The on-going chronicle of all things related to the George and Laura Roediger House (c. 1905) in the historic Holly Avenue Neighborhood of downtown Winston-Salem, NC. More info and pictures can be found at RoedigerHouse.com. [Mobile users: CLICK TO SEARCH the blog.]
How about the marvel of what fried rice really is, in the hands of a rank amateur such as myself: it's what you try to do with leftover rice and a remaining cooked pork chop from the previous evening's meal. An appoximation of a thrown-together stir-fry sauce that hit all the right notes, diced onion and carrot sautéed at the start, an extra splash of sesame oil: for Monday's mid-afternoon meal of the day I really could not get enough of this bowl of delicious food.
For reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph, I scrapped my Sunday night dinner plan and used sous vide pork chops as the fallback, along with easy roasted spiced potatoes and broccoli florets. It was pretty delicious and a bit too abundant.
Say hello to Scarlett, who has now said hello to the Roediger House. Sumner has a sister he never knew he wanted or needed, and their first day together turned out to be pretty smooth. The following details are subject to verification, but at this point it's believed that she is about four months old and a German Shepherd and Husky mix. My neighbor down the street, who works at the nearby homeless support ministry, came along in hopes someone might be able to adopt her. We might describe this as a fateful moment to have been hanging out in the front yard! But the unhoused couple who had gotten Scarlett in a Craigslist meet-up needs to head back to Illinois and are unable to take her with them. She is a sweetie and I bet will be easily loved by all who encounter her here.
With a sufficient portion of saved butter chicken sauce, and a seasoned pounded chicken breast sealed and stored in the freezer, a saucepan and the sous vide let me create a thrown-together approximation of murgh makhani over steamed rice last Saturday night. With spiced roasted cauliflower, it warmed my soul on a dreary weather day.
Autumn arrived that Saturday, on a day where Winston-Salem was once again in the outer bands of a passing tropical system that made landfall on the North Carolina coast in the wee hours of the morning. We had some gusts and on-and-off rain throughout the day, knowing all the while that it could always have been much worse. I certainly felt bad for our houseguests and the larger Bookmarks Festival attendees whose busy agenda of authors and talks and books, and authors talking about books, was marred, or at least complicated, by the nasty conditions.
The next day’s swept-clear skies and the full sunshine to greet us made for good Sunday morning sitting and coffee-sipping with Sumner. With the season’s shift came the early indications that the trees were ready to comply: high above the driveway I noted with mixed feelings the coloring coming to one of the maple trees.
Suppertime approached Thursday night, another day out in a school working with aspiring administrators, and then weekend guests arriving soon after I got back home...and me with no plan for what ought to go on the dinner plates. That's why there are things tucked away in the freezer, including some beef taco meat I'd cooked and vacuum-sealed a while back. Laid out in a sheet pan were tortilla strips, topped with Mexican cheese and diced red onion and black beans, plus plenty of that spiced beef...and a bit more cheese. Once baked, and joined by a generous dollop of sour cream, it proved more than passable.
This was the occasion of the marvelous annual Bookmarks Festival here in downtown. (The Bookmarks independent bookstore is just up the street, half a block away.) My dear childhood friend Margaret and her own dear friend and colleague from the University of North Carolina were excited and delighted attendees, as both are avid readers who also are very supportive of authors and the arts. They made good use of their time here, fully participating in the offerings of the festival and also venturing out to the Reynolda House Museum of Art. While I've found lots of reasons to appreciate the Roediger House's location and access to so much of what downtown offers, it proved especially well-situated for just about all of the Festival's features.
After a fine day spent with a subcohort of aspiring administrators from the High Point Univerity Leadership Academy, I was rather happy to be reminded that a store-bought puff pastry was hanging out in the fridge...and that meant I could observe National Pepperoni Pizza Day with a puff pastry version. Easy to make and leaving minimal clean-up, it felt like cheating.
The last remaining portion of the previous weekend's giant round braided challah loaf found its way into a marvelous batch of French toast last Tuesday at dinnertime. The variety of ways one might tackle French toast offers tons of avenues to a finished product of syrupy goodness, but I found long ago a dedicated level of satisfaction with the recipe from PJ Hamel of King Arthur Baking. I keep coming back to it, free of regrets. It was a sugar-high meal, since some Atlantic Beach lemon pie remained from the previous evening.
"French Toast," by PJ Hamel of King Arthur Baking online.
The Monday main meal occurred early in the day, both to get me away from snacking temptations and also because I had a pretty enticing dessert already made and chilling in the fridge. And since the day was dedicated as National Cheeseburger Day, I could only abide by that dictate, even though burgers were so recently on the menu. Mostly cooked via sous vide, since I’d prepped, pattied, and vacuum-sealed them to store away in the freezer, these were finished in the skillet where the requisite cheese was piled on. A heap of kettle chips was nice but even better was the homemade special sauce that dripped and oozed with each hungered bite.
