Bierocks - the food of my people!

In Kansas, everyone eats bierocks. Bierocks are a bread pocket filled with meat & cabbage. Yes, I said cabbage! They are a delicious Volga-German food (most people in Kansas are part of this ethnic group somewhere along the line) and so far as I'm aware, they don't eat them anywhere else. Though they are clearly (to me at least) a cross between German and Russian food.

Everyone's grandma makes them better than anyone else's but few people under the age of 40 know how to make them, which is both sad and adds to their allure - if you only eat them a few times a year they taste darn good!  Most people make a whole bunch in one day and put them in the freezer, this can be a whole day project and aside from making the house smell vaguely of cabbage, a fun way to spend a long afternoon.

Shortly before Christmas, I went out to my Grandma's house for a visit, dinner and board games (I lost sequence a lot and won rummikub a lot). What was for dinner? Bierocks. I was in heaven. The problem with living so far away from everyone who knows how to make bierocks, is I never get to eat them.

So I needed to learn to make them. I had a consultation with Mom, with Grandma and I dove in. Now, keep in mind this is not a recipe but more like "orally communicated guidelines." Mom and Grandma (paternal) don't make them exactly the same way, so I pieced it together from what they said to figure out what would work for me.

Bierock guidelines

Ingredients

bread dough
ground beef
green cabbage, shredded
salt
pepper
garlic, onion are optional 
butter

-Make a non-sweet bread dough (Mom recommended using Pillsbury hot roll mix, Grandma uses some frozen dough for making dinner rolls, or you can go make some dough from scratch. I used the roll mix.)

-While your dough rises, brown ground beef in a large pan with  shredded cabbage, seasoning as desired. Allow meat mixture to cool somewhat.

- When dough is almost ready, grease a larger cookie sheet and preheat oven to 370.

- After dough has risen, take a small ball (bit smaller than a tennis ball) and roll the dough out into a circle. Place about 1/2 cup of meat mixture in the center and pull the corners of the dough up and join them together in the center. Pull the new corners up and join them together, until the dough is sealed and circular (so much as you can, it takes practice to get them a nice shape).

- Flip prepared bierock over onto a greased cookie sheet. Repeat until cookie sheet is full and bake for 20 minutes at 370 or until nicely brown.

- After removing from the oven, baste tops lightly with butter. Repeat until ingredients are depleted.

- Allow to cool and enjoy!

Notes:
- If you use 1 box of Pillsbury hot roll mix, 1 lb of ground beef and 2-3 cups of cabbage you will get about 7 bierocks.
- Mom shreds the cabbage in a food processor to make it smaller, very few people make their bierocks this way but Mom always receives accolades for "less cabbagey" nature of hers and this is the secret.
- I said the directions to roll the bierocks out, my mom makes them in her hand, but how she does it is completely beyond me, feel free to try that if you're an over achiever!
- Most people like these with ketchup (including me) and some also with mustard, though this isn't strictly speaking traditional. 
- They also freeze very well but I don't think they are as good after being in the freezer.

Does anyone else's family eat these? If so, I want to know about it!

Slow cooker ribs - dinner success! Diet fail!

I've been staring at ribs at the grocery store all summer. More than once I put them in my cart, wheeled them around while I did my shopping and then decided to return them to the meat section. They can be a bit pricey and I felt they were impractical for one person because the packages are so large! But earlier this week at my local Safeway (or un-safeway as it's known around DC), they had country style pork ribs for .99/lb. I couldn't pass it up, so I bought some (5lbs!) and took them home.

I had no idea what to do with them.

I don't remember ever eating ribs until my mom married my step-dad. He makes a mean rack of ribs - bar-be-cued, beer marinated, slow-cooked or smoked, they're always delicious.

They seemed a good match for the crock pot, they could slowly cook and become tender and juicy while I was at work. After my numerous crock pot disasters, I did not want to risk messing up my ribs so I called mom to get rib advice. She told me to broil them before I put them in the crock pot but otherwise there wasn't anything special I needed to do except cover them with bbq sauce.

So one night I set out on my rib adventure. I rubbed them with garlic, sea salt and paprika. I would have also used pepper but I was out! I set the oven to broil and cooked them 8-10 minutes on each side. Alright, one side was a little longer because I got distracted and forgot to take them out. Oops.

I let them cool a bit and placed them in my crock pot. I poured BBQ on top and a little bit of water, maybe 1/2 cup. I put the crock pot in the refrigerator for the night and then in the cooker the next morning before work. I turned it on low to cook while I was gone, it was about 9 hours before I got home.

