Vanilla Bean Pudding Cake

After our bucatini carbonara had had a chance to settle in a bit last Thursday night, a dessert seemed necessary in order to make the evening complete. And I went with vanilla pudding cake, which I probably over-rely on when I’ve not made better or other plans for a sweet conclusion to any small dinner gathering. But what’s the harm in serving up so tasty a treat? Plus: I need to keep working on my technique with it until I really nail down how to get perfect ratios of cake and pudding...an elusive goal still.

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"Vanilla Bean Pudding Cakes," from Susan Reid. Published by King Arthur Baking. Recipe printed July 2017.

Meal No. 4031: Linton Hopkins’s Bucatini Carbonara

The pickings at the grocery store last Thursday were understandably slim, following our intense and enduring winter weather event from the previous weekend. It was my first time of venturing out, and apparently the same could be said of many of my fellow shoppers (plus: it was senior discount day, so there’s that). Although I was able to add a salad to our dinner plates, I had to fall back on something I could produce from pantry staples that night: Linton Hopkins’s bucatini carbonara. Lordy, it’s so silky and wonderful, rich and pleasing. I still had a version of Thousand Island dressing to help along the future prospects of the spring mix I’d grabbed fresh. Jonathan, our guest at dinner, very thoughtfully brought along a really nice red wine, which paired perfectly. Good company, good food, good wine, good conversation. Oh, and maybe a dessert also manifested before the evening got away from us, so more on that in tomorrow’s blog post.

Please note: It's outrageous to this summer-loving senior that 20°F that morning was an improvement.

And while it wasn't as much about the weather as it was distance when I needed to have a virtual meeting that morning, I was reminded that that's what school has been like for a lot of students across our area since schools were closed all week. Weather-related interruptions to the school calendar always cost us, but we all know ain't nobody coming to school on Saturday, on spring break, or after the posted end of the year.

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Adapted from "Bucatini Carbonara," by Linton Hopkins. In Food & Wine, July 2009.

A Sheetload of Ice

The grand sleet event of late January that offered us an accumulation of close to maybe three inches of mostly sleet, which compacted down into a 1.5-2 inch sheet of ice all over every ground surface (yard and driveway and steps and sidewalks!), had a lasting impact because temperatures remained very much below normal. Schools were out the whole week and I was lucky that I'd had no scheduled work trips. I thought I'd let a standalone blog post capture a piece of this story...or should I say a kazillion pieces?

After initially carving a path to walk more safely from the street to the back door, and clearing off the front steps and sidewalk as well, I wanted to get as much of the driveway cleared as I could.

The bright sunshine of last week helped even while it was still too cold for my efforts to get boosted by any rapid melting. Instead, I had to rely on gradually chipping away with a flatblade shovel, wedging underneath where I could, and hoping that a large enough section would break up or lift up. The wheelbarrow helped but unfortunately the tire isn't holding air for very long.

Digging in the front edge, pushing in gently, lifting a bit, waiting for the rewarding sound of cracking ice, and either happily grabbing up a huge chunk or aggressively shoveling the bits and fragments...

I mean: I did finally get the car out, and I reckon not quite half of the parking lot was freed of its icing.

One of four massive piles of these ice slabs is pictured here, tucked behind a dead cherry tree but easily accessed from the upper lot area. Another sizable pile of this icy debris sits in the kitchen herb garden; a couple of smaller piles are nearby. At the street, on one side of the driveway entrance is a similar pile of these chunks and on the lower side is a pile twice as big. Here's a shot of that taken once the snow had begun last Saturday morning:

Meal No. 4030: Ultimate Cream of Tomato Soup & Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

As our inch-and-a-half (or maybe two?!) of accumulated sleet from the weekend's winter storm remained fully in place everywhere, and while the city seemed mostly shut down, we took a real plunge Monday night very nearly into single digits. With four planned for a fine Holly Avenue gathering of neighbors for supper, I was pretty set on having soup. This time, it was cream of tomato soup, along with grilled cheese sandwiches on either homemade Japanese milk bread or peasant bread. We certainly had our fill and seconds proved to be a powerful temptation to make it so.