While the cheeseburgers and chips were more than enough food for the day, I had already made dessert for that evening and it was chilling in the fridge. It was a return to the marvelous Atlantic Beach pie, a seafood restaurant speciality from the North Carolina coast, our Tar Heel lemon version of the better known key lime pie. Ours can be made either with a saltine cracker crust or, as I prefer, crushed Ritz crush. As the article proclaimed it (linked below), it's pretty phenomenal.
The lovely weather made for excellent skink pursuits by the house pooch Sumner. In the photo above, you'll find the skink all the way down at the lower left corner, but I also caught Sumner and the skink in a moment of greater closeness than the skink might have wished:
"One Phenomenal Pie: Atlantic Beach Pie," from Chef Bill Smith. Published in Our State Magazine, May 2014. Also featured in "Found Recipes" on All Things Considered from National Public Radio, broadcast April 13, 2013.
Last Sunday was National Monte Cristo day but I cannot justify dropping a cheesed sandwich into a big pot of oil to fry, no matter how good I found that to be the one time I actually did it. Instead, I took liberties with the Madame Cristo grilled ham and cheese recipe from Chef John of FoodWishes.com, which has now made quite a few appearances here since I discovered it just under a year ago. Although I had to run out and grab some deli meat (turkey seems to be a suitable partner to the ham), I happily utilized slices of bread from the giant round challah loaf I'd made the day before. These sandwiches were something else, in all the right ways.
Based on "Madame Cristo—Grilled Ham and Cheese," from Chef John Mitzewich of FoodWishes.com and AllRecipes.com. [Updated 03 July 2018]
Ten years ago, it was a blessing of a Jewish New Year to enjoy a visit from my dear friend Sheryl, who was a fellow PhD student with me at the University of Virginia in the late 1990s. While this is not an observant household, the occasion was well-suited to my hopes of being a proper host for that all-too-rare company from California, with the challah culinary centerpiece taking a lovely braided round form, as befits the holiday. Now has passed a decade, much too quickly, and while Sheryl was not able to make it back last weekend, I still marked the occasion with a fresh loaf of braided round challah.
Around mid-day, I got going with the slow build of the yeasted dough, which achieved marvelous rise in two separate one-hour increments, as noted above. Then I divided it up and created long ropes of dough ready for braiding together, beginning with this pattern:
Then, I braided each of the extended portions of this great X:
Those braided extensions were then rolled under, placed into a springform pan, and given an initial egg wash:
Oh, it baked up to be rather gorgeous...and proved to be tasty enough that a sizable hunk was all that I needed for supper. Let's call it a great challah day.
Challah Recipe from Tori Avey, The Shiksa in the Kitchen [Updated 08 May 2023], which I first discovered thanks to the Bon Appétit website. [Published 04 September 2013]
Guidance for braiding the challah from "How to Braid Round Challah - Quick and Easy," from CookKosher.com on YouTube.
Last Friday night's gathering for three featured breakfast for dinner, in the tasty form of savory breakfast bread pudding. I made it way too rich, though, by using brioche loaf instead of a regular pain de mie or sandwich bread...but I still ate my entire oversized slice. If I'm looking at grits as an option for a meal, I'm likely to make grits part of the meal, and that was also an inescapable truth of that weekend-starting grubfest.
Dessert also seemed required but I opted for something that would at least feel lighter and still be special: lemon pudding cake. I suppose I let it cook just past the correct baking time but it was still pretty wildly incredible.
"Savory Bread Pudding," by Charlotte Rutledge of King Arthur Baking. [recipe clipping]
Guidance for making the creamy grits: Luquire Family Stone Ground Grits, milled in Greenwood, SC.
"Lemon Pudding Cake," from Julia Moskin of NYT Cooking. Featured in "Straight from the Home Coop" from 04 April 2012 (original link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/dining/hatching-your-own-batch-of-eggs.html). Recipe was adapted from The Farm, by Ian Knauer. [Accessed online 03 July 2016]
Last Thursday night, with two homemade hamburger buns remaining, I pulled prepped frozen burger patties from the freezer, dropped them into the sous vide, and finished them in a hot skillet and added cheese. In the meantime, I put together a batch of beef and cheddar melts sauce as a step up from the typical "special sauce." With some kettle chips on the side, it was mighty nice to find a dinner plate with a cheeseburger on it, after too long an absence.
"Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation.
