Every weekend, we sit around and plot our meals for the week. Generally one trip to the grocery store follows the meal planning and we rarely stray from the plan. We may not get around to cooking everything we planned to cook but we don’t usually decide to make something completely different once the shopping is done.

Despite having done this for about 2 years, planning meals for the entire week is a challenge for me. I used to be the type that would make a zillion trips to the store and would decide what I wanted to cook on a complete whim. This ended up costing a lot of money and I wasted a lot of food. I also worked in a restaurant for a long time and quite honestly didn’t have to cook that many real dinners. I pretty much never had to think about what to eat for lunch since the restaurant fed me. In addition, I detested leftovers and rarely wanted to make something that would last for several meals.

Fast forward to now and life is pretty different. Instead of working 4+ nights a week, I’m home every night and need to have something to eat for dinner just about every night. I also take lunch with me to work most of the time. When we plan our meals for the week, we think about what we want to eat for lunch and dinner for a full week. To make decision making a little easier, we keep a list of all of the meals I’ve cooked that we liked enough to eat again. We also have to think about leftovers. It’s rare that I don’t cook something with the intention of eating it again at least once. All this planning is not an easy task. For me, it takes a little bit of the fun out of cooking. I liked the old way…where I would wake up and decide what I felt like cooking. Fortunately I still get to bake on a whim as we don’t plan desserts or baked goods in advance and I keep enough supplies in the house to bake nearly anything we might crave.

So…here’s what we’ve planned to eat this week. Pretty much everything on the list will be eaten more than once.

Pork Fried Rice - I use a variation of the recipe in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I’ve made this enough times that I don’t actually need the cookbook anymore. This is great reheated in the microwave and even better if you fry it a second time. Also, my version is made with brown rice.

Potato Leek Soup – I like mine pureed and topped with cheese and chives. The topping is not necessarily traditional but it’s delicious. The version I’ll make is from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.

Shrimp Cakes with Tartar Sauce - Like crab cakes…but with shrimp. I found a great recipe online last year at Je Mange la Ville and this will be the recipe I use again this week.

Turkey and Muenster Cheese Sandwiches on Homemade Oatmeal Wheat Bread - I could eat turkey sandwiches every day so they’re a common item when we plan meals. The bread recipe is slightly adapted from one found in the February 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Living. It’s great tasting and doesn’t get stale as fast as a lot of the homemade breads I’ve made.

If all of the food above doesn’t last until Saturday, we’ll have baked potatoes or eggs or vegetables or even a bowl of cereal. We probably won’t have to resort to any of these as I usually make more than enough food.

And then there’s dessert. I don’t have anything planned for later in the week but I did already bake a batch of dark chocolate oatmeal cookies – minus the oatmeal and white chocolate chips in the recipe. Instead I used toffee bits and peanut butter chips. Still very delicious…so much so that they won’t last all week. By Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll need to dream up something else.

P.S. Let me know if you want to stop by for dinner…we’ve usually got plenty of food!

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Back in February, I tweeted (and in effect Facebooked*) a request for a good potato roll recipe. Sadly I only got one response. Not so sadly, the response I got yielded my new favorite dinner rolls.

The boyfriend’s boss provided the recipe. I believe she told me that it’s her mother’s recipe. Susan, thank you for giving me such a great recipe! It’s a recipe that I will more than likely commit to memory and use for the rest of my baking days.

* I have it set up so that my tweets on Twitter are automatically posted to Facebook as status updates. A lot of people think I spend an absurd amount of time updating Facebook. I don’t. But I do write a lot of tweets.

I’ve made these rolls 3 or 4 times and it’s pretty likely I’ll make them again this weekend. Like most bread, they’re best fresh out of the oven. But these taste nearly as good as fresh when lightly reheated. Even better, they taste nearly as good as fresh when lightly reheated and 4 days old. This is what makes them the best rolls ever. It’s easy to make homemade bread that tastes wonderful fresh from the oven. It’s not so easy to make homemade bread that tastes nearly as good as fresh when it’s several days old.

