Thanksgiving, pt. 3: oops!

Well, I figured at least one of the dishes I planned would be a partial or total wash! The subtitle today is "oops, I killed the yeast."

I seem to have been mostly successful in my attempt to make Sweet Country Corn Bread. Since it's really not a tough thing to make, you might wonder how I was mostly successful. Well, first, my mind must have been wandering somewhere when I was cracking the eggs. I was making a double batch, so I needed two, but I stopped myself right as I was about to crack the fourth into the batter. Oh well, I figured, it certainly won't hurt, and will help test my theory that it might be small eggs that make the cooking times longer when making American recipes in Sweden.

This SEEMED to be the case when, after only 20 minutes, I stuck a knife in the center of the corn bread and it came out totally clean. Cool! So I took the pan out and set it on a wire rack to cool.

After it had cooled down for 10-15 minutes or so, I tried to loosen it and flip it out of the pan. What happened when I did this was that a rather large but thin patch stuck to the bottom of the pan, and I saw that the corn bread was really quite wet and mushy inside, but not in the middle; more off to one side like.

I didn't know what else to do but to re-heat the oven and throw the bread back in for the full cooking time and hope for the best. After cooking it for 25 more minutes, it seemed non-liquidy on both the left and the right sides, but we'll have to see how it tastes. I haven't tried it because I wanted to leave the crust intact.

So, by the way, as far as recipe tips go: corn meal can be purchased at most stores here; look for it in the health food section (you know, where you find nuts and lentils and rice and soy flour) under the name "polenta".

Well, if I mostly salvaged the corn bread, I only semi-salvaged the herb dinner rolls. For this I used a dinner roll recipe in a (gasp!) hard-copy cook book, so I can't really give you anything to go off of. You've got something like this, of course: Bread Machine Dinner Rolls, but I didn't use a bread machine. The idea was to make a regular dinner roll recipe, but to add some herbs to the warm liquid. I chose 2 teaspoons of caraway seeds and some dried parsley for color. Well, they turned out hard and doughy, and I still haven't decided if I'm too ashamed to serve them or not, but at least I'm pretty sure I know what I did wrong. The liquid (in the case of my recipe, milk) was supposed to be heated up in a suacepan along with sugar, butter and salt until the butter melted, and then added to the flour and yeast mixture. But I'm pretty sure you have to cool it down some first, because after melting the butter you certainly don't have liquid that is only 120-130 degrees Fahrenheit. In other words, my liquid was too hot, and I probably killed the yeast. The dough barely rose at all during either the first or second risings, and after double the suggested baking time my buns were still dense and doughy in the middle. The yeast was, I'm also prepared to admit, god know how old and from an opened package.

Sigh. I'm not fabulous with yeast breads.

Anyway, I guess I can serve them anyway and claim that that's exactly the way we yanks like our bread -- no one will know the wiser! Moohaha!

Also on Thursday evening, I pre-cooked the wild rice that will be in the appetizer salad. This frees up a pot and some stove space for Friday and allows the rice to dry off and cool down nicely before going into the salad.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a million potatoes to peel.