Last Tuesday was National Chocolate Milkshake Day and also a gathering of six for dinner. The manageable approach was to make a milkshake ice cream on Monday night—a copycat version of Wendy's chocolate Frosty—followed by baking a cake on Tuesday morning. As shown in the picture at the top, I'm certainly not a food stylist but I don't think the point is the picture! The ice cream was churned in the big freezer chest, with the rock salt and huge bag of ice from the corner market:
And it could hardly be a birthday celebration without that cake. I went with the King Arthur single-layer yellow cake with the American classic goopy fudge frosting. While I deviated slightly from the recipe and got a bit of a scare with the icing, a good dosing of my homemade chocolate sauce brought it into shiny pourable goodness for a very tasteful final rendering:
Ice cream and cake together: now there's a marriage made in belly heaven.
"Classic Yellow Cake with Fudge Frosting," from PJ Hamel of King Arthur Flour. See also PJ's blog post of the same name [Published 26 December 2011]
The recipe for a copycat Wendy's Chocolate Frosty was originally discovered in a discussion thread on the Southern Living blogs, posted by user Pat (pbj1118). Most recipes on the web are not an exact match, although I'm sure they're still good!
Flavor boosted with homemade chocolate syrup, from a batch based on "Hershey's Chocolate Syrup," from Stephanie Manley of CopyKat.com. [Published 25 August 2020 / Updated 15 September 2021]
Last Tuesday night was an occasion for gathering the full crew together at the Roediger House, in a birthday celebration, and it therefore required something feast-worthy. But that doesn't necessarily mean formal and fancy. The menu relied on a generally well-received Cuban-inspired slow-cooked pulled pork, braised in a citrusy liquid with corresponding spices and flavorings. On homemade buns slathered with a cilantro lime sauce, with Mexican slaw on top or on the side, it was a most satisfying dinner as part of a larger delightful evening.
"Slow Cooker Cuban Lechón Asado," from Cory Fernandez of TheKitchn.com. [Published 10 December 2022]
"Cilantro Lime Sauce," from Alexa Blay of Key to My Lime. [Published 04 September 2019]
"Beautiful Burger Buns," from Ellen "Moomie" Dorsey of King Arthur Baking. See also the accompanying blog post, "Burger Buns with a Beautiful Backstory," by PJ Hamel. [Published 28 June 2021]
Spiced-up Coleslaw adapted from "Mexican Coleslaw," from Christin Mahrlig of SpicySouthernKitchen.com. [Published 08 August 2017]
"Taco Seasoning I," from Bill Echols on AllRecipes.com.
Well over four years have passed since I brought out a much-loved and once popular recipe that's been in my collection since 1997: creamy Swiss baked chicken breasts. That was last rainy Sunday evening's supper spread, along with roasted broccoli florets, and it was delicious.
Once the rain had mostly cleared out, I hit these city streets for my daily stroll, and chanced to cross the Church Street bridge over Salem Parkway at an opportune moment as dusk settled over us.
"Easy Creamy Swiss Baked Chicken Breasts," a recipe shared with me by Cindy Coulson in 1997. A matching version of the recipe can be found on Cooks.com.
After enjoying the heck out of some roasted salmon Thursday a week ago, I put away the extra I'd cooked in order to then make some wonderful salmon croquettes. These tasty patties are best accompanied by a simple but amazing aïoli, from a recipe passed on by dear friends in New Jersey quite some years ago. I still had broccoli in the fridge so more roasted florets were ideal to serve as the vegetable. That's what filled the bellies and put smiles on the faces at the Roediger House last Saturday evening.
Adapted from "Salmon Burgers" (p. 396) and "Herb Sauce" (p. 395), from Denise Austin, Shrink Your Female Fat Zones, Rodale Books (2003).
"Chili-Lime Aïoli," from David Wald of Princeton, NJ, May 2009.
Blame the cauliflower head that I'd bought on sale, if you must, but as we approached the end of last week, I knew it was time to cut out the florets, toss them in olive oil, spice them well, and roast them in a good hot oven...just so they'd be the perfect tag-along for a second go at Instant Pot Indian Butter Chicken. This was one of those Instant Pot community buzzed-about recipes that everyone circled around when the initial popularity of multi-cookers exploded onto kitchens everywhere. And my one previous experience of this butter chicken recipe left me happy enough, and this latest version proved quite tasty as well.
While September started with two or three phenomenally gorgeous days, we quickly settled into quite a little heatwave, temps up into the mid-90s, and dry as a bone. I actually scheduled the irrigation system to run in the front and back yards, which I've had to do very little of for most of the summer.
"Pressure Cooker Indian Butter Chicken," from Jay's Sweet -N- Sour Life.
The price of salmon has proved discouraging for quite a while now, so when this week's specials from Harris Teeter came out with a per-pound price of $7.99, I was there for it. Last Thursday, it was awesome to once more look down at my dinner plate and to see perfectly roasted spiced salmon there for the first time since early July. Piled high beside it was the roasted broccoli florets that I never can get quite enough of. The dual benefit—a healthy meal choice and a palate-satisfying selection—brings me back to this menu whenever I can pull it off.