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"Ultimate Cream of Tomato Soup," from Cook's Illustrated, November 1999. Recipe can also be found online at Cookography.com.

"Easy Same-Day Peasant Bread," from Jenny Rosenstrach of the CupofJo.com blog. [Published 02 February 2022] Adapted from Alexandra Stafford of AlexandraCooks.com. [07 November 2012 / Updated 15 November 2025]

Meal No. 4029: Beef Cheddar Melts on Milk Bread

Our heavy sleet day last Sunday meant there would be no shopping excursions, and as few ventures outside at all except for what the pooches required. It was a fine day for baking up a loaf of Japanese milk bread but also for tossing a couple of prepped vacuum-sealed filet mignons into the sous vide immersion circulator. I'd already prepped the special cheddar melts sauce. All that remained was to slice that bread, butter it up good, adorn it with sliced of cheddar, slice the cooked beef after giving it a good pan sear...and let's not forget the caramelized onion slices as well. This was one of those dinners where the talking tongues were silenced while the tasting tongues reveled in gustatory glory.

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"Japanese Milk Bread Recipe (Hokkaido Milk Bread)," by Dini Kodippili of The Flavor Bender. [Published 01 July 2020]

"Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation. [Published 14 October 2022]

Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls for the Sleet Day

We were stuck with such a winter weather mess last weekend, and what form it was to take or how much damage it might do proved impossible to predict. But it sure put me in a mood to make a batch of eggnog cinnamon rolls before my final holiday carton of it reached its unusable state.

Ooey gooey sweet and sensational, the fluffy cinnamon rolls produced from this particular recipe are consistent winners. I certainly didn't realize I'd left these aside for almost two years. They are heavenly bundles of sugar and spice, fully adorned with an irresistable eggnog and white chocolate glaze, and then raised to excess by a cream cheese icing.

This last picture (above) is how the rolls looked straight out of the oven, before they were amply doused by that afore-mentioned sugary glaze. Also: in my incessant disposition to count unimportant things, I'll call this the 25th batch of some sort of cinnamon roll that I've made since I started this blog in 2008.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Winter’s Late January Sleet Smack

Oh, with giddy anticipation, once the cackling imprecision of breathless long-view predictions had put in our minds the slimmest glimmer for a foot-high snowfall fever dream, did we all hustle and bumble into dedicated preparation last week. But a complex convergence of multiple systems and fronts made it hard to know what all those models were promising. And we all should understand and be forgiving of the floundering meteorologists: the models are playing catchup to the shifted landscape that comes with climate change uncertainty.

When I woke around 4:30am Sunday morning, it was 14°F and we had mostly gotten sleet, in abundance. The barest incidence of light snow flakes and occasional pelting by fat cold rain drops were nothing compared to a couple of inches of those rough tiny granules of ice. Sumner hated it, finding it to be terribly disconcerting. Scarlett, true to her shepherd, husky, and Saint Bernard lineage, was ready to seek a cliff face for ice rappelling.

Reports around the state and region made it clear we were lucky in terms of damage but we missed out on what would have been an enormous gorgeous snowfall had the precip been otherwise. Just around the corner from the house was what appeared to be the command center or staging hotel for one huge crew that never had to go out since we didn’t get all the ice that was so fearfully anticipated.

Our power stayed on even if elsewhere fortunes were much less bright. To have this much sleet coverage was a bit of a wonder but it also really was coming down for a good part of the day. Imagine if it had only made it all the way down as snow! I still got out and trudged my 3.5 miles while the sidewalks and streets were stompable enough as long as the boots were steady and sturdy...that's when I spotted the linemen's trucks behind the hotel and was sure those crews didn't mind never getting called out.

Speaking of crews: a team from Budd Services (the company that provides groundskeeping for the neighboring office building) spent Saturday night in their trucks on the parking lot behind us. We get to see these gentlemen regularly through all seasons, always impressed by their diligence and focus.

After daybreak Sunday, they emerged into the brutal cold and got busy spreading ice melt and running the scraper blades. But yeah: tell me again about the immigrants who don’t work but who are taking our jobs…?!

