Due to lots of stress, lack of propane to cook with and overall laziness on my part, I haven't made a "real" meal in a while, if that's how you'd like to phrase it. We have a meat, generally a vegetable and a starch every night. Whether they came in the form of a frozen dinner or a Hamburger Helper dinner, or was actually home cooked, well, we won't go there. The natives eat every night, that's enough for me. Since I finally got a gas bottle filled, I decided to get off my ass and cook a "real" meal like I used to. I also decided I wanted to try more new recipes so that I could add some new stuff to our usual menu. This go round would include Texas Roadhouse Rolls which, yep, are the home version of Texas Roadhouse's yeast rolls. If you've ever eaten there, OMG, they are scrumptious! I have a feeling they either have GREAT pastry chefs all over the world that work in these places, or a mass box of frozen rolls that they just pop in the oven and call it a day. I vote for the latter.
Anyway, my meal was to consist of garlic fried chicken bites, homemade mashed potatoes and gravy (let's face it, instant just don't taste the same), whole kernel corn and these fabulous Texas Roadhouse Rolls. Well, because I'm an idiot and failed to thoroughly go over the instructions first, I was in the kitchen for almost 4 hours slaving away to get the rolls right and the chicken done and the potatoes done. Notice how I left out the corn. Yea, after all this, I decided that corn really wasn't essential so I didn't even bother to open the can!
The chicken was ok. It was about what I usually expect. You cube chicken, dip it in egg then into a flour and garlic powder and fry it up! This doesn't take long which would sound amazing but because the chicken cooks quick, you constantly have to be near the pan. You can't exactly do too much with it cooking unless you have a deep fryer. We have a gas stove, obviously, so the temp isn't really regulated. I always make homemade mashed potatoes. I positively HATE instant! Let me just say, once you've got something down and to a "science," don't fuck with it! Just don't! I always cube the potatoes. Well I was trying to take the easy way out so I hooked up one of my new fancy KitchenAid attachments and went to work slicing the potatoes. Big mistake. Sure, they cooked, they were done, but I'm guessing because of the way they were cut, they held water. The potatoes were mushy and watered down. Blegh. My gravy was fantastic though. It too was homemade. The reason I was in the kitchen so long, ready to burn shit down was those damn rolls.
Let's start from the beginning....
I've only ever made any kind of dough homemade, ONE time and that was pie crust. It took it a while to firm up and was highly difficult to work with since it was 100 degrees in my house and the crust kept melting but I made it work! Anyway, this recipes calls for you to mix the yeast, sugar and water til all dry ingredients are dissolved. Check. Then you add in eggs, SCALDED and cooled to lukewarm milk, and..... more sugar I believe. I'm not looking at the recipe people. Oh, and butter, also cooled to lukewarm. Once again, because I didn't read the instructions properly the day before, I had to melt butter and scald the milk. Both containers were set gently in ice baths to cool faster. Maybe that was the problem. Either way, all items are now added to the wonderful KitchenAid where I (I mean, the mixer) used the trusty dough hook to knead the crap out of that dough for about 4 minutes. Well then you chunk it in a greased bowl and you lightly grease the top. I understand the greased bowl but why is there a grease layer on top (more like oil, but you know what I mean!)? First off, that dough was STICKY! Seriously sticky! Notice in the picture how there's quite a lot left in the bowl. Is this supposed to happen?
Then it's supposed to rise, on it's own, with no help from anything but the air temp! Yea, it was slightly cold in my house. This is what it looked like after being in the bowl on it's own for about an hour. No rising. This is what it looked like when I put it in the bowl!
Sorry folks, no picture after it rose. It took forever, but I googled an idea for making it rise faster and was told to heat a bowl of warm water in the microwave to boiling, then quickly remove and stick bowled dough in and heat would help without causing issues. This did work! After rising, you're supposed to roll it out on a flat floured surface with a rolling pin. My counter nor my rolling pin care too much for flour. It just kept wiping off! Well I finally got it rolled out, cut into rectangles and GUESS WHAT? You have to let them rise AGAIN! What's with all the damn rising! Pressed for time I popped them in the oven once they were ALMOST double their size. Perhaps a little more rising would have resulted in fluffier rolls but I was told they were good so either I have an entire family of liars of they were actually decent. They were tasty, just a little dry. Practice makes perfect right. These will be tried again, I'm just hoping I can split the recipe in half. It's supposed to make 24 rolls. Um, there's only 4 of us.... Don't need that much!
