Fun with rouladen

I’ve posted more than a few times about our traditional German sauerbraten dinners.  (Mmmmmm, my mouth is watering just thinking about it!)

Yesterday, though, I decided to delve into uncharted cooking territory and attempt another dish that my mom made often (far more often than she made sauerbraten) during my childhood: rouladen.  Rouladen usually consist of bacon, onions, carrots, mustard and pickles, wrapped in thinly sliced beef which is then cooked.

When rouladen are all cooked and ready to be devoured, they look something like this:

You’ll notice that I stole this photo from Google images – specifically from “What a Dish.” (Thanks, “What a Dish”!)  You know why I had to resort to stealing photos from Google images?  Because we (“we” being all the kids plus SOs, along with Eva, the now-24-year-old ex-exchange student from Germany for whom I was an AFS liaison back in 2006, and who is currently student teaching at a local high school) were so busy having a good time and visiting that I simply forgot to take photos of our celebration and finished meal!  (Yes, I AM out of blogging practice, but I am doing my best to post more often this year.)

So I don’t have photos of everyone hanging out in the kitchen drinking good German beer or of us making the other dishes that we served with the rouladen… 

(Well, that’s not entirely true.  I do have this one photo of Tom making the spaetzle while Peter kept him company:)

…but I DO have photos of the process of making rouladen.  If you have a realio-trulio German along to help you, it’s even more fun!

Here’s the cast of characters:

Most importantly, you’ll need about two slices of thinly sliced top round per person, each piece about 3” x 7” x 1/4.”  Our butcher sliced these for us and they were gorgeous!

You’ll also need salt and pepper, German sweet mustard, bacon, onions (you can simply sauté them; I totally annihilated caramelized them), baby carrots or thin carrot slices, German pickles (“die Riesen” are unlike any American pickle, sort of a cross between sweet and dill.  These were given to us by my dear friend Christel, also aus Germany!) and, for the gravy, beef broth, corn starch, and some sour cream.

Here’s the fun (read: messy) part:

For each roulade, season the meat with salt and pepper, then spread some (that’s an official culinary term; it means “as much as you want) mustard onto the flat meat.

Next, lay a piece of uncooked bacon lengthwise smack-dab in the middle of the meat, like so:

Now spoon some onions at the end closest to you:

Add a small carrot or a thin carrot stick:

And lastly, add a thin strip of pickle. 

What?  You want a photo of the pickle added?  Hmmmm.  I don’t have one!  You know why?  Because either I totally forgot to add the pickle to this piece of meat or I totally forgot to take a photo when I did add the pickle!  Fortunately I have a photo of when I added the pickle but totally forgot to add the bacon!

Hey, just have fun with it!  Yes, that’s my excuse.

Speaking of fun, this is the fun part.  Start rolling!

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a friend from Germany to help you.  This is just how Eva and I roll.  (Sorry…)

In order to secure each roulade, you’ll need either toothpicks (which we used), string (which my mother used), or some of these things (thank you Google images!):

Reminder to self: get some rouladen clips when we go to Europe in May (yes, I will blog that trip – I promise!).

This must be when I started my second beer because I pretty much stopped taking pictures at this point.

Once all twenty of our rouladen were rolled, we cooked them on high heat in our large electric frying pan, turning the heat way up to braise them and then down again to cook them until all pink in the meat was gone. 

At that point, we transferred them to the crock pot…

…leaving the drippings in the frying pan.

We then made a roux from the drippings, slowly adding beef broth and a little corn starch until it was gravy consistency, and then we poured gravy that over the rouladen.

And then we just let those little guys cook on low heat for a few hours while we made the kasespaetzle – which I took next to no photos of… but here’s one from our sauerbraten dinner.  (Same idea, except that yesterday we made about a fifth of that amount!)

About 15 minutes before you plan to serve the rouladen, add about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sour cream to the crock pot.  To make it easier, I removed all the rouladen, stirred the sour cream into the gravy, and then replaced the rouladen.

I wish I had taken photos of our plates filled with this deliciousness and of the whole “Mishpocheh” (look it up… in a Yiddish dictionary) enjoying each other’s company, but I am so out of blogging practice that I totally forgot! 

Which gives us reason to do this whole thing again sometime soon!

A how-to: 100% make-ahead brunch menu

We entertained some friends this past Saturday morning at 11:30 in the morning.  Would you believe that I hardly lifted a finger that morning, instead enjoying a very calm and stress-free morning before they arrived?

I used to not like putting on brunches because it meant a frenetic weekend morning – and who wants that?!  But no more!  I found three recipes that can all be made ahead of time, making for a lovely, stress-free entertaining day.

Here’s the menu:

Fruit parfaits (assembled the evening before and refrigerated until ready to serve):

Veggie and with-meat stradas (also assembled the day before and refrigerated overnight until ready to bake):

Break-apart cinnamon yeast rolls (easily assembled the evening before and left to rise overnight, then baked in the morning):

Unfortunately, I haven’t been back in the blogging mindset long enough to have taken photos as I put everything together. A year or two ago I would have taken photos of the entire process and blogged it immediately.  Be patient with me; I’m hobbling back slowly!

I’ll cheat and use a few links – just this once.  Here you go, the “recipe” for each item – and I use the term “recipe” lightly here!