These potato rolls are incredibly delicious and soft and tender and buttery and delicious and pillowy. They’re good by themselves or with a hint of butter. Make them a little larger and use them as sandwich rolls.

I did make a couple of slight modifications to the recipe I was given. The main thing I altered is the use of butter instead of shortening. I also added a little bit of honey in lieu of a little bit of sugar.

I also made a batch of these using half wheat and half white flour. I like the all white flour ones better but the wheat ones were pretty tasty as well.

Best Rolls Ever aka Potato Rolls

Yields approximately 30-36 dinner rolls

Ingredients

• 1 cup mashed potatoes (You’ll need enough potatoes to make 1 cup of mashed potatoes…)
• 2/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup scalded milk (I used 2%)
• 5 to 6 cups flour (I used half bread flour and half unbleached all-purpose flour)
• 1 packet dry active yeast
• 1/2 cup lukewarm reserved potato water with 1 teaspoon sugar added to it.

Directions

1. Boil potatoes until tender. Drain water, reserving 1/2 cup for use in rolls. Finely mash potatoes and measure 1 cup for rolls. Cool mashed potatoes to nearly room temperature.
2. Dissolve yeast in the lukewarm potato water. Set aside for 5 minutes. (It should be foamy after 5 minutes.)
3. In bowl of stand mixer with paddle attachment, mix together mashed potatoes, butter, eggs, sugar, honey and salt. Mix together on medium speed for about 2 minutes.
4. Add yeast mixture to lukewarm milk. Stir.
5. Add the yeast and milk mixture to the potato mixture. Mix on low speed until blended.
6. Gradually add flour (one cup at a time) until a soft dough forms.
7. Switch to the dough hook attachment on the stand mixer and knead for about 5 minutes at low speed.
8. Place dough in lightly oiled bowl. Put dough is a slightly warm place, cover it and let the dough double.
9. Punch down dough and shape into rolls. Place rolls about  1 1/2 inches apart on parchment paper lined baking sheets. I have pretty large baking sheets and I used two.
10. Sprinkle rolls with a touch of flour if desired. Let dough rise again.
11. Bake in a preheated oven set at 400 degrees for approximately 12 minutes.

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Come back in about 2 days for a post about homemade croissants. Making these croissants occupied a lot of my weekend so I don’t really feel like talking about them anymore today. Maybe tomorrow?

In case you were wondering: Yes, all 5 sticks of butter in the picture were used for the croissants. Yes, this is an obscene amount of butter. Yes, this is an unhealthy amount of butter. Yes, butter is probably going to kill me (if bacon doesn’t get me first). And yes, they are delicious.

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Eating homemade cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning is apparently a tradition in my boyfriend’s family. Last year we spent Christmas morning alone and he made the cinnamon rolls himself the night before. This year, we spent Christmas morning at home alone again and I was given the cinnamon roll baking duties. I should mention that I was given this duty with a warning of “They’d better be good.” It was almost an insinuation that I would ruin Christmas if they weren’t good.

Cinnamon rolls (or buns) are one of my favorite yeasted breads but it’s hard to make a batch that taste good both fresh out of the oven and reheated 2 days later. Almost any recipe tastes good fresh…it’s the 2 days later thing that poses a challenge. Last year’s Christmas cinnamon rolls were from Baking Illustrated and they were mediocre at best. They got rather hard when reheated. We blame the recipe not the baker. But I should note that the cream cheese frosting recipe for their cinnamon buns is a winner. I also made the pumpkin cinnamon rolls from the blog Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk a couple of times this year and while they were rather fantastic, we wanted to try a new recipe for Christmas. So I went to the internet.

I wanted to make delicious cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning. I also wanted them to be pretty much ready to go Christmas morning. Yet I didn’t want to bake them the night before. Nothing beats that fresh from the oven taste. I cruised Food Gawker and Tastespotting for just a few minutes when I found the 3 magic words I was looking for: overnight cinnamon rolls. In addition, those 3 magic words were preceded by the name Alton Brown. This sounded like a winner. Despite my adoration of Alton Brown (and frequent viewership when I used to have cable), I have never made any of his recipes. Until now.

