Nikki Heated

Continued from yesterday's post, my Nikki Heat story has a happy ending. Usually try to save the best for last, but this iPhone photo tells a better story than all the rest.

Beau and Beck have to wait for Gran's rolls

Lightly flour work surface and rolling pin

Plop out the dough and start rolling into a rectangle

An imperfect rectangle, I might add. Then slather with REAL butter, room temperature.

Mix high quality cinnamon and sugar, about half and half.

Spread to within an inch or half-inch on all sides.

Start rolling along wide side of rolled-out  dough.

Gently, so the sugar and cinnamon stay put.

There you go. Press seam into dough before cutting.

Cut about one-inch wide slices and leave room for rolls to rise. Cover with a towel and let rise overnight.

In the morning, voila. Ready to bake.

350 degrees for 15–18 minutes. Do not over bake.

Baby Bear porridge: just right

Glaze: 2 T. butter, 2 T. milk, 1 t. vanilla, 1 1/2 c. powdered sugar

Keep stirring

Stir until smooth and not a bit grainy.

Start icing while rolls are still warm.

There will be "orpha-lans"–end pieces and ugly rolls that don't fit in the pan.

Luscious

Share these delectable rolls so that you don't wind up on The Biggest Loser.

Care and Feeding of Nikki Heat

Nikki Heat needs stirring every day

When a friend gave me some of her family legacy sourdough starter several weeks ago, I had no idea how much attention this would require.

Cover sourdough with a towel as it needs to breathe.

After naming this creature Nikki Heat for detective Kate Beckett on the television series, Castle, I even had to arrange for a friend to care for and feed the beast when I went out of town. Miss Nikki Heat, sourdough starter, has made a place for herself on my kitchen counter.

My family is starting to love her. 

Already I had to move to a bigger bowl, and the plastic lid on top of the towel keeps the dough from drying out. 

The down side is also the upside. Lots of yummy rolls, as often as I want to make them, so long as I plan ahead. Down, because our weight could go up. Up, because Nikki makes magnificent rolls.

And at last, after numerous iterations, I have perfected cinnamon rolls made from this sourdough.

Here's how to make the dough for either dinner rolls or cinnamon rolls. 

Measure 2 c. all purpose flour into bowl

Add to flour 1 t. salt

Next add 1/4 c. oil

then 1/2 c. water

to this you will add sourdough mixture

scoop out 1 c. of sourdough mix

goopy looking stuff

That's it. Just 5 ingredients

Mix well

See how clean the sides of the bowl look. Smooth the dough with spatula. Such an easy dough to work with.

 

Cover and let rise in a warm place

Next post, I will show how to make rolls.

The starter my friend gave me has been in her family for more than 25 years. Imagine stirring and feeding a starter for 25 years. I thought that had to be a record until I read that the Boudin Bakery in San Francisco still uses its original starter, used there since 1849 (see sourdough link above).

This recipe calls for feeding with 1 c. flour, 1 c. sugar and 1 c. milk, twice a week. Whisk and add to original mixture. Unless you use a lot, you have to give some away, which is how Nikki came to live at our house.

Tiny TOMS

Tiny TOMS

Teenie tiny TOMS

Teenie tiny TOMS on tiptoe

Read about TOMS, the shoes that with every pair purchased a pair of new shoes is given to a child in need. "ONE FOR ONE."

Seven-year-old Ava just got a pair of the smallest TOMS made. When her mother pulled back the covers to awake Ava yesterday, she still had on her TOMS.

Ava, the girl who hates to wear shoes, has found her shoe-mate.

Super Bowl XLV: How 'bout Them Cowboys

Really looking forward to watching the Cowboys play at Cowboy Stadium tonight. Wait a minute. Those players will be in the stands or at home to watch Green Bay play the Steelers.

Is it my imagination or does football season last longer every year? Pretty soon the Super Bowl will compete with the Academy Awards. No, that will never happen. Too much money at stake.

Whether you watch the game or not, this Volkswagen commercial tells a story without a single word uttered.

At work, a cultural force.

The first time I saw Paris

View taken from the Jules Verne restaurant, May 1, 2006

A chapter in Pat Conroy's book, "A Southerner in Paris," made me think again about my own experience of Paris. Conroy writes, "Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers."

This comment cracks me up. My own impression to the contrary, Parisians my husband and I met seemed warm and welcoming, tolerant of my, Je parle francais un peu.

"In Europe, climate shapes character, and the Parisians have been left out in the rain too long," Conroy said. "To Parisians, all Americans are Texans, grinning cowboys."

So true. But even to the rest of the United States, Texans appear caricatures like J.R. Ewing since many people believe Dallas the city exists for oilmen, ranchers and football players.

So much for stereotypes.

Another Conroy observation made me cringe as he characterized the Japanese as "untiring photographers" [who] "… experienced the city of Paris through glass, through square apertures and focused lenses."

That's how I travel too, my camera a barrier between me and raw experience. Because I love that the possibility exists to capture a scene––a split second in time when the light illuminates a drab building or an architectural detail or the unguarded look of a person unaware that someone even notices them––I lug around my camera and lenses.

Life. No one can stop the crush of time pressing us into the next moment, but people can freeze-frame a few images that remind themselves how wonderful life is.

The river Seine courses through this ancient city.

Outside Notre Dame Cathedral, this medallion marks the center of Paris.

Inside the cathedral

An astonishing sanctuary

Even with Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth,
attempts to describe building cathedrals fails to capture the architectural feat.

The cathedral's flying buttresses hold up this massive structure.

View of the Eiffel Tower from a Batobus, a great way to get from one end of the river to the other. And yes, it rains a lot.

Alongside the Louvre, uncanny seeing the street without cars or without hearing sirens. Paris is a city of sirens.

I love this angle from the courtyard of the Louvre, which makes the building look like a titanic sinking ship.

On what's called "the People Bridge" another photographer snaps a candid.

Sun sets on one of the bridges across the river

How many hands have handled this handle?

A guardian of the city atop the Musée d'Orsay

On Sick Days

At first it felt like a novelty, giving myself permission to lie in bed all day … Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday … giving my body the chance on its own to heal, and most of all taking time to read. But while I read I also felt guilty for not writing.

My plans got waylaid. After building a head of steam, the manuscript I had begun again to complete before the end of March waits like my husband's truck, which has been in the shop for a month. Starts and stops compete with all things out of our control.

So with 2 books that had arrived the day we got home from our trip to Houston, I chose to read first Pat Conroy's My Reading Life. I read the whole book in a day. A feat. And then I took notes in my journal to summarize what helps me both as a reader and a writer.

Like mine, Pat's mother made him a reader. Although I came to reading for pleasure much later than he did, my mother surrounded me with books. Displaced me with books would be more accurate. And for that reason, I felt as if books were my rival.

And my mother used reading to punish me. More than once she made me read a book and write a report on what I had read. The one I remember, in particular, was a volume of the Time Life series on world nations, which she had purchased. She made me read France.

So I thought about that book I had read in the fourth grade when I got to visit France, twice. And the cookbook my mom gave me in high school, written only in French. She was trying to elevate me, the same way she and Peg Conroy educated and elevated themselves.

Pat Conroy writes, "Peg Conroy used reading as a text of liberation, a way out of the sourceless labyrinth that devoured poor Southern girls like herself."

Ah, yes, my mother was born in Dallas in 1931. After her mother died when she was 7-years-old, she was raised by relatives in East Texas. Poor indeed.

Thus I have come to appreciate reading as a reward. Time out for good behavior. And I do agree with Pat Conroy who goes so far as to say, "The most powerful words in English are 'tell me a story.'"