculously messy job that makes me worry that my hands will remained stained red for the evening (though they won’t) — and chopped them up. I let the salad ingredients marinate in separate bowls, and I checked on the sauce and gave it a stir.

I had to let the bread rise a little longer than called for — maybe 30 or 40 minutes more — because the oven wasn’t going to be free of the the sauce for a while, but bread can be pretty forgiving when it’s rising, and it didn’t seem to have any negative effect at all. I kneaded it a second time, rolled it out to let it proof, then started working on the polenta.

I chopped and lightly sauteed a leek, half a red onion and some garlic, and brought 4 cups of vegetable stock to a simmer. I whisked in one cup of yellow corn meal — just the regular kind you get in a box at the store — and had to stir it continuously for 10-15 minutes, which got quite tiring. I’d never made polenta before, and it was a bit surprising. I didn’t realize you needed to little corn meal for so much liquid, and I didn’t realize how thick it would get so quickly.

After the 15 minutes of stirring, I added the onion and leek, and also added some goat cheese, gouda and parmesan, then poured the mixture into a cake pan and put it into the fridge to set up.

Once the roasted tomato sauce was done, I took it out of the oven and put the focaccia in — I put rosemary and sea salt on the top again — and then I was just about done.

The bread came out of the oven just a few minutes after Annie and Devin arrived, and when we were ready to sit down, I put the salads together — I couldn’t put them together earlier because the beets would have turned everything red. I put the polenta torta onto a baking sheet and into the oven for 15 minutes along with the tomato sauce in a covered bowl so everything could heat up.

The focaccia was a little lighter in color than last time, but tasted just as delicious. We finished off even more of it, and I think it was a bit lighter on the inside because of the extra rising time. All that olive oil and salt, and the fluffy warm bread… it’s just incredible.

The salad was delicious and full of flavor, and pretty with its red-yell0w-green combo. The golden beets were hard to find and pretty pricey — there were only three bunches of baby golden beets at the fancy new Pavilions, which were about the size of radishes — but they did add a really nice touch.

The polenta looked and tasted great with the tomato sauce and an extra sprinkling of parmesan and basil. It was light and fluffy and had a delicate cheesy flavor. It was very easy to serve cut up into wedges.

Annie helped me mix up the mascarpone with some cream, sugar and lemon zest while I hulled the sweet strawberries and added a bit of sugar and lemon juice. It was a tasty way to end the meal and wonderfully simple to make.

We also had a bottle of Gabbiano Chianti Classico, which we enjoyed. I went to the new Pavilions at Santa Monica and Robertson, and their sommelier suggested it. She also suggested an Ecco Pinot Grigio that we didn’t drink. That’s quite a fancy grocery store — and all the employees were really helpful.

This was definitely one of my better dinners so far. I’m excited to try other polenta variations — it’s so simple to make and very delicious!