These were perfect. All the work was done on Christmas Eve. All I had to do on Christmas morning was let them rise for a little while and bake them. I made the icing the night before as well. The only hard part on Christmas morning was waiting for them to be cool enough to eat without burning the roof of my mouth.

I think the loads of egg yolks and buttermilk in this recipe are what made them so fantastic. Don’t skip the buttermilk. And try to find really eggy eggs. The kind with blazing orange yolks. Yes, they’re probably way more expensive than the other eggs…but they’re worth every penny.

The recipe for Alton Brown’s Overnight Cinnamon Rolls was found on the Food Network website. Or click here.

Since it’s hard for me to follow a recipe verbatim, the handful of changes I made to the recipe are listed below for your edification.

• The recipe gives directions for making 12 large rolls. We prefer smaller ones so I divided the dough into smaller pieces and made 24 rolls. They still fit in my 9″x13″ pan and all was well. So well that I ate 3 of the little ones in barely one sitting. This might explain why I felt ill for a good part of Christmas Day.
• We like filling. Lots and lots of filling. To accommodate for our love of filling, I made a batch and a half of it. And I probably used a little more cinnamon than the recipe wanted me to use. All was well again.
• Despite my claim of hating raisins, I like them baked into bread with cinnamon. So I added raisins to the recipe. Just sprinkle them in over the filling before you roll the dough.
• I used half the prescribed amount of sugar and substituted honey for the sugar that I didn’t use. I pretty much do this with all of the breads I bake. Honey makes it better. Especially when it’s local honey made by someone you know.
• I added a little bit of vanilla extract to the icing. Maybe a teaspoon. I have to admit that I did not measure the vanilla. I rarely do. It’s risky not to measure but I haven’t totally messed up a recipe this way yet.

Because these turned out so well, I didn’t ruin Christmas. Thank you Alton Brown!

I hope all of your holidays went as well as mine did!

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For Wordless Wednesday information and posts, go here.

Because you’re likely to ask, this cinnnamon-raisin bread is from a recipe in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook.

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Quote from  American consultant, statistician and educator W. Edwards Deming

I believe that these pictures of my blueberry almond bread pudding officially mark the end of the blog posts about the goodies I made with all those fresh blueberries I picked earlier this summer. Took me long enough, eh?

The inspiration for this bread pudding came from a post at Food Gawker over the summer. I really like to use sites like Tastespotting and Food Gawker to find new food to make and bake. Anytime I’m bored by my own ideas and my own cookbooks, all I need to do is to turn to the food blogs for an endless set of options.

This particular recipe was adapted from a recipe at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once.

As usual, I did make a few alterations to the original recipe. I used fresh blueberries instead of frozen as I had plenty of fresh ones available. I baked the brioche from scratch from a recipe in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I did take a few shortcuts in baking it (as I really didn’t want to wait 24 hours to bake the brioche) and it probably would have tasted better if I hadn’t taken them.

The original recipe used a Meyer lemon marmalade in the filling. I skipped that entirely as I had no Meyer lemon marmalade and no way of obtaining or making any since Meyer lemons weren’t in season. Instead of the marmalade, I used copious amounts of amaretto and slivered almonds to add a little more flavor to the pudding.

I also used a lot more cream and eggs than the recipe called for as it seemed too dry otherwise…but maybe I made my bread pudding in a larger quantity than the original recipe?

This was the first bread pudding I’ve ever made but it certainly won’t be the last. Next time I may or may not go to the trouble of baking the brioche from scratch…baking the brioche wasn’t difficult but it takes a long time to prepare…and then I had to wait another day to assemble and bake the bread pudding. The anticipation of the eventual dessert killed me…enough so that the next time I make bread pudding, I might start with stale French bread from the grocery store to save myself a day.

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