From Our Grandma
Dedicated readers might remember that we called our grandma last week to ask her about pumpkin spice. Now, she wasn’t particularly helpful in the spice milieu, but we did get to talking about food in general. She asked us if we were making something. “God, no,” we said, so she asked us, “Why not?” We won’t bore you with the Shakespearian lengths to which we went in explaining our laziness, but we came away from the conversation with an easy cinnamon roll recipe from the old bag (KIDDING—WE LOVE GRANDMA!), and that sounds pretty OK for fall. Anyway, here’s how to do it:
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Fast Cinnamon Rolls
“I like this one because it only takes a little bit of time and I don’t have to knead the dough,” says grandma, who also describes why her hands hurt in great detail. All told, she says, this should take folks in the neighborhood of 30 minutes.
The Dough
-3 tbsps. softened butter
-2 cups flour
-2 tsps. baking powder
-As much salt as you like, though about a tsp. should do it
-1 cup milk
-1 egg
The Cinnamony Inside Stuff
-1/2 cup white sugar
-1/2 cup brown sugar
-1 and 1/2 tbsp. cinnamon
The Icing
“This part might be the easiest,” says grandma.
-1 cup powdered sugar
-3 tbsps. heavy cream
-1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
In a bowl, mix those things together until you get the consistency you want.
The Steps for the Main Event
“Just remember to move at your own pace and not rush, even if it seems easy,” advises grandma.
1. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees and grease one of those square baking pans (“I don’t know how big they are, darling, but they’re a perfect square,” grandma explains. We did some research, and 9x9-inch pans seem to be the norm).
2. Setting the sugars and the cinnamon aside, get your other dry ingredients all mixed up together in a bowl, then carefully and sensually hand-mix the softened butter in while making sounds like “Ungggggggh,” all soft, like a whisper. In a separate bowl, beat the milk and egg. Combine and stir until you get dough—it’ll be kind of soft.
3. In another bowl, mix the sugars and the cinnamon until they’re kinda uniform, then sprinkle some of that combo onto the bottom of the pan, knowing you’ll need to still have some set aside for later.
4. Pour that dough straight from the bowl onto your floured cutting board or whatever surface you make stuff on. “If you want, you can melt a little butter in a dish and pour or brush it on the dough,” grandma explains. “I haven’t had a brush in a long time, though, and mine still turn out fine.” Sprinkle the rest of the sugar and cinnamon on top.
5. Give it just about two minutes, then roll the whole thing into a long dough tube, cut into smaller rolls and pop them into that pan we were talking about before. “I want to say you’ll get 12, but it might be 18,” grandma tells us. “Oh, I’d remember better if I could remember the size of the pan. Well, just eyeball it, darling, it will be fine.”
6. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until they look pretty good to you—you know, all golden brown.
7. Let cool a little then ice those fools.
8. Eat those fools.
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As always, if you make it, snap a photo and show us!
We were looking for Prince, but remembered his estate is VERY litigious. Also, ladies love Peter Steele (RIP). Seriously.
Also
-It’s really more of an Albuquerque thing, but Vinaigrette sister projects The Feel Good and Modern General Feed and Seed are reopening in the city to the south on Sept. 28 after the whole pandemic thing made ‘em not, uh, be open. Why, that’s this week! EVEN AS WE SPEAK THEY ARE OPEN! You might recall the owner of these businesses as Erin Wade, the very same person who told food delivery apps where they could stick it last April.
-Thanks to eagle-eyed Fork reader Ellen, who sent us a sign from the door, we’ve learned the folks at Yin-Yang Chinese restaurant are dealing with a family emergency and closed through the rest of the month. We wish them well and hope to be elbow-deep in a thing of sesame tofu soon.
-Meanwhile, reader Deborah tells us the pumpkin shake at Blake’s Lotaburger has an effing slice of pumpkin pie whirled in there, and it’s basically the only thing we’ve ever cared about even a little bit at all. If y’all get one, will you tell us more about it?
-You might have heard Susan’s Fine Wine & Spirits is back on Agua Fría Street, and you heard right. Here’s a link to the site, tell ‘em The Fork sent you.
-Lastly in local stuff for the week, you’re gonna start smelling chile roasting soon. Buy it. Buy all of it. Just go over to wherever you smell it, and buy it all up.
More Tidbits
-Last week we told you about a Sam Adams beer so strong that states were literally like, “Don’t come here, beer!” And this week, we’re here to tell you about Rock on Lager, a beer from Oregon’s Crosby Hops that will reap bucks for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund—basically a way for music folks screwed by COVID-19 to get a little assistance. We’re not sure how to get some, but we’re gonna try to find out.
-Apparently if you bought chicken at any point during the last 10 years, you could possibly take part in a class action suit dubbed the Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation. Boiled down (or broiled down?), the suit claims price fixing in the poultry industry dating back to 2009, which resulted in consumers overpaying for their chicken. Learn more here and then consider how strange it is that we eat birds.
-Oh, drag, there’s pumpkin spice toilet paper now. Have fun giving it to your friends, white people/comedy geniuses. It will in no way be a waste of paper and time.
-We’ve been trashing employers who want to treat employees poorly for months now, and according to the fine folks at Eater-dot-com, things might be changing. In a piece from earlier this week, writer Jaya Saxena says restaurants are maybe, possibly, finally seeing the benefit in not underpaying staff. Who among us hasn’t seen a Facebook post about this very thing? As always, be cool.
-Ummmmm......a recipe for cashew curry? Yes, please. Find it right here from the nerds at Saveur.
-Lastly in the world of not-just-around-here, CNN-dot-com reports that you can get your grubby little hands on choco-covered cicadas. Why? Well, they’re not ENTIRELY different from shrimp if we really boil it down. And don’t you want to live the kind of life where you don’t wonder if you’d have liked the choco-bugs?
This is literally 10 hours of cicada sounds, and we wonder if someone is going to think, “Really?” and click it, only to then think to themselves something like “Dunno what I was expecting.”
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
In this week’s print edition of SFR, the intrepid Riley Gardner visited Joe’s Dining to give us the lowdown on why it’s been a Santa Fe brunch staple for 20 years. Read Riley’s piece here.
Number of Letters Received
30
*We were scared that people would have pumpkin spice angries, but they did not.
Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)
Our boss told us someone was really trashing us on Facebook this week, to which we say “Cool—read something else, ya jamoke. We’re trying to get someplace real.”
*Yeah!
Actually Helpful Tip(s)
“Once, while making pizza, I felt a welling up of something from deep in my childhood and thought of how the manicotti and ravioli I had then often had a touch of nutmeg in it. This might seem counterintuitive, until you taste it. So I made a four-cheese pizza with ricotta and nutmeg and black pepper on a sprinkling of olive oil, and this was topped with mozzarella, pecorino, and parmigiano. It brought tears to my eyes and is now a standard.”
*Jeff D. is our new favorite!
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Rolled up into a tube of dough,
The Fork
