Cinnamon Rolls and Potato Kale Soup

Today we made two of our chosen recipes.

The first was Everyday Cinnamon Rolls. We did not have the recipe chosen before we got groceries so we had to make more substitutions than we would have liked for testing a recipe. For instance: we did not have enough buttermilk so we made some clabbered milk*. We didn't have enough granulated sugar, so we used some Splenda for baking, also our baking soda and baking powder were not as fresh as we would have liked.
* there is a recipe for clabbered milk in the book

Also, we melted the butter, and then too impatient for it to cool we put the bowl of butter in another bowl of ice water, which resulted in butter the consistency of thin pudding.

Now, we don't really know what part of our "adjustments" actually made this happen but the dough was way too sticky. We had to add a ton of flour to get it to be kneadable, and needed a scraper to separate it from the butcher block at times. Then, when we cut the rolls they were very floppy and did not hold their shape well on the way to the pan.

Besides the textural challenges, it worked out fine. The rolls were tasty. They were more of a quick bread than a traditional cinnamon roll, but since they were lighter and could be made relatively quickly, I would still recommend them for a tasty quick bread. I would like to try them again without the substitutions we made today.

For dinner, we made potato kale soup. One substitution was bacon for the chorizo. Chorizo would have been excellent in this soup, but I forgot to pick it up at the coop. Bacon was a good substitute. We did add a little larger pinch of crushed red pepper. Also, we used onion soup mix, mixed with boiling water for two of the six cups of chicken broth, but strained out most of the onions. It turned out very yummy - a definite do again.



This day included a lot of substituting and thinking on our feet, which is one of my favorite parts of cooking, but isn't always fair to the recipe you are trying out.

WW points plus are for the recipes as listed. Everyday cinnamon roll (one roll) is 8 pts, soup is 7 its for 1 and 1/2 cups.