In Search of Grandma’s Dinner Rolls

My grandma is well-known for her rolls. Everyone looked forward to eating them at family gatherings. I don’t actually have a recipe for her rolls because she doesn’t use a recipe. She just knows how to make them because she’s done it so many times.

One of her sons once videotaped her making rolls and cinnamon rolls so that we could learn how she does it. When I last watched that video, I had never made bread before, so I didn’t know what to observe. I’d like to watch it again and see if I can learn more. Until then, I’ll just try re-inventing the recipe on my own.

If any family members are reading this and have some suggestions, please let me know! Do you remember Grandma using an egg? I don’t, but I could have missed it.

Our New Kitten – Sokkie

We have a new kitten! She just sort of showed up a couple weeks ago. Since she was a stray we took her in. She’s cute and pretty healthy for a stray. She has little white feet, so we’ve named her “Sokkie” which means something like “little sock” in Dutch. It’s pronounced “soakie”. I also like this name because in Lao, “Sok” means “search for” and she was searching for a home.

Maybe it seems to you like I keep getting new cats and kittens? Well you’re right, but currently we only have one cat. It seems that cats in Laos, and especially kittens, are quite unpredictable.

Indonesian Pumpkin Curry

Pumpkin is a common vegetable here, so I’ve learned how to make a variety of things with it. Actually not much variety – mostly soups that are a lot like this. Most of the time I use a packaged Thai curry paste instead of making a spice paste myself, but this recipe includes directions for an Indonesian style of spice paste. Thai and Indonesian foods have some similar flavors and both ways of making the soup taste delicious.

Sweet Potato Pie For My Birthday

This is the first pie I’ve ever made. Okay, I’ve made pie crust before for fruit tarts and I’ve made pie shaped things like quiche, but I’ve never actually made a pie. If you know how much I love pie, it’s even more suprising. I love pie so much that at my wedding, I didn’t want a wedding cake, I wanted many kinds of pie (and got what I wanted)!

Sweet potato pie is sort of like pumpkin pie in that it’s an orange pie made from a vegetable and it includes spices like cinnamon and nutmeg.

I made this pie with sweet potatoes that we bought in Vientiane. We can’t usually get them up here yet. The variety of sweet potatoes that we can get in Laos isn’t as rich and moist as the kind in the US, but it still made a great pie.

The Once and Future Apple Cake

The Once and Future Apple Cake is a cake with a story. It began with a little girl whose mother baked apple cakes, but then died when the girl was young. When the girl grew up, she searched and searched for an apple cake like her mother’s. Please read the story and recipe here. I can’t tell the story any better than it has already been told.