The fruit parfaits are made with:

• Assorted berries – fresh in the summer, frozen in the winter

  

• Fit and Light Yogurt (or any vanilla yogurt)
• Granola

  

As you can see, all you need to do is layer the ingredients in parfait (or any clear) glasses, beginning with the granola, then followed by the yogurt, and topped with the berries.  I had set aside a gorgeous raspberry to put on top of a “spritz of spritz” (a dollop of whipped cream) at the last minute, but I totally forgot to do that… since I was so relaxed perhaps?!

I assembled the parfaits at about 10 PM the evening before.  You don’t want them “brewing” for too long.

For the strada, I just followed the basics of any strada recipe (here’s one), altering the ingredients to include the veggies I wanted to use (mushrooms, spinach, onions, red peppers).  I added cooked breakfast sausage to one so I could offer both a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian version. This took me about 30 – 40 minutes to prepare the afternoon before our get-together.  In a nutshell, you layer bread in a casserole, add some sautéed veggies, pour an egg/milk mixture over everything, cover it, and set it in the fridge overnight.

After you bake it the next morning, it looks something like this:

I posted all about the pull-apart rolls here.

Ingredients:

About 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (actually, I "rollerpin" them in a sandwich bag)
About 15 frozen yeast dinner rolls
About 1/2 package (3.4 oz) butterscotch instant pudding mix
About 1/2 cup brown sugar
About 1/2 cup melted butter
About 2 t. cinnamon

For this, I have step-by-step pics!

"Chop" the nuts until they're just the right size for a coffee cake topping. As my mother would say, "Dass fuelt man." (One feels when it's right.)

Place the chopped nuts in the bottom of your greased bundt pan.

Place the frozen rolls over the nuts. I put down one row, then added a few more rolls on top of that.

Sprinkle the pudding mix evenly over the frozen rolls.

Melt the butter...

Add the brown sugar...

...and the cinnamon...

...and pour that gooey, luscious mixture over the rolls, trying to moisten the butterscotch powder.

Cover the whole thing with a towel and let sit overnight. (I put the pan in the bathroom. Why? I don't know; it's a tradition. Whenever we need yeast to rise, like on Thanksgiving, there's a towel-covered bundt pan in the bathroom. It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving around here without a towel-covered bundt pan in the bathroom.)
Get up in the morning and shuffle into the bathroom. You will be greeted by this:

Before you have coffee (but after you pee), stick the pan in a pre-heated 350 degree over and set the timer to 25 minutes.
When the timer goes off, you'll be greeted by this:

Let cool slightly, then turn upside-down onto a plate and observe with all your senses!

In the morning you’ll be greeted by stradas that are ready to bake, rolls that are ready to bake (you could probably bake them together, but I baked the rolls first and then the strada; budget about 1 1/2 to 2 hours for all the baking if you do it that way), and parfaits that are sitting in the fridge, ready to go.  I set the table outside in the morning…

…but if we had eaten inside I could have gotten that done in the morning, too.

Even the coffee can be pre-programmed to be ready in the morning! (Don’t forget to put out some Kahlua!)

The mimosas, though, will need to be made when you want them – and yes, before noon is acceptable!  Hey, a simple mixing of champagne and orange juice isn’t too much to do on the morning of your event, is it?

Have fun – and let me know how things turned out for you!

Artichoke & Jalapeno Chicken Dinner

Whenever Tom shops at Costco he brings home a tub of this:

It’s not exactly diet food or even remotely healthy, so I generally stay away from it. 

But yesterday I was looking for something quick and easy to make for dinner and when I opened the fridge, the tub of artichoke & jalapeno dip was staring was staring back at me and I had an idea.

I sautéed some onions (you can never go wrong with sautéed onions, right?) and added some bite-size chicken tenderloins.

 

Then I very slowly added another ingredient that you can’t really go wrong with…

I added some dip…

…and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

I’d gotten the rice cooker started when I first decided to experiment with the dip, because how could brown rice not go with a dinner like this?

And voila – dinner is served!

I wish I had a photo of Kat’s face when she tasted this!  I knew that she doesn’t like artichokes, but I wasn’t aware that she detests them. (And she also doesn’t like green beans, so I definitely struck out with her!) 

But I loved this and probably had more than I should have.  As far as I know, Tom liked it too, but he’s been so exhausted from both work and the bathroom remodel that he’s in zombie-land… so who knows how he felt about it.  (He did have two helpings.)

I left the empty chicken bag on the counter and turned around to see this.  Weird cat.

Boo in a Bag

This ain’t no mother/daughter cupcake party!

Oh, no.  When the daughters, best friends since junior high are the ripe old age of 27, they are so much more mature…

And the mothers?  Well, we’re all no longer spending the majority of our days being…this:

And we’ve all come to really enjoy our mother/daughter friendships.  (Oh wait, does that imply that we ever didn’t?  Nah, couldn’t be!) So what do we do?  We get together for occasional mother/daughter cooking parties! 

Last night we cooked a Thai meal in our new kitchen… where the bar is a perfect gathering place for chatting and munching on hors deurves…

 

…and there’s plenty of room for lots of cooks.

Of course, chopping and cooking with one hand reserved for the wine glass takes a little longer.  But with company like this, THAT’S the whole point!

Before we knew it, dinner was served.

Here’s all of us, sitting down for a meal of deliciousness!

Cheers!

I’m not sure how the conversation steered to my mother’s fur coats and willed and bequeathed jewelry, but the evening eventually came to this:

Mom would have really loved to be at this little gathering – and I guess that, in a way, she was.