Rolling with the punches

How was your Thanksgiving? Mine was…interesting. Let’s see, I dropped a buffet table on my feet and now have a set of matching bruises that don’t coordinate with any of my outfits. I spent the bulk of the time my family was here being irritated with my brother. I won’t go into details because.. siblings? Fighting? On a holiday? Whoever heard of such a thing? Let’s just say it’s amazing how quickly we can fall into old patterns of behavior, especially when a younger sibling hasn’t changed much in the 20 years since he hit puberty. Although, he did call to wish me a happy birthday today and I’m pretty sure 20 years ago he only acknowledged my birthday enough to wish I was never born.

I have to say the most memorable part of Thanksgiving, 2007 was my attempt at re-creating Nathan’s mom’s famous dinner rolls. It wasn’t really a recipe she followed so much as a technique; she’d thaw some frozen bread dough, pull it apart, roll it into balls, place the balls in a greased cake pan, let them rise and then bake them. Sounds easy enough, right? I thought so, so I suggested to Nathan we try to make our Thanksgiving rolls that way.

In the twelve years I knew her, I had witnessed my mother-in-law make these rolls countless times, but apparently I did not pay close enough attention to the technique because everything in between thawing the dough and serving the rolls was kind of a blur. My mind kept going from “first there’s dough” to “then there’s rolls” not realizing it really is quite important how big you make those balls of dough before you put them in the pan to rise. Another thing I failed to realize is dough meant to make six loaves of bread might be a little, shall we say, unwieldy, when divided between only two cake pans.

By the time we were ready to bake these suckers, the pan on the left had taken on a life of it’s own. The dough had risen to the point it was touching the oven door, so we chucked it and only baked the pan on the right. They actually turned out pretty good and the best part about it was we got a great laugh, and it wasn’t one of those, “this sucks now but we’ll laugh later” kind of things. We cracked up as soon as we opened the oven door. And then we took the picture.