Results? They were fantastic. I had made 2.5lbs and put the rest in the freezer. For dinner that night I think I ate a pound of pork. Did I mention I'm on a diet? Yea a pound of pork for dinner is a huge diet failure but it was good I could not help myself. I think I could have eaten all 2.5lbs in one sitting.

I should have probably put a little more liquid in the crock pot because the exposed parts of the ribs got a little charred looking but even the charred bits tasted amazing. I can't wait to make the other half but I should probably wait a few weeks, since I'm supposed to be dieting...

Spinach & Broccoli Lasagna

I learned how to make lasagna by watching my mom in the kitchen and it's one of my favorite things to make. It's easy, tastes good leftover (better even sometimes) and you can freeze it. Don't be intimidated by all the layers, it comes together in a snap, most of the time required is to bake the dish. I tend to be impatient when baking lasagna, especially if it's a week night and I'm hungry. The longer you can hold out, the better it tastes, so try to be patient.

Note that the ingredient quantities can be adjusted to make a smaller or larger lasagna. The amounts I list below will make a small lasagna about 6 servings (ie not too much for one person to eat over a few days), I use this IKEA pan when I make lasagna for myself. If you want to make a larger version appropriate for a standard 9X13 pan, you should roughly double what I have listed below.

Ingredients

1 small container of ricotta (I think the small ones are around 10oz but I can't remember)
2 cups shredded Italian cheese (you can use Mozzarella, but a blend of several Italian cheeses is best)
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups fresh spinach
1 1/2 cups chopped broccoli
4-6 pre-cooked lasagna noodles
26oz jar of spaghetti sauce
Garlic (to taste)
Italian Seasoning (to taste)
Black pepper (to taste)

Mix the egg and all the seasonings in with the ricotta in a medium size bowl. Grease a small (approx 11X7) baking pan. Put a small amount of pasta sauce (approx 1/3 cup) in the bottom of the pan, this helps prevent the noodles from burning on. On top of the sauce, layer ingredients in the following order noodles, ricotta, veggies, shredded cheese, sauce and starting over with noodles again, repeating until you run out of ingredients or reach the top of the pan. You should end with noodles topped with shredded cheese on the top. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for 30-60 minutes, removing the foil for the last 10-15 minutes.

As I said above, I'm impatient when waiting for lasagna. It must bake long enough for the cheese to melt but it will taste much better if baked for a full hour. Sometimes I make the double size and put single lunch portions in the freezer and pull them out to take to work when I'm in a rush or don't have anything else handy.

Taste: A
Cost: B+ (no meat!)
Waste: A+

Quick cinnamon rolls

Love cinnamon rolls? I do. But really I only LOVE my mom's and like everyone else's. Mom is known for her cinnamon rolls. People drive from other cities to buy them from her store and during the holidays, they are overloaded with orders. I, of course, request them every time I visit. Oh if only she could ship them to DC. sigh.

This quicker version is something mom used to make at home, when she did not feel like getting up at the crack of dawn to make the real deal. Waiting for the dough to rise takes forever and at home there is no proofer (an appliance that makes dough rise faster). This was my first try at making them. Something to tide me over until I can have the real deal over Thanksgiving.

I had a phone consultation with mom before I started. Did I ignore her advice? Yes. To my own peril? 50-50. I did not have the exact ingredients that I needed to really make this but I wasn't feeling like going to the store so I decided to wing a few things and it more or less worked out ok, tasted good anyway, maybe too good...I ate 3 already!

Ingredients
pre-made crescent roll dough
cinnamon
sugar
brown sugar
powdered sugar
cream
cream cheese
vanilla

I did not put in the amount of each ingredient because you can adjust based on how many you want to make. Roll out the crescent dough and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar roll them up and put them in a greased pan. You may notice in the photos I used a loaf pan, is there a reason for this? Yea, I couldn't find my 9" round pan. It's important that the pan not be too over sized, when the crescents are cooked and plump up you want them to touch lightly, so I used the loaf pans.




After the crescents are in the pan, prepare the brown sugar topping. This stuff is like crack. The total secret to the amazing-ness of mom's cinnamon rolls. Pour about a cup of cream in a saucepan and mix in a cup of brown sugar, you can make more or less but there should be about a 1 to 1 ratio of cream to brown sugar. Boil the mixture until the brown sugar dissolves and it bubbles nicely. It should be a dark brown, carmel color. You can add more brown sugar if needed and pour the mixture over the rolls. Put the pan in the oven and bake according to the package directions.