The Monday that followed all this was bright and sunny but still cold and breezy. As is so often the case, the house looked lovely in that early morning light but I also knew I'd have to get the flatblade shovel in hand and get to work clearing off the front steps for the postal carriers and some sort of path across the parking lot down to the street.

And a task like that is a sore and painful reminder that I have entered my seventh decade on this earth.

An even colder arctic push invaded overnight Monday so that by the time I got up Tuesday morning, it was 11°F on my Tempest weather station, and the nearby Smith Reynolds Airport was registering 9°F. Current projections are that our area will continue to experience below-normal temperatures perhaps into the latter part of February. You can count on me to keep you posted, especially if bellyaching results.

Notebooks, Galore!

As my work schedule slowly eased up as we got closer to the official start of last spring, I utilized some of my extra time to tackle my two huge ongoing notebooks collections: observation notes from the various schools and districts I work in, and the collection of printed recipes that seems to grow ever larger. The work-related observation notebooks include every observation I've done since I started doing this work as a consultant, and in some school districts that became a years-long process or involved a large number of schools. Knowing how small I write anyway, coupled with the dependence on narrow-lined notepad sheets, you might correctly assume that I've really done a ridiculous number of observations over the last 20 years. It takes a 6-inch binder to contain the work I've done through the High Point University Leadership Academy or in Guilford County; Virginia Beach City observation notes require two notebooks to contain them all.

The other notebook project related to my collection of (mostly) printed (mostly web-sourced) recipes. Originally converted into notebooks in 2017 to organize what had once been tucked into folders in a milk crate, and next reworked and expanded in 2022, I had been finding some of them overstuffed and also realized some organizational and categorical shifting was called for. As long as I was on a notebook kick as February rolled over into March, I refreshed my inventory especially of the extra large binders and set to work on once more improving the management of all those many, many recipes. It took a while to finally file away the stack of backlogged recipe printouts, and that dragged on through the rest of the year: Sunday December 7th was when I finally finished! I figured you'd want to know.

Meal No. 4028: Meatloaf Minis

Last Saturday night brought to Winston-Salem a massive winter weather event (more on that to come in a blog post to follow), and once all had been done to get us as ready as possible, there was still a dinner to make. A fun recipe that has never fallen short of delighting the household came to mind, since I still had a couple of leftover containers of terrific homemade sour cream-and-chive mashed red potatoes as the ideal side item. The central feature: mini meatloafs with a sweet and tasty sauce. It's easy enough to put together but a fine variation from the norm here, and I'll boast that supper satisfied quite perfectly that evening.

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"Mini Meatloaf," from Lauren Allen of Tastes Better from Scratch. [Published 20 February 2023]

Meal No. 4027: Teriyaki Steak Skewers on Caesar'd Spring Mix

My recent extravagant purchase of a whole beef tenderloin netted me some incredible filet mignons to grill over the MLK Jr. Holiday weekend, and then I also saved out some fresh cubes of beef to marinate and then skewer and grill on the actual Martin Luther King Jr. Day itself. These perfect tender morsels sat atop a spring mix salad, with a choice either of creamy Caesar dressing or a souped-up Thousand Island dressing that I created as a special sauce for beef and cheddar melts sandwiches.

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Based on "Easy Lemon Caesar Salad Dressing," by Kim Hardesty of lowcarbmaven.com.

Based on "Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation.

Meal No. 4026: The 2026 Chili Cook-Off

When I was on faculty at Wake Forest University, I built into the calendar each year a series of events that were simply reasons to gather: a dessert and decaf in May, a brunch in the run-up to Easter, and each January a chili cook-off gathering. The most consistent continuation of those, albeit with an evolving or shifting guest list because of different directions that life takes us, has been the January chili affair. These troubled times are the very reason we must stay connected, so last Sunday night the chili cook-off came back to life at the Roediger House.