You'll understand that I was pretty hyped to grab another slab of salmon on a subsequent grocery run, to roast and serve up on Monday night.
The first Wednesday of September also happened to be National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and I had the perfect recipe to go along with that: Vietnamese coffee ice cream, now a longtime favorite of the Roediger House ever since I got David Lebovitz's ice cream book some years ago. I made the base last Monday, and churned it Tuesday evening, and it was well set-up by the time the dessert hour arrived that Wednesday night. Oh, I'm glad there was enough extra to go into a to-go container to send down to the neighbors!
"Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream," by David Lebovitz. In The Perfect Scoop. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press (2007), p. 35.
Last Tuesday was National Cheese Pizza Day, and we celebrated at the Roediger House with yet another new pizza crust recipe, plus a homemade thrown-together quick tomato sauce (that was surprisingly delicious so I hate I didn't write down what I did!). When it was all baked up, that cracker-thin crust held up well to the mix of cheeses I added: grated parmesan, sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and even provolone. 'Twas more than enough to eat three pieces.
The dough is enough for two pizzas, so let's be clear about what that implied for the next evening's dinner:
'Twas delicious all over again, and perhaps even better!
"Ultra-Thin Pizza Crust" (recipe) and "This Pizza Crust Is Ultra-Thin" (blog post, published 16 June 2014), from MaryJane Robbins of King Arthur Baking.
The Sunday night of Labor Day weekend was perfect for bringing together the crew of regulars, gathering first around the dinner table and then retreating to the third floor mancave for a stretch of delightful camaraderie. The menu that evening was shaped by the dessert decision (more about that in a moment), where I found myself with two pie crusts, and quiche for supper seemed a tasty option to pursue with that extra one. Bacon, caramelized onion, and Swiss and Gruyère, in a silky eggy custard with additional flavor-enhancing ingredients, baked up beautifully in that crust to give us quite the marvelous quiche. It was a way to shake things up a bit with an unexpected main dish, gilded by the guilty pleasure of having breakfast for dinner. On the side was the option of a pile of spiced roasted potatoes and a handful of plump and juicy seedless grapes.
The dessert I leaned towards for that night was lemon meringue pie, which I'd made somewhat recently and decided I could really stand to have a bit more of. There are lighter desserts than this, but there are also heavier ones, so this seemed a good middle option. I'm regularly inclined to feel like the lemon could have been punched up more but the diners took a shining to it nonetheless.
Recipe based on "Bacon and Caramelized Onion Quiche," from Mountain Mama Cooks.
"All-Butter Pie Crust," from King Arthur Test Kitchen of King Arthur Baking. See also "Butter vs. Shortening: The Great Pie Crust Bake-Off," by PJ Hamel of King Arthur Baking. [Published 23 November 2013]
"Lemon Meringue Pie," based on a classic and common recipe.
Perhaps how good it was back in July made it easy to swing back around relatively soon to pasta with a vodka sauce. The Saturday of Labor Day Weekend presented the ideal opportunity, while in Winston-Salem we enjoyed a third straight day of picture perfect weather. It was a mix of inside and outside time as the day unfolded, an intense dose of yard work, a good 4-mile downtown stroll, and then enjoying sitting and watching and listening to the busy-ness of the neighborhood in eveningtime, when downtown was alive with the concert on Fourth Street and a game at the Winston-Salem Dash's ballpark nearby.
Based on "Penne alla Vodka," from Daniel Gritzer, Senior Culinary Director of SeriousEats.com. [Updated 17 March 2023]
The final day of August was an imitation of a gorgeous September day, almost in anticipation of the turning of the calendar month. But the fully clear blue skies and wonderful breezes, along with low humidity and very comfortable temps, were likely the handiwork of the remnants of Hurricane Idalia, which slammed Florida's big bend region the day before and was skirting the coast as our morning proceeded. While I'm certainly glad not to have been in this system's path, its push of cloud cover as it advanced did keep us from catching sight of the previous evening's August Blue Super Moon.
For the mid-day snack and then again for dinner, it was a pair of loaves of superior banana bread, topped with walnut pieces, eagerly consumed especially because it was so on target. I'd have made the banana bread the day before, and had in fact gone so far as to whip the softened butter and add in the sugars and vanilla...and then a never-before-experienced event occurred: the egg I cracked into the batter was utterly and thoroughly rotten. It all had to be tossed and I had to recover from the sight and smell of it.
The wonderful pleasantness of the night likely had a lot to do with Sumner's resistance to come inside as bedtime approached.
"Carolyn's Banana Bread," a recipe shared by former neighbor Lori Pilon.