This is one place where I ignored mom (yea...there was more than one). I did not have enough cream so I used half and half for the carmel mixture and it worked pretty well. I added a little more brown sugar to make it thicker. No problem.

While the rolls are in the oven, make a cream cheese frosting. Mom uses cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla and cream. Like I said, I did not have enough cream and now I'd used all the half and half for the brown sugar topping, so I used milk. I also did not have any powdered sugar so I used granulated. Did it work? Um...not so much really. It tasted fine but did not have the same texture of mom's and was more of a sweetened cream cheese than a frosting. It still tasted yummy and I'm going to use the extra as a dip for apples tomorrow at lunch.


These are perfect brunch fare and soooo much easier than waiting for bread to rise for hours and hours. No thank you. Plus, you can make a few or a few dozen. I made one pack of crescent dough, so 8 and I will def be eating them all. Hopefully not all today...we'll see.

Diet dilemma

My mom is my cooking inspiration. And to what I aspire. Some of my favorite foods I can't eat unless my mom makes them - chicken fried steak, honey pecan chicken - restaurants (and me) just can't measure up to mom. I don't get to make that many trips home these days, so when I do make it, I have a list of things I want mom to make for me. And I eat. And eat. And eat.

My mother is also severely overweight and I worry about her health. She has a tendency to yo-yo diet and every time I talk to her she has some new plan. When I went home last year for Christmas she had been on a shake diet for 4 months and lost about 40 lbs but she fell off the wagon when I was there and we went to lunch and has been up and down ever since.

Until a month ago when she started a new "lean cuisine" plan that was suggested by her doctor, she has portion control problems (not that I don't...) and she's been doing pretty well. She'd even been exercising a little bit. I'm worried that when I visit she will cook all the yummy things I want to eat for me and eat them too. For me mom's house is a huge splurge but for her it's easy to fall into a pattern.

I think food should be enjoyed and don't really believe in dieting per se but the adoption of a healthy lifestyle, which includes lots of veggies, leaner and less meat, some tasty desserts and exercise. However, my mom needs to lose weight and however it happens, I'm ok with that but I do encourage the adoption of healthy habits and want to see the foundation established because at some point, everyone wants to eat real food again.

Delicious food is one the pleasures of life and I hate to see it demonized. I only hang out with women who eat, there is not room for this obsession about eating a cookie. However, it is important to realize that eating properly is important for your health and not just because of weight but also getting the proper vitamins and nutrients - but veggies are also yummy!

So I'm off this week to visit my family for Thanksgiving - hopefully I won't eat too much and will be able to support my mom with her diet plan.

A girl, a chicken and a plan: part 2

The chicken is successfully in the oven and really it wasn't that bad! The part that I was dreading, taking the bag of chicken parts out of the chicken was really no big deal. Everything was contained in a neat plastic bag. No fuss no muss!

Before I opened the chicken, I called mom because I was sure I would need assistance but I really didn't. I took the bag out, rinsed the chicken a little and put it in a pan with some water. I sprinkled some spices (pepper, salt, garlic and a chicken seasoning blend) inside the chicken and all around the outside and put it in the oven. The package even said what temp and how long to cook it! It also said to tie the feet together but Mom said I did not have to and Mom trumps package.

It also doesn't need to cook nearly as long as I thought, only an hour and 10 minutes (according to the package), I'm assuming it's because this is a fairly small chicken at about 6lbs. I told mom when I go home for Thanksgiving, we're making a turkey together! She laughed. We'll see.

On that note, I need to go and baste it a little!

If you say "mmm" in the kitchen and no one hears it, is it still good?

I'm a single girl, who likes to eat but it's challenging to cook for one. Recipes are designed for families of four. Package sizes at the store are too big to use for one person. Leftovers are depressing. No one to make "mmmm" sounds when it's really good. The list goes on. There are some benefits, no one to complain when it's bad, and only one person's likes and dislikes to accomodate. Big pluses.

My mom, is actually a chef, she runs her own catering company, so most of my kitchen education as a kid involved watcthing from the bar while I talked to my mom or her kicking me out of the kitchen. She made it look so easy. She never measures and it's always amazing, I call her the "approximate chef." It gave me impossible standards, which I did not realize until I grew up and figured out that not everyone has these amazing abilities.

So the goals are to cook for one person (maybe with leftovers to take to work for lunch the next day), save money, cut out food waste where possible, and make lots of "mmm" sounds, even if no one else around to hear it.