The pandemic put a true kink in the ritual, and the only year since that I made an effort to at least time a chili gathering to its usual spot around Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Weekend was in 2022. Deviled by a nostalgic impulse here in 2026, I wanted this to be a bigger deal: that meant a guest list and an invitation card to be mailed, adapted from the graphic I'd used back in 2010. The weather worried us a bit that day: we were in the mid-30s with precip moving through and a promise of a frozen mix. But for the hearty souls who turned out, it was a great night with a delicious variety of chili to sample.

With it being the first attempt at resurrecting this event for a few years, I didn't have a good measure of how available folks on the invite list might be. Still: better to be prepared, right? So I made a couple of appetizer options for us, including my version of South Carolina-style pimento cheese (above) and my own divination of Virginia-style Mexican restaurant white dipping sauce:

Of course, there had to be a pan of Granny Wilson's honey wheat cornbread. Since this delicious variation makes a full sheet pan's worth of sweet cornbread, the chili cookoff was perfect for bringing it out. I must've missed something in its preparation, though: it wasn't quite as on target as I'm accustomed to. No pictures are available, which is probably for the best.

Let's not leave out the dessert options for that chili winter's night, starting with Ina Garten's marvelous lemon bars on shortbread cookie crust. Well-glucosed and super lemony, these bars are marvelous to the max, each and every time.

Before we no longer had the recent holidays out of sight in the rear view mirror, I also wanted another go at eggnog tres leches cake. Alas, the version I've been most dependent on makes a thicker sponge cake than seems prudent—it can end up with unmilked dry portions that I find problematic. So I skimmed down the cake layer with some clever mathing, but kept the milks and topping amounts constant.

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"Simple Beef Chili with Kidney Beans," from Cook's Illustrated, Number Sixty-One [March-April 2003], p. 10-11.

"Vegetarian Chili," from All About Vegetarian Cooking. By the editors of Joy of Cooking: Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker. New York: Scribner (2000), p. 82-83. Cookbook was a gift from former student Alison Pomeroy.

"Granny Wilson's Cornbread," a recipe shared with me by Linda B. Dunlap.

"South Carolina-Style Pimento Cheese." Recipe worked out by me, based on Sharon's Palmetto Pimento Cheese. [Published 23 October 2009]

"Mexican Restaurant White Dipping Sauce," a recipe worked out by me, sampled by Spring Street, and approved of by all.

"Lemon Bars," by Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa. Published in Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2001.

Modified from "Eggnog Tres Leches Cake," from Michele Feuerborn of FlavorMosaic.com. [Published 13 December 2015]

Meal No. 4025: Grilled Filet Mignon

I grew up in a meat-eating household, and in particular were we extremely fond of grilled steaks: porterhouses, ribeyes, and filet mignon, above and beyond all else. But meals like that are indeed a nearly literal luxury in the current economic climate, and therefore grilling a steak happens few and far between now. Last Saturday night was a joyous indulgence, though, once the early morning's cold rain had passed on and we got a bit of sunshine and the winds had died away. Out to the grill I went and with me were two thick-cut filet mignons, freshly harvested from a larger beef tenderloin I'd allowed myself to exuberantly invest in. Grilled to a perfect temp with just the seasoning of salt and pepper, the meat itself did all the talking and I liked listening. As long as it all felt extravagant, I also made a pot of mashed sour cream-and-chive red potatoes, adorned with a bit of red wine demi-glace. As dinners go at the Roediger House, this ordinary weekend repast felt like a giddy celebration.

Meal No. 4024: Linton Hopkins's Bucatini Carbonara

Every once in a while I have to return to this finer variation of carbonara, built upon bucatini pasta and silkened with several egg yolks. That was the quickly whipped up supper last Friday evening, as the bitter cold of a biting winter made clear its malcontent with Winston-Salem. I still knocked out a 5-mile walk that afternoon without pushing my pace very hard, and then I defeated all those healthy good works with that rather unhealthy dinner. And a cookie afterwards. It helped make up for the 19°F to which I awakened that morning.

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Adapted from "Bucatini Carbonara," by Linton Hopkins. In Food & Wine, July 2009.

