Mr. Aitch and I had shrimp on the grill Saturday night and had some leftover. Not enough for another meal but enough for something.
So I put on my thinking cap and came up with a version of Shrimp Alfredo using ingredients that I had on hand: low-fat cream cheese, Romano cheese, milk, garlic powder, red peppers, and egg noodles. And of course, the shrimp seasoned with Old Bay. We also had a fresh garden salad.
And wine. Always wine.
I decided to write down the recipe after we tasted it. Yummy!
Mr. Aitch and I are snobs.
Bread snobs.
We can barely eat mass-produced bread from the store. Most of it feels gummy and tastes, well, tasteless.
The texture of bread is known as the crumb and it can be open or close. Open has a lot of texture and close doesn’t. Most store-bought mass-produced breads have a close crumb. IMHO that equates to the gumminess. That’s all I know about bread baking but it’s enough for me to know.
In my experience most store-bought mass-produced bread is full of preservatives which can be good as the bread doesn’t mold as quickly. Locally baked breads from our local bakers tend not to use preservatives in their bread. Their bread has more texture like what my grandmother used to bake. One problem is that it molds quickly. Unrefrigerated and you’ve got maybe 2-3 days before it gets fuzzy.
We don’t eat a like of sliced bread in our house so the solution we came up with involves frozen bread dough. Yes, it still has preservative in it but we get the texture we like and can have freshly baked bread and rolls every day or two.
Our oven stays off during the summer. It’s the Mr. Aitch Law in our house. So how do we get freshly baked bread and rolls?
The gas grill.
We only bake enough that the two of us can eat within a few days.
Since we grill almost every day, it’s not a problem to do bread, or rolls, or hamburger buns, or pepperoni rolls, or cinnamon rolls when we need/want them.
The smell of freshly baked bread just makes me hungry. 🙂
Mr. Aitch and I love freshly baked bread and rolls. In fact we’ve been known to have that and a bottle of wine for dinner! Unfortunately it’s just too darn hot in the summer to turn on the oven. We usually end up having store-bought “freshly” baked bread or rolls. Until now.
I cheated and used the frozen bread dough already shaped into rolls.
I sprayed the 8×8 aluminium pan with cooking spray. Then I placed nine rolls in the pan and sprayed a piece of plastic wrap with the cooking spray. This was placed over the rolls (spray side down) to keep them from sticking to the plastic while rising.
Once they were doubled (or tripled) in size, Mr. Aitch fired up the grill to 400 F. Our grill has three burners so he turned off the center burner (indirect heat) and we placed the uncovered pan of risen rolls right on the cooking grate.
Sorry for the overexposed photo but we were in a hurry! He closed the lid, set the timer and turned them half way through the baking time according to the directions on the package. He was able to maintain a fairly consistent temperature (350 F) adjusting the burners as needed.
18 minutes later we had freshly baked rolls. Perfect.
After we took them off the grill, I dumped them out of the pan, brushed the tops with a little bit of bacon grease then wrapped them in a cloth to keep warm while he grilled the rest of our dinner.
We’ve done this twice within a week and can’t wait to do this again.
Have you grilled anything unusual?
On the third row of the neck shaping I discovered this:
Dropped stitches
I somehow dropped the first three stitches. It must have happened when I was detangling the yarn. Fortunately I saved the project before it got off to much. Now I only have 20 more rows and I can shape, sew the seams and block the finished top. Will there be a fashion show by the end of the week? We can only hope!
Last nights dinner:
Pre-kebab and dessert
Dinner on the grill
Knitting In Flashes 