"WORST EVER" Chocolate Chip Cookies

Following last Thursday's boys' night supper, the proper thing for this host to do seemed to be a dessert concoction of some sort. It had been a while since I'd made what Sam Merritt calls the WORST EVER chocolate chip cookie, and it's easy enough since it uses melted butter instead of softened (as almost all my cookie recipes require). This is the recipe that steps in when I've not planned ahead, in other words. But it's also really good: these chocolate chip cookies have a distinct air of childhood reminiscence and they also taste awesome. The large batch meant several plates went out to neighbors and as a take-away for the excellent Mookie.

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"The WORST EVER Chocolate Chip Cookies," from Sam Merritt of SugarSpunRun.com. [Published 28 November 2018; Updated 19 December 2024]

Meal No. 4023: Poppy Seed Chicken Casserole

It's been almost five-and-a-half years since I last made the wonderful and comforting poppy seed chicken casserole. It's an upgrade of a long-time family dish but is made without relying on cans of soup, thank goodness. (We always called it 'Bama Chicken.) With the entirely accommodating shortcut of a Costco rotisserie chicken, the amount of which really bulks up the casserole, and with the succulence of well-simmered and sautéed mushrooms and onion, good sprinkles of thyme, and suitably flavored with marsala wine, the finished product is a wonder of spreading goodness once ladled up onto the plates in abundance. With last Thursday's boys' night supper, I also had roasted herbed broccoli florets, which I really do love. We were well-satisfied by the end of our very short meal—that's how fast we blazed through our servings.

It was a bitterly cold January day, with temps staying near freezing but conditions were formidably inhospitable with full-force icy gusts that pushed you backwards, when they weren't cutting through you altogether. I got out and did over four miles with an aggresive afternoon exuberance, before heading out for a much-needed haircut. Days like that remind me how nuts it is to ever think about moving to Canada, no matter how terrified I am about our national future.

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"Poppy Seed Chicken Casserole," by Ashley Moore in Cook's Country, February/March 2015, p. 20.

Vanilla Snacking Cake with Dark Chocolate Whipped Ganache

Last Wednesday evening's weekly gathering with Amy on hand featured a new dessert, a take on a less-sweet snacking cake with a dark chocolate whipped ganache. It was a tasty evening finisher but dark chocolate is not a universally-loved feature here, so I suspect I'll opt for a less punchy topping if this reappears in the future.

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Adapted from "One-Bowl Vanilla Cake with Chocolate Frosting," from Christina Marsigliese of ScientificallySweet.com. [Updated 03 April 2025]

Meal No. 4022: Grilled Teriyaki Steak Skewers with Caesar-Topped Spring Mix

After a couple of days working down in southeast Georgia, I returned home without making it to the grocery store...but for the three of us at dinner last Wednesday night it was not a lost cause. I had spring mix, I had creamy Caesar dressing, and I had beef tenderloin cuttings I'd stored away in the freezer a while back. Cooked mostly via sous vide, then marinated in a teriyaki-style concoction, these were skewered and grilled up in the chill air of a winter night; then we prepared our respective bowls of spring mix with as much or as little creamy Caesar dressing, added roasted sunflower seeds, and eased those beefy morsels off our skewers and on top of our dressed greens. I'd not prepped beef skewers like this since 2020 and it was a happy return to 'em.

Meal No. 4021: Roasted Spiced Potatoes and Roasted Broccoli

Back on Saturday of last week, just before I hit the road for a short work trip, it was the better part of wisdom to use up some vegetables in the hopper, and so it was a supper of roasted spiced broccoli and roasted russet and sweet potatoes, combined. After years of baking or steaming vegetables, I'm glad roasting has come home to roost.

Right outside the house on that rainy Saturday afternoon, the streets were abuzz with pasionate protestors, rallying in response to the killing of mother and artist Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. The point of origin was the parking lot behind the house, and then the group circled the block.

I'm not sure how far the march carried down Fourth Street towards the city's center, but the protestors soon positioned themselves at the intersection of Fourth and Broad.

Lots of bullhorn calls, chants by the protestors, and encouragingly responsive horn-blowing from passing traffic continued for much of the afternoon. The location of the house gave us a pretty good view of their persistence in spite of the rainy weather.